Missouri Teachers Responsible For Bomb Detection

Dec 9, 2008 1:13 PM

Columbia Public Schools teachers become an unofficial bomb squad if someone threatens to blow up a school. If a bomb threat is made, the district's emergency response plan calls for teachers to sweep their classrooms for potential explosives and listen for "ticking" noises, according to internal instructions given anonymously to the Columbia Daily Tribune. If a suspicious item is located, teachers are instructed not to touch it and to report it immediately to building administration.

Assistant Superintendent Lynn Barnett said those guidelines are supposed to be confidential, but she confirmed that during a bomb threat, teachers are expected to look for unfamiliar items. Nobody but a teacher could assess a classroom for items that don't belong, she said.

"It has to be somebody who knows every backpack, coat and item a child might have brought in," Barnett told the Tribune. "Law enforcement or administrators would not know those things. A teacher isn't to do anything with the item, only to see if something different is in the room."

As long as teachers know what is expected of them and have clear instructions, the Missouri National Education Association doesn't have a problem with teachers doubling as first response observers, said Otto Fajen, a lobbyist with the group.

"More than anybody, teachers have some grasp of what should be in a room," he said. "They might be able to identify in a relatively short period of time a foreign object. So it's not out of the realm of reasonableness that they would play some role."

The Tribune reports that according to Fajen, the association would want teachers to have ample opportunity to give input when developing a policy and to receive adequate training.

Columbia teachers go through emergency response training every year, but Barnett said she is not sure whether all teachers undergo specific training to search their rooms.

Having teachers look around their rooms while children continue to work makes sense because in most cases, bomb threats are false, said Columbia interim Police Chief Tom Dresner, who is also commander of the police SWAT team.

"The difficult thing about this is it's such a gray area," he said. "If anyone calls" a bomb threat in, "the vast majority of the time, there's no real bomb."

False threats would be more frequent if would-be callers knew they could interfere with a school day, Dresner said. "The mileage you get out of a threat makes it much more enhanced," he said. "Don't get me wrong, we're not wanting teachers to do our dirty work for us, but there comes the reality of how much do we have in terms of resources and our ability to have a day come to a screeching halt."

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