DES MOINES, Iowa — At the start of the 2024-2025 school year, Iowa schools became part of a national trend: non-credible threats against school safety. This uptick created fear and disruption for school districts, even resulting in criminal charges against students.  

Many of these threats were reported through Safe and Sound Iowa. An online anonymous reporting system that parents, students, and school staff can use to notify school leaders and law enforcement agencies of any school safety concerns.

“As the tip comes in, it goes to our dispatch center, and they are going to review it. And based upon that initial review, they’re going to determine which avenues the tip goes. So, depending on what that is, that determines the urgency, you know, which also then determines the response,” said Matthew Anderson, Bureau Chief for the Governor’s School Safety Bureau.

This uptick in non-credible threats has resulted in school lockdowns, and police investigations, often sending schools into a panic. Anderson said that each tip of danger is thoroughly investigated.

“You don’t want to cause additional alarm, but you also don’t want to dismiss anything,” he said.

In Iowa there have been over 100 threats made so far for the 2024-2025 school year, and over a dozen arrests have been made as a result.

“Parents don’t want the extra anxiety of sending their kids to school. Law enforcement doesn’t want to be spending their resources responding to these types of things and ultimately with the criminal penalties that come along with it,” said Anderson.

Criminal penalties like acts of terrorism, a Class D felony, which students as young as 14-years-old have been charged with. 

“It’s a high price to pay for making a really bad decision,” said Anderson.

And it has experts wondering: is this a downward trend, or a modern example of ‘kids being kids?’ 

“Any kid at that age is impulsive, right? [At that age] we make choices without understanding everything that happens. But with that being said, you can’t make a broad generalization that none of these kids have ever understood that or are incapable of understanding that,” said Cassidy Wagner, a Pediatric Mental Health Therapist at UnityPoint.  

“If the intent of the threat was to cause fear, panic, anxiety, to generate a law enforcement response, well, then that’s absolutely going to land in the county attorney’s lap for prosecution purposes. And that can be a felony,” said Anderson.

A charge that can halt a young person’s life before it’s even truly started, even if the charge is dropped.  

“The stories that you tell yourself hold very true to you. So, trying to break that stigma is going to be hard when everyone around you is telling you, you know, that you can’t do something right,” said Bella Mujeeb, Behavioral Health Nurse at UnityPoint.

Social media only heightens the issue, as Iowa saw non-credible threats made from out of state.  

“These social media threats, as they start working their way through social media, made it appear because the name of the town was the same as when it was an Iowa town,” said Anderson.

Those threats, no matter the distance, are having an impact on Iowa students and their mental health.  

“There is a concept known as vicarious trauma or secondary trauma that can come from seeing the things that are happening,” said Wagner.

And the first line of defense starts at home, with parents having real and honest conversations with their kids.  

“Kids just want to be heard and listened to, right? And feel like they’re part of that conversation,” said Mujeeb.

“On top of my school administrators, teachers, educational professionals, I mean, parents are absolutely in that chain of prevention,” said Anderson.

Prevention includes parents continuously monitoring what their children are consuming and communicating online.  

“They’re having conversations with each other that we’re just not a part of and parents are not a part of. And those conversations have happened rapidly, and they happen with folks all over the world,” said Wagner.

Anderson said when it comes to monitoring your kid’s digital footprint, “trust, but verify, because it’s not like as a parent you want to not trust your child.”

This use of social media was an issue highlighted during the Perry school shooting investigation, as those conversations were the first warning signs of shooter Dylan Butler’s interest in violence.

During the Perry investigation press conference, Iowa DPS Commissioner Stephan Baynes said that Butler “had stated interest in prior school shootings. We can say that some of those prior conversations happened online, in the sense of chat rooms and those sorts of things.”

During the press conference, Baynes urged parents to make themselves aware of what their children are doing on social media.

“Parents need to be involved, willful blindness is not a parenting strategy,” he said.

And experts agree.

“In general, I think kids are much more capable than we give them credit for and are very capable of having mature conversations about difficult topics.”

“The best way to stop school violence is to prevent it. And the best way to prevent it is to talk to them and be educated,” said Anderson.