Episode 211: What Happens When There is a Potential Threat Against Your Child’s School? Behind the Scenes with Police and District Safety Personnel

Anthony Godfrey:
Hello and welcome to the Supercast. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. Threats of any kind against a school are always taken seriously, even if the threat is not considered credible, comes from out of state, or originates in another country.

On this episode of the Supercast, we go behind the scenes with police and district safety personnel to find out what happens when a threat is reported or uncovered. Hear about the immediate steps that are taken, and how we work closely with local law enforcement to keep students, teachers, and staff safe.

We're talking now with two of the experts that we work with anytime that we have a school threat. Please let's start by having you introduce yourselves.

Cody Stromberg:
I'm Cody Stromberg. I'm the Deputy Chief of Police for Herriman City.

Matt Alvernaz:
I'm Matt Alvernaz, the new School Safety Coordinator for Jordan School District.

Anthony Godfrey:
And tell me a little bit about your career path that brought you to this point.

Cody Stromberg:
Sure, I started my career back in 2006, worked in Sandy City and then for the Unified Police Department. I was assigned to Herriman City in 2011, and I've been there ever since. Working for the Unified Police Department and doing community policing in which I was intimately involved with a lot of our school projects, crossings, safe walk routes, school evacuations and reunifications, and all of those types of activities. And then when the Harriman City Police Department separated from Unified Police in 2018, I went over there as a lieutenant in charge of our operations division. And I'm now the deputy chief where I oversee 55 full-time and over 60 part-time employees.

Anthony Godfrey:
We're very grateful for your assistance day-to-day and in the case of emergency, of course. And thank you very much for taking the time to be here.

Cody Stromberg:
Of course. Thanks for having me.

Anthony Godfrey:
If you have to stand up in the middle of the podcast and leap into action, I will understand.

Cody Stromberg:
They don't usually call me unless something really bad happens. So I think we're safe.

Anthony Godfrey:
Let's hope there are no calls.

Cody Stromberg:
Yeah.

Matt Alvernaz:
His days of leaping are over.

Anthony Godfrey:
Okay. Okay, that's good. Matt, talk a little bit about what brought you here.

Matt Alvernaz:
So I'll be brief on my background. I started with the Army. I did four and a half years there. Got out in 2009. Started with the San Diego Police Department, worked about seven years there. And decided to move the family to Utah. And it's been good. We started with the Saratoga Springs Police Department. And I got into the schools, working as a school resource officer. An opportunity opened up to kind of blend the two with this newfound love of the education side mixed with the law enforcement side and real big concerns of school safety. So it's a great opportunity and I appreciate you guys bringing me on board.

Anthony Godfrey:
Well, we're thrilled to have you, and Matt we're going to have you back on the podcast to talk more about your position and what's involved and your journey here. But thank you for your time today. Tell me about some of the types of threats that come in regarding schools. And, really we're talking about this because from time to time there are these false threats online but we never consider them that until we've looked very carefully at the situation. We take every threat seriously. Speak to that first of all.

Cody Stromberg:
Sure. I think we have to take every threat seriously. The reality is in the world of law enforcement everything is as it's reported until proven otherwise. And if you look at some of the statistics, particularly that the state legislature has been gathering through safety and other avenues for the last few years, the reality is that these threats have been happening for a long time. They're just now a little bit more public because of the world of social media in which we live.

Anthony Godfrey:
Yeah.

Cody Stromberg:
And the reality is that a school violence incident is every parent's and every educator's worst nightmare. And so we have to take that threat seriously until proven otherwise.

Matt Alvernaz:
Along those lines, I mean, it's good to be precautious, right? You never want to say, “hey, you knew and you didn't do.” It's easier to start with a bigger scene in the law enforcement world then we could shrink it back down. But if you come in too light and now you're trying to expand it because it's worse than you thought, that's harder to do. So we come in, we're taking it for what it is, make it a big scene sometimes, and we shrink it down as we determine it's less valid or less of a threat than we initially thought.

Anthony Godfrey:
Talk me through what happens when you first hear about a threat on social media. There's a nondescript threat. It's not specific to a school, but students in a certain community are starting to spread it around. And in their minds, they're assigning it to the school that they attend because they've received it from someone that they know.

Cody Stromberg:
The upside and the downside of social media is that these threats tend to spread like wildfire, which can be good in the sense that we tend to hear about them more quickly than we used to.

Anthony Godfrey:
Yeah.

Cody Stromberg:
But on the downside, they also can sometimes get misassociated to the wrong school, or they get exaggerated beyond what the original statement was. A lot of times, we get reports from concerned parents who are forwarded information from their student or their child, students sharing information back and forth on social media platforms, particularly.

I think, as I mentioned before, I think the SafeUT app and some of the other efforts that our state government has been involved in recently have helped us to kind of direct those attentions in a positive way and guide that information to where it needs to be. Because when we first receive a threat, we go through our standard investigative process. We try and figure out is it a legitimate threat, where is it specific to, or is it specific to anywhere, and that will dictate our response, where you could see anything from a physical response of additional officers in school to kind of a behind the scenes, more quiet response where we can identify a specific individual and we have investigators or officers that will go contact that individual directly and go through our investigation that way.

Clearly, those types of threats are a serious concern. There are criminal statutes specifically related to making threats against schools now that allow us a little bit more latitude to push these investigations further. But the reality is the world in which we live is one of rapid information. And sometimes that information is inaccurate, which makes it difficult at times for us to respond appropriately.So like Matt was saying, we'll start wide and then we'll try to narrow our focus from there.

Matt Alvernaz:
Yeah, the information we get is pretty fluid sometimes. It's like, oh, we got, it's over here. Well, hold on, we're getting new information over here, but we can't ignore the previous information. So we have to kind of be ready to adapt and respond. And so you'll have different levels of facets of the response, you know, physical presence there while doing stuff behind the scenes.

Social media does have the advantage of leaving that digital footprint. We can track things, which is great. People think Snapchat's, you know, got that erase. No, we'll get it. If it comes down to we can dig deep enough, you know, with recent incidents. Snapchat was how we were able to make our determinations through warrants and get that kind of stuff going. And I don't want to speak too much because it was th department who did that, but it was a fantastic job. But yeah, so I mean, it's both a blessing and a curse.

Anthony Godfrey:
And what you just said, Matt, re-emphasizes the importance of those strong relationships that we work on all the time, is making sure that we have good communication because neither one of us can be as responsive to schools as we need to be without helping each other out.

Stay with us when we come back, more on potential threats targeting schools and how we work with local law enforcement to hold the suspect or suspects accountable.

Break:
In Jordan School District, we like to support students in and outside the classroom along with their families. That's where the Jordan Family Education Center comes in, offering support services and a wide variety of classes for students and their families, free of charge. You can take a class called Blues Busters for children feeling sad or worried. Just Breathe is a class that helps students reduce stress. Or how about a class that supports parents in helping their children make and keep good friends. There are also support groups and free counseling, all provided by Jordan School District school psychologists and counselors. To find out how you can benefit from free family support services offered by the Jordan Family Education Center, call 801-565-7442 or visit guidance.jordandistrict.org.

Anthony Godfrey:
Walk us through the steps that you take once you find out about a threat from a police department standpoint and from a district standpoint.

Cody Stromberg:
For us, we receive that information through a multitude of sources. One, of course, is the SafeUT and the resources that are set up through the state. We get a lot of information from parents directly. Like I said before, we'll get a lot of information from students who will pass information to their SRO and it comes to us that way or it comes from the school because information has been reported to your staff and then comes to us.

So our first step, again, is to identify as quickly as we possibly can where that threat originated from. And if it originates from a specific student that's somehow connected to that specific school, then obviously that gives us a good place to start. And then if it doesn't, then we start looking at our external areas. We start doing, as Matt indicated before, we start looking at, you know, warrants for social media or we try to trace IP addresses, that type of thing. We have a lot of partnerships available to us to get through some of that stuff.

But that's usually our first step is to try and place an element of credibility on it as quickly as we can. Because if we can place an element of credibility on it then we also have to start developing some sort of a safety plan or some sort of an action plan related specifically to that threat and then we work it backwards from there. We start- if we can identify an individual- we start looking at a criminal investigation and we move that direction.

But the first- the first real piece is is it a real threat or is it not? And I say real, but the reality is they're all real threats. Is it a threat that's credible or is likely to be carried out? Or is it something that somebody just said because of you know they're venting or we have a mental health crisis or things that are happening that our youth are impacted by? And sometimes, let's be honest, kids say dumb things sometimes so they're not meaning that they're gonna go through with it but we have to treat it that way until we can prove otherwise. So we have to put an element of credibility on it and then we start trying to trace where it came from.

Anthony Godfrey:
And as you described in regards to recent events, it's establishing does this even apply to our area? Was this even intended as a message for any of our cities?

Cody Stromberg:
And a lot of that happened simultaneously, I can tell you, with the specific incident we were dealing with on Friday, the SRO obviously was intimately involved in, “okay, what's the plan” but I also had a detective who was assigned to do the warrants on the IP address. I had a detective who was assigned to follow up on social media accounts. I had a detective who was assigned to liaise with the district and pass information back and forth. So a lot of that stuff kind of happens simultaneously until we get to a point where we can confidently say that we don't believe the threat is credible and then we might scale it back. But there's a lot of things that have to happen in that first few minutes and whether the report comes from SafeUT, or from the district, or from a parent or student, the reality is the process is much the same. And then we make sure that we loop in our partners. If we get a tip from SafeUT or from a parent, then we'll call the school and deal with administration directly. We'll bring Matt into it and try and make sure that we're all on the same page and operating off of the same set of facts.

Matt Alvarnaz:
And the report comes to the school exactly the same way, you know, whether it's students reporting it directly to us, we see it through Safe UT, we catch it on social media, or the police department lets us know in reverse. Our response is you got the principals, they're there, they're on the ground, you got the school staff, faculty, and we continuously train on this kind of stuff.

You've got your initial information. If you have a name, if you have a lead, the first thought for the principals is what's the way to make it safe? How are we gonna make the school safe? Is it a lockdown situation? Is it a secure situation? Is it kind of just okay, we have flippant comments here let's work with the police department to determine more of what we have.

In the case where we keep referencing on Friday when that information came to us police department was already there. Their presence was fantastic. I saw these guys out there working, doing their various things. The uniform presence in and out of the school was awesome.

I was there to help alleviate for the principal's task. He still has a school to run and he's dealing with the parents, phone calls, doing all this stuff. So my job was to help deal with the law enforcement side of it. However we can assist, because at this point you get a threat like this- yeah it's against us, but they're the ones with the tools and the resources. If we find out some information, it's not us who's gonna go do it, it's them, right? If there's some validity to it.

So how can we be a resource to them at this point? Meanwhile keeping our focus on making sure the kids are safe. And how can we assist that and stay out of their way? Keep the kids safe- out of the way- and continue to operate that way, and that's where that partnership comes in.

Continually deal with that message. Make sure we're on the same page with that. What we put out needs to match what they're putting out, or don't release information too soon because it might compromise the investigation. Because they know information they don't want the potential threat to know. If we run out and say it, you know, it might damage what they're doing. So yeah, for us it's how to, that initial response, we're there first in a sense, the SRO is there, but make it safe, be that resource and watch the kids and continue to run that school and go from there.

Anthony Godfrey:
Yeah.

Cody Stromberg:
I think you mentioned something really important, Matt, that maybe we don't always consider and that is the disruption that these threats sometimes cause to the school particularly. You know, even a non-credible threat causes significant disruption to the school day whether we do lockdown or lockout or secure or not. The reality is there are a lot of kids who either don't come to school because their parents don't want them to. Or, you know, they get checked out in the middle of the day or they don't go to class. Or just the anxiety that some of our educators face. The teachers in the classroom are having to try and keep control of the kids while all this is going on and try and have a normal school day while they're waiting for information, right?

I think that's something we don't talk about enough is the disruption to the teachers and the students who are actually in the school not having a lot of information but still having to go through, you know, their school day and it's really, really difficult. That's one of the things that we don't really have great answers for because again, we have to treat every threat as a real credible threat until proven otherwise, but we also just can't immediately say that it's not. So there's certainly an element of disruption that occurs that makes it really, really difficult for our teachers, too.

Anthony Godfrey:
Yeah, I appreciate that. We really try to balance it out, like you described. We want to be responsive to every threat, take it very seriously, but minimize the distraction and the disruption that it creates.

Let's speak to the statute that's out there, that it's a recent change in the law that allows you to pursue more aggressively those kind of false threats and perpetuating those false threats.

Cody Stromberg:
There's been a lot of change in the legislature recently specifically related to school safety. I'm sure that you guys are very well aware of the new school security task force that's being headed by Representative Wilcox through the law enforcement and criminal justice committee in the House. We have members of law enforcement, members of the education world that sit on that committee. Their focus really is trying to identify through the various data that we receive, what truly are our issues or responsibilities specific to school violence and how can we make our schools safer for children. And they're doing a lot of work to try and identify things like statewide standardized best practices.

When we have these types of events we talked about, you know, do we necessarily want the Jordan School District to respond differently than Canyons does or differently than Granite does? The reality is that in law enforcement our tactics and our response is usually fairly universal, and we're trying to apply that to the school setting as well. So that it doesn't matter where the threat occurs, the response is going to be the same.  And we develop those standardized protocols that are designed and promoted for efficient operations but to gain the most positive outcome from whatever the situation is that's going on.

Even within law enforcement, between agencies, we use different verbiage for things and different codes for things and it can get confusing at times and those are things we're trying to avoid.

Anthony Godfrey:
The right terminology is really important. If we're not using the same terminology then it's much more difficult to provide a coordinated response.

Cody Stromberg:
Right.

Anthony Godfrey:
What advice would you give to a parent who finds out or a student who sees a post that seems to be a school threat? They're not sure where it's coming from, they're not sure whether it applies to their school. What are some of the first steps that they ought to take when they see that?

Cody Stromberg:
It's almost a double-edged sword in some sense, right? And like I said before about the availability, the rapid availability of information can sometimes be beneficial. Because in that one case– I don't know if you know this, but they've had– SaveUT puts out a report every year of the interactions that happen on the app. There were over 800 confirmed threats of violence against schools last year in the state of Utah. 800. So depending on how many contract school days we have, we're dealing with this several times a day throughout the state.

But we don't want that one that we didn't think was serious to become serious. And so the reason I say it's a double-edged sword is I want to know about it as quickly as we can. There certainly are better avenues to report it than others. Sharing it with your friends is not a great avenue to report information. It does kind of tend to complicate some of these issues sometimes when they're being shared amongst peer groups and not elevated.

So the only thing I would say is, I would like you to not press share. But if you're gonna press share, then also send it to Safe UT, send it to the school, send it to law enforcement so that we can investigate it. And we can go through the proper channels of sifting through the data and the information and trying to identify- backtracking to the source and what information is credible versus what's not.

Kids are gonna share stuff on social media. I was sitting at a high school football game last Friday watching these kids in the stands and they were just, the speed at which they share information on social media is unbelievable. Like, I don't know how their fingers don't cramp up every night when they get home because they're all over the place, right? And so it's gonna get shared. And I don't know that there's anything we could ever do to prevent that. I would love to, but I don't think it's realistic. So the only I would say is to also send it to SafeUT. Send it to us. Send it to the school so that we can begin as quickly as possible to vet out what's credible information and what's not. And we run into that one situation in 800, heaven forbid, that's the real deal that we can begin to respond immediately.

Anthony Godfrey:
Sharing is not reporting. That's the bottom line.

Matt Alvernaz:
If you press share, you send it out, it creates panic. It inflates the issue, makes it so much worse than it needs to be. And then misinformation starts going. People who panic and want to reshare because they're concerned, okay, there's some of that, but there's also people with malicious intent who think, “Oh, this will be fun. Let me spread this out. Let me alter the rumor. Ooh, let me expand on it.” And it just makes it worse. And then the resources that go into, you know, addressing it and confirming it or making sure it's more safe is, it's just, it becomes wasteful. It becomes dangerous and all sorts of things come into play with it. The best thing you can do, is tell your trusted adult, report it to the school and the law enforcement. It doesn't really matter the order on that because we have that cohesive partnership.

Anthony Godfrey:
Let's talk about what factors we consider when putting together communication for parents because as much as we don't want students sharing with each other, once we have adequate, accurate information, then we want to share that out with parents so they can make decisions and understand what's happening.

Matt Alvarnez:
So we have to make sure our information is accurate. So nine times out of ten, the students- you just talked about how quick they are with those phones and pushing out information. They hear a blip of a rumor. We have most of the truth, we just haven't been able to put it out yet. They will put out whatever they hear.

So parents say, "Why am I hearing it from my kid first?" So your kid's got a half-second delay on what they shoot out.

"Well, we have to make sure we're accurate." If I just start parroting everything we hear, again, panic, and misinformation.

“Why are you so disorganized? Why aren't you on the same page with the police department?” If they put out information they have, it’s different from ours, well, that's just incompetent right there. At least it's how it's gonna appear. So we have to be responsible with our information, but we do get it out quickly. As quickly as we can in a safe manner. And again, as of that cohesive partnership.

Anthony Godfrey:
You're right, we coordinate closely with law enforcement on those messages. Talk about the law enforcement end of those messages.

Cody Stromberg:
Yeah, and the transparency piece is huge for us in law enforcement, and that's something we're very passionate about in Herriman. And I know that all of the police departments the Jordan School District share the same sentiment. We've had these conversations before. How do we push out information to parents? When do we push it out? What do we say? And how do we do it in a way that helps either relieve some of their concerns or address some of the issues without adding to the panic and the confusion, right? And so the partnership certainly is key, as Matt alluded to. We spent most of the day on Friday back and forth on the phone with the district's communications team with the threat that we were dealing with at Herriman High School.

From the law enforcement perspective, the safety of students is obviously the highest priority, but we also have to factor in things like traffic impact, right? If we suddenly have a bunch of parents who show up to a school wanting to pick up their kids, how do we manage that? How do we provide them accurate and adequate information that they can then make a reasonable informed decision as to what they're going to do with their student? And so we try, like Matt said, we try to push out information as quickly as possible, but we're also obligated to push out the truth. And we have to make sure that it's vetted and we have to make sure that we have a plan and that we're addressing the issues that need to be addressed as opposed to being a part or facilitating and spreading rumors, which is usually not helpful.

Anthony Godfrey:
What's interesting to note, especially in some recent events that we dealt with, is that sometimes something starts in another state, states away from where we are. But it spreads through social media and there are lots of abbreviations for school names that end in HS and that can be applied to many schools nationwide or a reference to a mascot or that sort of thing. We've seen that over the years. So that's part of the reason that we have to take a little bit of time to verify the information. If we know there's an imminent danger, we're going to communicate that immediately. It’s making sure that we've followed up on the information we receive and we're sending out the most actionable information, the most useful information to parents so that they can make a clear choice.

Cody Stromberg:
Yeah, I think you're exactly right and that's exactly the situation we were faced with last

Friday with a message that originated from out of state but because of some references to homecoming and because of some acronyms that were used, suddenly it ends up in our backyard and we're trying to sift through where that came from.

Now we certainly have a lot of partnerships, both at the state and federal level, that allow us to rapidly move through some of that information and do some of that back tracing. But at the same time, that doesn't help the panic that happens for the two or three hours before that information goes out to the public, right?

Anthony Godfrey:
Sure.

Cody Stromberg:
And so we wanna make sure that we're responsive to the parents. But what I tell the parents most often is, exactly as you said, Dr. Godfry, that if we had a legitimate and credible threat that we felt the safety of students was in jeopardy, we would let you know.

Anthony Godfrey:
Right. Immediately.

Cody Stromberg:
Right. Immediately. We would let you know immediately. We would have a plan to address it. We would tell you what the plan is, for the most part. We don't necessarily divulge all of our tactics, but we would tell you what to expect. And if you're not seeing that from the police department, then we're probably in a pretty decent place. And if things change, we'll let you know.

But at the same time, you can't discount the feelings that the parents have, right? I have four children in the district. And when things like that come across my desk or through social media, I have the exact same first thought, which is where my kids are, my kids okay? And then you work through the rest of it. And you have to respect that, those concerns that come from the parent level.

And so we're trying to push out information that we have, but we wanna make sure that it's accurate. So just like you said, we work through that. If there were a credible threat that safety of students was in jeopardy, we would certainly let people know immediately and we would have a plan to address it.

Anthony Godfrey:
I can't thank you both enough for taking time today, but most of all for everything you do to keep our students safe. We've worked with Herriman for a long time very effectively, and it's obvious how much you care about students. And all the officers we work with in all the cities, how much they care about keeping students and teachers and employees safe. And Matt, we've worked with you before as an officer and now on staff here at Jordan, and we're very grateful for your dedication to everyone's safety as well. So thank you both for everything you do. Our schools are very, very safe places to be and they will continue to be with your efforts. So thank you very much.

Cody Stromberg:
I can't speak highly enough of our partnership with the Jordan School District and something that's been long-seated and has been going on for a long time. And you've carried that tradition forward certainly in identifying new ways that we can be more efficient and effective. Like you said, I think our schools are very, very safe. But we can always do better. So we're always looking for ways to make improvements and so these types of discussions, and the information that comes out of what can be a stressful situation sometimes becomes very valuable in helping us to identify better ways to do things in the future.

Anthony Godfrey:
Absolutely, well thank you very much.

Thanks for joining us on another episode of the Supercast. Remember, education is the most important thing you'll do today. We'll see you out there.

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