Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School was evacuated and locked down on March 25 due to a phoned-in bomb threat. Police searched the school and did not find any explosives. All indications are that the school is safe, although it was still a scary day for the BT community, said Head of School Bracha Rutner.
“We got a call from somebody — we don’t know exactly who — who started making all sorts of threats to the school. I actually happened to have been out of school and at an athletics meeting, and I came rushing back to be there. The person who [was] called right away called our director of campus operations, and he was the one who stayed on the phone with him. Then we called 911, and about eight police officers showed up,” she said.
The call was made to the middle school, where an administrative assistant picked up. Rutner said they haven’t determined why that was the case, but that the caller was probably just “pressing numbers” until somebody picked up.
Details of the exact nature of the call are not available, but Rutner said that it was credible enough to be “very frightening.”
Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School has a protocol for situations like this, which helped it respond appropriately. Before every fire drill, the school discusses what to do in case of a threat. After police arrived, swept the building and determined there were no bombs present, the administrative team gathered to decide what to do next. Ultimately, school resumed, although Rutner said that the rest of the day and the next few days were a bit altered. Beth Tfiloh changed protocols for school activities and drop off and pick up as a precaution.
“We sent a tremendous amount of communications out to our parents not only about what happened, [but] also about what we were going to do that day, what was going to happen for the next days, and then the last email of the day was how to talk to your children about what happened — age appropriate from preschool to high school,” Rutner said.
That last piece is not easy. Beth Tfiloh has students of all ages, and it’s not a simple thing to tell a young child that there was a bomb threat at the place they spend many hours of their day, five times a week. Rutner said that for the youngest Beth Tfiloh students, teachers tried to keep things “business as usual” as much as possible.
“Thursday was a bit different [than most days]. As it wasn’t a great weather day, we just kept the kids inside. Teachers kept everything as usual, so the preschoolers didn’t really feel anything different, and we really tried to do the same with the lower school. With the middle schoolers, we shared some, and with the high schoolers, we were very open,” Rutner said.
The school kept guidance counselors prepared and available to speak with students who had questions, as well as equipping them with what to say to parents who wanted to know how to talk to their kids about the bomb threat.
“But in school, we just kept the talk to a minimum,” Rutner said. “Even the adults need a sense of normalcy.”
While Wednesday was a serious scare and Thursday was altered, Rutner said that everything at BT was mostly back to normal by Friday.
The police haven’t told the school whether they know who is responsible for the call at this point, but Rutner said that they shared that they have ways to try to figure out what phone number made the threat. While justice will hopefully be served, Rutner’s biggest takeaway, beyond being glad for the safety of the BT community, is that the school’s protocols were effective.
“It felt like a stress test in as real circumstances as possible,” she said. “We learned things about our communication and protocols, and for the most part, everything worked. You can always learn for the next situation.”
Beth Tfiloh encompasses a school and a synagogue, and leadership at BT is always working on the balance of convenience versus security. Unfortunately, Rutner said, the world right now necessitates that some of the former is sacrificed in the name of the latter.
Parents at the school understand this, and they told the BT team that they are overall very happy with how the situation was handled, Rutner said.
“I’m really proud of the team and I’m in awe of the police. The fact that they came so quickly and were so helpful, their presence was really reassuring,” Rutner said. “Everybody kept their calm and did what they needed to do.”
