On Sep. 10, Principal Lee Romero sent an email to all students and parents of BVH. In this email, he informed the families of the school about the shooter threat that occurred on the BVM campus. Romero mentioned that administration and police enforcement were investigating further to ensure the safety of the BVH campus. Romero later clarifies with a second email addressing the situation, on Sep. 11.
“As your principal, my number one priority is to create a safe learning community for our students and the entire staff here at BVH. With this in mind, I want to be clear and restate that any student or adult perpetuating false rumors and threats will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Romero said.
The threat stemmed from a text message that spread to other students, administration and parents. Due to the open accessibility, this message reached other schools in the district which became a concern for the entirety of SUHSD. Although multiple high schools were aware of this situation, some primary schools and middle schools took safety measures.
“It was not just the BVH environment [that was affected], my child’s preschool was on a secure campus the whole day. Unfortunately you get copy cats that see this and it starts going to other schools, so it just wharfs into this larger problem,” Assistant Principal (AP), Tyler Aricaga said.
Later that day, SUHSD members sent out another email regarding that these rumors had reached multiple schools. Then, Superintendent Moises Aguirre, sent out a video message, explaining the situation and the effects it has had the past few days. This threat had a major impact on BVH, a major factor being the proximity, meaning the school faced setbacks and loss of resources throughout the time of investigation.
“We have all these administrators and teachers who are working through this rather than helping students and doing other things on campus. Same thing with police officers, there are other things that need attention but they have to take all these threats seriously. Not only that, we have students who are not coming to school,” Arciaga said. “It was all [time] consuming for us and there are other students with other issues and there are things we need to attend to but we can not because we are just consumed with this problem.”
Finally, after district schools and families were addressed about this issue, SUHSD members hoped to ease worried students and parents. Much of this ease had come from Romero’s output of the information to keep others informed about the situation.
“In the email the threat was not to BVH. If you have something credible, this is the avenue to do it on other than to post on social media. [The email] was an educational element and to calm [everyone] down a little bit,” Arciaga said.
