Wawasee High School students sent home early following threat

 

SYRACUSE, Ind. --- A viral TikTok threat sent some students home for Christmas break early on Friday. Some districts had police cars posted outside, others shut down completely on Friday as a precaution.

The viral trend is called "blow up your school day" and it was allegedly set for December 17th nationwide.

The FBI called it "not credible" with no specific schools or districts targeted, but the Wawasee Community Schools had to send high schoolers home Friday, when a local threat came in during school hours Friday morning.

“I would have not sent my kids to school if I would’ve known there was a threat even a minimal chance that something happened to them inside the school,” said Rachel Steele a parent of at Wawasee community schools.

Parents Steele were concerned about their children’s safety at the school district.

The high school students were sent home following a social media threat that spread via Snapchat, early Friday morning.

“We felt like based on the specific information based upon the specific information that was in what we took a look at, we had to make that decision with the number one interest of our school being safety,” said Superintendent of Wawasee Community School Corporation, Dr. Steve Troyer.

School districts throughout Michiana are seeing threats like these, including Concord Community Schools, where a student was arrested Thursday because of a post.

“The threat that we had yesterday was an anonymous social media account. We were able to work with TikTok and get the account user information and we were able to identify the suspect and make an arrest,” said Nick Minder, the Chief of Police at the district.

Administrators and police urged students to mindful about what they put out on the internet.

“It’s not funny to post things like this in today’s day and age we have to take every threat serious and it doesn’t matter the intent of the message whether they meant it in a joking manner or a serious manner. We’re going to investigate it thoroughly and if it was intimidating in any nature we’re going to take the proper action,” added Minder.