EDITORIAL — On students, by students

There’s a shocking twist to the latest series of incidents involving bomb or shooting threats against schools.

Reporting before the Cebu Provincial Board during their regular session last week, the Cebu Police Provincial Office (CPPO) said their investigations showed that most of the threats were made by students who wanted to avoid taking examinations or those who don’t want to have to submit assignments and other schoolwork.

“This is becoming a sort of modus operandi among our students,” CPPO Director Police Colonel Abubakar Udang Mangelen Jr. said in his briefing.

It would seem that calling in sick or saying that the dog ate their homework just doesn’t cut it anymore for some students.

That obviously bit of levity aside, people, especially students, must be made to understand the gravity of threatening harm to others. Remember that we take bomb jokes seriously now, no longer just in airports but also in malls and other public spaces.

More often than not, a bomb threat means no threat at all; who would go to such lengths to plant a bomb only to tell people to get out of harm’s way? This also goes for shooting threats.

But if one or the other is made, authorities can never afford to take such a threat for granted. Especially not with the third school shooting this year happening in South Cotabato just last week, where three students died and six were wounded.

So when a threat is made, schools have to send students home, shut down everything, call the police and investigators to search the place high and low, and wait until things calm down.

An actual attack might deal more damage, but the damage caused by the threat of an attack isn’t that far behind. This means disruption, anxiety, and wasted time and resources.

Aside from preventing actual attacks from happening, we must now also concern ourselves with preventing threats of attacks on students by students.