A 12-year-old boy has been arrested and charged with Conveying False Information regarding a Destructive Device for writing a bomb threat on the wall of his school's bathroom, according to Horry County Schools spokesperson Teal Britton.
He's also suspended pending a hearing and eligible for a 12-month expulsion.
The threat was made at Green Sea Floyds Middle/High Schools Monday morning.
"Police had persons of interest they were looking into after viewing hall surveillance footage. A middle school boy confessed to have written it," Britton said.
This is the 25th bomb threat at an Horry County school since December. Britton confirms the school was put on lockdown. In past cases, schools were evacuated. There were also two bomb threats at Green Sea Floyds Middle/High Schools Friday. In one case, the students were evacuated. The other, the school was locked down while police conducted a search of the school. In each case, the threats were written on a bathroom wall. Also in each case, no device was found.
But the fact that the school was on lockdown and not evacuated has upset ex-cop and parent Susie Randolph.
"I was angry, I was mad, and I was scared, because I never want to lose my child," she said, adding that police are trained in any bomb threat situation to evacuate buildings.
"Nobody knew what was going on. Everybody should have got out of the building. Because what if it were true, and then we would all be dead," Susie's daugher Colby, a student at the school said.
"At some point, when do we take our schools back from being toyed with by nuisance threats that are devastating in lost instructional time and county resources?" Britton says.
She adds the schools' principals participate in training and use a rubric and determine risk threat levels to determine evacuation or lockdown.
"There were two SRO's (School Resource Officers) at Green Sea-Floyds and the administration was in consultation with police, which deemed the threat {Monday morning} to be low level," Britton said.
At one point, the suggestion was made that schools would require students to make up time lost from evacuations from the bomb threats. Britton says that likely won't happen this year, as there are two weeks of school left.
"It's a very extreme answer to a problem. We're hopeful we'll reach an easier solution," she said.
As of Tuesday, Birtton says 9 students have been expelled due to bomb threats; 5 other students were assigned to the alternative school. Four other students are awaiting a hearing.
We want to let you know that WPDE received a letter Monday from Horry County interim Police Chief Saundra Rhodes. The letter asks the media for the remaining two weeks of school, not to publicize the bomb threats unless an arrest is made.
Rhodes said information will be given if asked.
NewsChannel 15 will continue to stick with our policy of covering bomb threats if a device is found or an arrest is made. There were exceptions to that when they started getting out of hand, and the number of threats became the story.
We will continue to check on every bomb threat we learn about and report the details as we deem appropriate for each story.
