DINWIDDIE COUNTY, Va. -- Dinwiddie County High School had more security and a bigger police presence Monday morning after a threat was posted on social media over the weekend.
Parents across the county — and the country — are facing tough choices about sending their kids to school after such threats in the wake of a deadly school shooting in Georgia earlier this month.
April Edmonds, a parent in Dinwiddie, decided to keep her daughter at home.
“You just don’t play with your kids' lives, so I kept her home today,” Edmonds said about her daughter in 9th grade. “I wasn’t going to risk it, even if it was just a false alarm.”
Ashley Robb made a similar decision, even though her son attends a different Dinwiddie school.
“He’s my whole world, so if I have to keep him safe, it’s what I’ll do," Robb said about her son in 6th grade. “With the two schools being so close, you never know if something could affect the middle school too."
Dinwiddie County Sheriff’s deputies continue to work to find out who posted the threat on Instagram over the weekend.
Many parents decided to keep their kids home, leading to a 40 percent drop in attendance at Dinwiddie County High School.
This is the fourth time this school year that the school system has faced a social media threat.
Charges are pending against three students involved in previous incidents.
Dinwiddie County School Superintendent Dr. Kari Weston said that the school will push for long-term suspension or expulsion for students who post threats.
“We will hold them to the fullest extent of the law,” Weston said.
The school system is also looking into students who share threats online.
“We’re also going after students who repost these threats,” Weston added.
Weston said that she personally checked on every classroom and teacher on Monday to make sure everyone was okay.
She wanted parents to know that it was okay to keep their kids home if they felt it was the right choice.
“Whatever your child misses today, we will make sure they catch up when they return to school,” she said.
The investigation into the threat is ongoing, and authorities are working hard to address the issue.
Dinwiddie is just one of many Virginia school districts dealing with students making threats in person or posting them online.
Law enforcement said school threats are common after a school shooting garners national attention, no matter where it happens.
"In the wake of an attack, it's a particularly dangerous time, because of the possibilities of a follow-on attack, that's unrelated but follows on the heels of another attack," Cliff Lent, President of M7 Solutions, an active shooter training and consulting business, said.
Lent spent 24 years in law enforcement, spending some of his time working in a Homeland Security Bureau focusing on school and business safety related to active shooter incidents.
"It plants a seed in their mind, this is something that can cause chaos or disturbance, or get somebody out of a test, or gain notoriety," Lent said.
While most school threats tend to be unfounded, law enforcement officers say they take every threat seriously.
Lent said there's a common misconception that perpetrators can remain anonymous.
"Kids frequently think they can remain anonymous if they hide their IP address, or if they use somebody else's phone or gaming device, or make the threat through an encrypted communication app, but that is not the case," Lent said. "Once a threat is made, and public safety is involved, police departments can gain search warrants, through the judges, and then they can identify each and every person that makes that threat, eventually. So, it might not be immediate, but they will be identified."
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