A Petersburg high school student made threats against the Petersburg School District’s secondary school on Tuesday afternoon.
This is the second threat to the school district by a student in less than two weeks.
Superintendent Erica Kludt-Painter sent out an email to parents Tuesday evening and said “This incident is completely unrelated to the previous threat investigation.”
In an interview with KFSK, Kludt-Painter said the student won’t be at school for the foreseeable future.
“I guess the reassurance at this point is that the student has not been on campus, and will not be on campus,” she said.
The school district was made aware of the threat by the Petersburg Police Department, who first learned of the incident.
Petersburg Police Chief Jim Kerr says that they have already concluded their investigation and they do not believe that there is an immediate threat to the schools. He says that if that weren’t the case, police officers wouldn’t have sent their own children to school this morning.
“Our kids would not be there. That would be the first thing you would see, is all of our kids gone from there,” he said. “We sent them all to school today. So I hope that puts people at ease.”
Kerr says this case wasn’t provoked by the threat made against the school district earlier this month.
“I don’t believe it was inspired by the last one, or anything like that,” he said.
Kludt-Painter stresses that there is no immediate threat of harm at this time. She says that there will be an additional police presence at the school in the coming days as a reassurance to students, staff, and families. But, she says, making sure all students are safe and thriving in the schools is a constant – it’s always a priority.
“We don’t have the luxury of just focusing on academics in our schools, we have to focus on the overall health of all of our kids,” she said. “And that can mean physical health, that can be mental health, that can mean all all pieces of that. So we have to look at the whole child, we have to look at them within their family setting, we have to look at them within our school setting.”
Kludt-Painter says that the district has three previously-scheduled training and meeting events geared towards school safety coming up. They include a Restorative Practices in service day this Friday, an annual crisis meeting next week, and lockdown training in early November.
