Parents continue to demand action from Lower Merion School District after fifth graders texted about school shootings

A lawyer for parents of a Bala Cynwyd Middle School student identified in text messages between fifth graders as someone they hoped would get shot in a school shooting questioned the Lower Merion School District on Monday on its conclusion that the students didn’t pose a threat.

Reading a statement from the parents at a school board meeting, the lawyer, Andrew Erdlen, said the fact that the district had allowed students who participated in the texting exchange to return to school Monday with safeguards that included backpack searches appeared to contradict the district’s statement that there was no credible threat.

“Either these students pose a threat that needs to be managed ... or they don’t, in which case, why is there a need for backpack searches and other safeguards?” said Erdlen, who said his clients’ son was “terrified” and did not attend school Monday.

His clients asked the district to reassign the students who sent the texts to a different school for the remainder of the year, and called for it to share “full details” of the investigation into the incident, which occurred more than three weeks ago and has been described by the district solely as “involving threatening text messages.”

According to the parents who hired the lawyer, the students discussed school shootings — with one writing “everyday i think of school shootings and hope the most people die,” followed by another student responding, “I hope the following people will get shot.” (The parents, who have requested anonymity to protect their son’s identity, said they were not shown the texts by the district, but received them from someone else because their son’s name was listed.)

The district has said it followed its threat assessment process and involved the Lower Merion Police Department. But parents have expressed frustration that the district hasn’t communicated the specifics of the texts and didn’t give reasons to support the conclusion that the students weren’t a danger to the school community.

The district has said it is prevented from sharing further information due to the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

Speaking on behalf of “many concerned parents,” Bala Cynywd parent Shapley Gregg read a list of requests to the school board, including moving a counselor from a different school to support Bala Cynwyd students, conducting small group workshops with students, hiring a security firm to conduct a risk and vulnerability assessment of the middle school, installing new security cameras, and revising the code of conduct “with clear examples and consequences for specific actions.”

Gregg noted that an FBI study of pre-attack behaviors of active shooters in the United States between 2000 and 2013 found that 88% of shooters younger than 17 leaked an intent to commit violence. She mentioned the 2021 shooting in Oxford, Mich., where a teacher saw the shooter write “the thoughts won’t stop, help me” and “blood everywhere.”

She also said that while the district’s acting superintendent had described school shootings as rare in a meeting with Bala Cynwyd parents last week, incidents had spiked in the 2021-22 school year.

“We are asking you to please listen to and believe children, your students, who recently expressed in text messages that they think about school shootings every day and wish the most people died, and then made a list of those people whom they hoped would be shot,” Gregg said. “This could be a warning sign.”

Other parents said they were disheartened that they had to push for information, and said they felt the district was more concerned with protecting the students who sent the texts than the others at the school.

The acting superintendent, Megan Shafer, acknowledged the parental unrest at the start of the meeting.

“I know that what I have been saying hasn’t been tremendously comforting for everyone,” Shafer said. “I think about it constantly.” She said the district — which earlier this year faced criticism over its handling of racist emails sent to Harriton High School students — heard the complaints about lack of transparency.

“Public education is so critical right now, that it scares me to think that we can’t do this better together,” Shafer said. She told parents that “I desperately want to work with you,” and said at the end of the meeting that she would be responding to the Bala Cynwyd parents’ requests.

In addition to communication, Shafer said, the district is grappling with its role managing students’ constant access to technology.

“We have not coached them properly — as a community, as parents,” Shafer said. But “we have to do it better as a school system because that’s what everyone expects us to do — fairly or unfairly.”

Parent Rebecca Rosenberger Smolen cautioned against taking an excessively punitive stance toward the children who sent the text messages — describing how her son had once “made self-defensive threats” on social media that were “taken completely out of context,” creating misplaced fear.

She urged parents “to more carefully take stock of how they would feel if other parents would take that stance with regard to their child, based on nothing more than presumptions ... from a very cursory understanding of the relevant facts.”

Smolen said she understood the desire for parents to receive more information and suggested administrators work with the families involved to provide a joint statement.

Erdlen, the lawyer who read the parents’ statement, said that allowing the students to return to school reflected a “general indifference” to their child’s well-being.

“It is unfair and absurd that our child is the one being punished by having to continue to go to school with the kids who threatened him and put his name on a kill list,” he said, speaking for the parents.