(NEWS CENTER Maine) – In the one week of the Parkland shootings, Maine had seven different school threats.
Here's the question that’s been swirling after several local media reports: Does Maine have the most school threats per capita for the 2017-2018 school year?
The answer is YES - with several caveats.
Our source is Dr. Amy Klinger, the Director of the Educator’s School Safety Network.
The group keeps a database of all school threats nationwide - based on news reports. “Our data is from search terms. If it's in the media, we see it,” Klinger said. “If it doesn't make it in the media, we don't know about it.”
She says for this school year, Maine tops the list with 25 reported school threats.
In second place is New Mexico with 12. “It's very shocking,” she said. “I think Maine has gone from being not really much of a concern in terms of our ranking to currently being the number one state of concern.”
The obvious flaw in this research is that the organization relies only on news reports for information, instead of stats from the FBI or police.
NEWS CENTER Now asked for the specific list of 25 events in Maine. Representatives at the Educator’s School Safety Network say they don't share a list of the events in their database with the public. But they claim they found 25 occurrences of school threats in Maine this school year alone by searching Maine media reports - so we attempted to see if we could find all 25 of those with an online search.
We don't know the specific search terms used by the nonprofit.
We searched for terms like school, threat, bomb, gun, and Maine.
After about 15 minutes online – we confirmed 18 school threats in Maine since September through local media reports. We were unable to find 25.
It’s impossible to say whether Maine does have the most school threats this year if we are only basing that on news reports nationwide.
The Maine Department of Education only keeps track of bomb threats - and they say so far this school year, 12 school administrative units have reported threats, which is not unusual compared to past years.
For the 2016-2017 school year, 14 threats were reported. There were 18 in the year prior.