A threat posted to social media targeting McGill-Toolen Catholic High School led to a teenager’s arrest last week and prompted new scrutiny of how the Mobile private school communicates safety concerns to parents.
Mobile police say a parent alerted officers after learning of a social media post threatening physical harm to students at the school. The teenager identified in the post, who was not enrolled at McGill-Toolen, was arrested and charged with making a terrorist threat, then taken to the Strickland Youth Center.
School officials confirmed that no alert was sent to parents on the day the threat was reported and investigated. McGill-Toolen’s Director of Advancement, Kim Dunne, said the situation was resolved quickly by school administrators and police, and that officials determined at the time a parent notification wasn’t necessary. Following media coverage of the incident over the weekend, the school sent parents an email the following Monday morning clarifying what had happened.
Dunne said the school has several tools available for notifying families when administrators determine a threat is credible enough to warrant it, including email and text alerts and a system known as IRIS — Immediate Response Information System — which lets parents choose how they’re contacted, whether by phone call, voicemail or text message.
Mobile Police Department spokesman Terence Perkins said officers stepped up patrols around the campus following the arrest as a precaution, though he said investigators do not expect further incidents connected to the threat. Perkins said his department treats any report of a threat against a school as serious, regardless of how it’s communicated, and urged anyone with knowledge of a potential threat to contact police promptly using the department’s non-emergency line so officers can begin an investigation.
The incident has raised broader questions among some McGill-Toolen parents about when schools should proactively communicate safety incidents, even after they’ve been resolved. School officials say their protocol going forward will continue to weigh the credibility and immediacy of a threat when deciding whether to issue a parent-wide alert.