Posted on December 16, 2015 8:56 am by LA School Report
The email that shut down LA schools came from an ‘Internet meme
sewer’
It’s been traced back to a barebones email server that hosts thousands of accounts.
Huffington Post, by Ryan Grenoble
It’s been traced back to a barebones email server that hosts thousands of accounts.
Huffington Post, by Ryan Grenoble
Parents, teachers grapple to explain Los Angeles school threat
The Los Angeles Unified School District will offer counseling to students when they return to classes on Wednesday, a spokeswoman said.
Reuters, by Lisa Richwine
The Los Angeles Unified School District will offer counseling to students when they return to classes on Wednesday, a spokeswoman said.
Reuters, by Lisa Richwine
Commentary: Did Los Angeles overreact to school threat?
Shutting down a city, and engendering anxiety and frustration on a metropolitan scale, now only requires nothing more than an email.
CNN, by Jeff Yang
Shutting down a city, and engendering anxiety and frustration on a metropolitan scale, now only requires nothing more than an email.
CNN, by Jeff Yang
Chris Christie faults Obama for failing to prevent Los Angeles
bomb hoax
Gov. Christie cited the LAUSD bomb threat to make the case that President Obama and Hillary Clinton were mishandling the country’s national security.
Huffington Post, by Igor Bobic
Gov. Christie cited the LAUSD bomb threat to make the case that President Obama and Hillary Clinton were mishandling the country’s national security.
Huffington Post, by Igor Bobic
After LAUSD closure, local firms open up to kids
Restaurants offered free lunches to students, museums waived admission fees, and businesses opened their doors to kids as employees woke up to a morning in flux.
Los Angeles Business Journal, by Natalie Schachar
Restaurants offered free lunches to students, museums waived admission fees, and businesses opened their doors to kids as employees woke up to a morning in flux.
Los Angeles Business Journal, by Natalie Schachar
Commentary: Tale of two cities – to close or not to close
schools?
In a swipe at L.A., New York City police chief William Bratton said the decision to close the L.A. schools was “a significant overreaction.”
EdSource, by Louis Freedberg
In a swipe at L.A., New York City police chief William Bratton said the decision to close the L.A. schools was “a significant overreaction.”
EdSource, by Louis Freedberg
Posted on December 15, 2015 8:05 pm by Mike Szymanski
LA Unified officials said tonight that all district
schools have been declared safe and will reopen tomorrow.
The decision was made after law enforcement officials
determined that an email foretelling violent acts across the district was
judged to be “not a credible threat” by investigators, in the words of Mayor Eric
Garretti, who joined city and regional officials at an early evening news
conference.
The announcement brought an end to one of the most
challenging days in LA Unified history, causing anxiety and inconvenience to
hundreds of thousands of families who send their children to the district’s
1,100 schools. The officials said 2,780 law enforcement personnel had swept
1,531 school sites to determine that all schools were safe for the resumption
of instruction.
However, as Garcetti warned, the opening of schools does
not bring an end to the episode. He objected to characterizing the email as a “prank” or a hoax,”
suggesting instead it could be a case of “criminal mischief or testing true
vulnerability of the district.”
“We sure hope we catch who is responsible,” he said. “At
best someone was engaged in extreme criminal mischief, a serious crime.
Somebody needs to pay for that. If they were testing our vulnerability, we did
a pretty good job of responding.”
The mayor said the threat came to LA Unified’s board
president, Steve Zimmer, at 10 pm Monday night. Zimmer immediately contacted
law enforcement, and it quickly led to a collaboration involving the FBI,
country agencies, the Los Angeles Police Department and the district’s police
department.
After hours of work, they presented information early in
the morning to Ramon Cortines, who had stepped down three days before as district superintendent,
to make a decision about opening schools.
Posted on December 15, 2015 5:40 pm by LA School Report
LA Unified school board President Steve Zimmer announced
tonight that 1,531 school sites in the district have been declared safe and
will be reopened tomorrow.
LA School Report will have a full report shortly.
Posted on December 15, 2015 3:48 pm by Mike Szymanski
Walter Reed Middle School in Studio City, has “zero
periods,” when students with electives go to classes before school begins. When
teachers arrived at the school early today to prepare for their regular class
time, they were greeted by their colleagues saying, “Leave the school, we’re on
Level 1 alert. This is serious!”
Minutes before school was supposed to begin, Reed’s
principal Jeanne Gamba issued a robo-call alerting parents that all schools
will be closed and parents are being asked to pick up their children.
All across the 1,100-plus traditional and charter schools
run by LAUSD, procedures were surprisingly similar today as law enforcement
authorities checked campuses to see if an email threatening violence across the
district was real or a hoax. It was a long and trying day, testing nerves of
parents and instincts of authorities with a “serious threat” of mass violence
just two weeks after the terrorist attack in San Bernardino.
Across town from Walter Reed in the southern part of the
country’s second-largest school district, principal Tracy Washington,of Locke
Early Education Center was standing outside her school, not allowed to go in
herself. She was able to alert her families through her cell phone.
“You do what you have to do; we’re here for the
students,” Washington said. “We take our orders from the district, and they
said, don’t go into the school. It’s a state of emergency, that’s it.”
Posted on December 15, 2015 1:47 pm by Mike Szymanski
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti made it very clear: He
didn’t close the schools. Neither did the police chief, nor the county sheriff.
That decision was made by LA Unified Superintendent Ramon
Cortines, who was supposed to be on his way to retirement this week.
“I made the decision to close the schools,” Cortines said
at a morning press conference, flanked by the leaders of the city, the
police chief, the sheriff and the school board.
Already seeming to anticipate criticism for causing such
a commotion across the city by shutting down the schools, Garcetti said,
“Decisions need to be made in a matter of minutes.” He was concerned that if
this threat turned out to be a simple scare he doesn’t want it to result in
people not speaking up the next time a threat may occur.
“We want freedom and liberty, but also to be safe,” the
mayor said, referring people to the Los Angeles tipline iWatch.
The city was put in a Level 1 alert, and Garcetti said,
“It is my number one priority keeping the city safe, whether or not anything
happens.”
Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell also touted
Cortines’s brave decision “to ensure that 700,000 young people are safe.”
Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck pointed out,
“It’s very easy in hindsight to criticize the decision when you have no responsibility.”
He said that Cortines’s decision was based on solid facts to make the
determination. “Southern California has been through a lot in recent weeks,”
Beck said, alluding to the mass shootings in San Bernardino.
Continue reading →
Posted on December 15, 2015 1:27 pm by LA School Report
Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat and ranking member of the
House intelligence committee whose district includes many LA Unified schools,
said today a “preliminary assessment” of the emailed threat prompting the closure of all district
schools today was a hoax.
In a statement, he said, “While we continue to
gather information about the threat made against the Los Angeles and New York
School Departments, the preliminary assessment is that it was a hoax or
something designed to disrupt school districts in large cities. The
investigation is ongoing as to where the threat originated from and who was
responsible.”
Even so, he suggested that district officials made the
right decision in closing the schools out of an abundance of caution.
“The safety of our communities and particularly our young
people is paramount,” he said in his statement. “At the same time, in an
environment in which it is very easy to transmit threats, real and otherwise,
and when fear and disruption may be the goal as well as the effect, communities
and law enforcement will need to make a difficult judgment as to how to respond
in a variety of circumstances. The goal of the intelligence and federal law
enforcement community should be to assist local authorities with as timely
information as possible to help inform those judgments. I will continue to
urge the intelligence and federal law enforcement community to share as much
information as it can, as quickly as it is able.”
Rep. Brad Sherman, a Democrat representing the Valley,
agreed with his colleague, to a point. Speaking on KTLA this afternoon, he said, “certain parts of the Los
Angeles email were not credible.”
Posted on December 15, 2015 12:59 pm by Mike Szymanski
It wasn’t by accident that all seven LA Unified school
board members happened to be at this morning’s press conference with the mayor,
the sheriff, the police chief and superintendent as they announced closing the
schools today.
The school board had already plan to continue closed-door
deliberations to select a superintendent to succeed Ramon Cortines. His last
official day in office was Friday, but when he came in to the press
conference this morning in a sweat shirt, yellow cap, jeans and tennis shoes —
very uncharacteristic for a man known for his natty suits and bow ties. He
began his remarks, joking, “I have retired and returned now for the fourth
time.”
The board’s scheduled meeting was eclipsed by the school
closings. Early on, board President Steve Zimmer and member Mónica GarcÃa
joined in, translating news into Spanish.
Then, all the school board members showed up at a 10 a.m.
press conference with the major police officials in the county.
There had been some hints that maybe the school board
would announce a decision about the superintendent today, but that now seems
even more unlikely than it had been. The board was continuing its search
discussions, awaiting any further developments on the threat assessment.
Posted on December 15, 2015 12:24 pm by LA School Report
A 17-year old male student at Los Angeles International Charter High School in Highland
Park was struck and killed by a truck this morning as he was crossing a street
near the school.
The death occurred after the LA Unified school district
decided to close all its campuses this morning due to a threat of
violence, although the school is not associated directly with the district and
had its most recent charter application approved by the LA County Board of
Education.
The school’s leadership decided to close down because it
is near some LA Unified schools, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The school’s director of recruitment, Tony Torrres, told
the Times that “the decision to close the school came very late. So people
were still heading to school.”
The death occurred reportedly around 7:10 a.m. as the boy
was crossing the street Avenue 60 and Figueroa Street and was hit by an LA
city Bureau of Street Services truck, according to KTLA.
Posted on December 15, 2015 11:48 am by LA School Report
The LA Unified school district made the rare move today
of closing all of its campuses after receiving a terror threat.
Superintendent Ramon Cortines has asked for police to
search every building — a major operation considering the district has over
1,100 campuses. The move also comes as New York officials said they received a
similar threat but have determined it was a hoax.
Check out our Storify feed below for live updates via
Twitter, Facebook and other social media accounts about the school closings.
Continue reading →
Continue reading →
Posted on December 15, 2015 11:35 am by Mike Szymanski
An email that threatened violence with “explosive
devices, assault rifles and machine pistols” provided LA Unified officials
today with the rationale for closing all schools across the district.
Those details and others, which began emerging today,
convinced city and school officials that closing schools was the more prudent
action, especially in the aftermath of the deadly terrorist attack two weeks
ago in San Bernardino and the attacks in Paris that proceeded it.
Speaking at a mid-morning press conference, Los Angeles
Police Chief Charlie Beck said an email came to several of the school board
members threatening attacks specifically to LA Unified schools, but not any
school in particular. He said the email came from Frankfurt, Germany, but it’s
origin, he said, “is believed to be from much closer than Germany.”
He said there was an “implied threat of explosive
devices and a specific threat of attack with assault rifles and machine
pistols.”
The email reached the district late last night,
prompting the city to declare a Level 1 security alert.
Mayor Eric Garcetti said the email referenced “violence
to students and could come in a number of forms of violence with weapons
already in place to bring that violence about.”
Rep. Brad Sherman, a Democrat who represents parts of the
San Fernando Valley, appeared on MSNBC and disclosed several more details from
the email, including the writer’s claim to be “a devout Muslim” who had “32
accomplices” with the ability to use “nerve gas.”
In a statement he had issued earlier, Sherman said, “The
author claims to be an extremist Muslim who has teamed up with local jihadists.
We do not know whether these claims are true or a lie. We do not know whether
this email is from a devout Muslim who supports jihadists or perhaps a
non-Muslim with a different agenda.”
Posted on December 15, 2015 10:02 am by Craig Clough
New York City schools also received an email terror
threat today, according to various media reports. But unlike the LA Unified
school district, which closed all of its campuses this morning, New York
schools remained open today.
In fact, New York leaders are cracking jokes about the
situation as LA Unified officials are closing roughly 1,000 campuses and
mobilizing police units around the city to search district buildings.
NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said the email
received in New York was similar to the one received in Los
Angeles, but police have determined it not to be credible and are
investigating it as a hoax, according to CBS and the Associated Press.
Bratton said big indicator that the email is a hoax is
that the word “Allah” was not spelled with a capital “A.”
“The language in the email would lead us to believe that
this is not a jihadist initiative,” Braton told CBS. ”That would be incredible
to think that any jihadist would not spell ‘Allah’ with a capital ‘A.'”
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio also said the
message appeared to be a hoax, and one that didn’t fool New York officials.
“Based on the information that we have, this was a very
generic piece of writing sent to a number of different places simultaneously
and also written in a fashion that suggests that it’s not plausible, and we’ve
come to the conclusion that we must continue to keep our school system open,”
said de Blasio, according to CBS. “In fact, it’s very important not to
overreact in situations like this.”
Posted on December 15, 2015 7:52 am by Mike Szymanski
UPDATED
All LAUSD schools were closed today due to a
“serious threat” called into the district.
The threat was not aimed at any specific school, but was
judged credible enough for school officials to close all the campuses, which
serve 643,000 students in 900 traditional and 200 charter schools.
“This is a rare threat, we get threats all the time, but
due to the circumstances in neighboring San Bernardino and what’s happening in
the nation, what happening internationally, I as superintendent am not going to
take the chance with the life of a student,” Ramon Cortines, the out-going
superintendent, said at an impromptu press conference.
He later confirmed reports that the threat came to the
district “from overseas.” Shannon Haber, the district spokeswoman,
confirmed that an email was sent to a member of the school board last night
suggesting a threat involving “backpacks or packages.” She also said the email
came from an IP address in Frankfurt, Germany.
The New York Times reported that New York City officials
said that they had received a similar threat but had concluded that it was a
hoax. The paper quoted Mayor Bill de Blasio saying he was “absolutely
convinced” that there was no danger to schoolchildren in New York.
Cortines said schools would remain closed until the
authorities have searched all school sites and determined they were safe for
students and staff to return. He said the district would issue a statement
later in the day, with an update on the results. He also said that city police
and the FBI were assisting with the threat assessment.
No comments:
Post a Comment