Three Delaware schools were evacuated Tuesday due to threats of violence, according to the Delaware State Police, and schools in Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania also received threats Tuesday morning. It is unclear whether the threats are related.
All three Delaware schools received threats via a “robotic style or computer generated voice phone call,” according to the state police Facebook page, and the schools were allowed to reopen after officials investigated and found nothing out of the ordinary or suspicious. Threats via automated robo-call led to the evacuation of several schools across the Delmarva region last week, and subsequent searches found no bombs.
At least two schools on Maryland’s Eastern Shore also received threats on Tuesday. Both have since been cleared. Threats of violence forced several schools in the same region to evacuate students and staff last week.
Multiple schools in New Jersey’s Bergen and Passaic counties also received bomb threats Tuesday, according to William Maer, a spokesman for the Passaic County Sheriff’s Office. At least one school, in the town of Fair Lawn, was briefly evacuated while law enforcement officials investigated.
The threats affected local districts in 10 New Jersey towns including Clifton, Leonia, Tenafly, Fair Lawn, Teaneck and Englewood, according to a law enforcement officer in the detective bureau of the Clifton police department. In Bergen County, threats were being investigated by the local school districts and law enforcement, according to the New Jersey State Education Department’s Bergen County office.
Clifton police said that the threat came in by voicemail in the early morning hours and involved a bomb placed inside schools and a secondary attack of a mass shooting. The threat was deemed not credible, Clifton police said, and no schools were closed.
In Pennsylvania, the Chichester School District evacuated students from its six schools due to an “unspecified threat” Tuesday morning, according to CBS’s Philadelphia affiliate. Local police were using bomb-sniffing dogs to search the schools, CBS reported.
Schools in several Massachusetts communities also received threats and were evacuated Tuesday as police responded, according to New England Cable News.
A bomb threat called in to Iowa City police Tuesday morning led to an early dismissal for students at West High, and authorities closed the building while conducting a search there.
