Calm Prevails on Anniversary of Columbine

The first anniversary of the Columbine massacre on Thursday passed quietly in Orange County, where most students were off for spring break. But the lack of ceremony was beneficial in its own way, said Bob Montenegro, safe schools administrator for the Anaheim Union High School District.

“It’s sad, but by recognizing the event you also run the risk of having a copycat incident,” Montenegro said. “That’s always a possibility when you remind people of a violent event that happened in the past.”

Similar fears of terrorism have marked the year since two teenagers at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., murdered 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves--a massacre that traumatized students, parents and teachers across the country and led to a drastic increase in security precautions at schools.

Orange County educators said Columbine has forced school officials to become more aware of off-campus activities that may signal trouble in classrooms.

“There’s a heightened realism [about] what’s going on outside of school,” said Capistrano Unified School District Assistant. Supt. Tony Monetti. “We’re constantly studying how we react to incidents.”

This increased awareness was demonstrated earlier in the week when the Sheriff’s Department decided to post a deputy at the private St. Mary’s & All Angels School in Aliso Viejo after a 13-year-old student allegedly threatened classmates.

Authorities declined to describe the threat other than to say the student said he would carry out his threat Thursday. A parent of another student reported him to authorities. The eighth-grader was suspended from school but not arrested.

Several similar cases have cropped up in the county since Littleton. A Capistrano Valley High School freshman was arrested and suspended last year, for example, for writing on a desk what school officials said were threats to bomb a wing of the school building and shoot students.

“Fortunately, this and threats by other students weren’t acted out,” Monetti said. “But we’d be foolhardy not to act on them. We have to take every one of them seriously.”

The Anaheim district has examined its crisis response plan for each campus.

“We’ve also hired a consultant to look at our plan and tell us how we can shore it up,” Montenegro said. “Because of Columbine we also conducted a mock hostage situation at one of our high schools with the police.”

District officials also had a third Anaheim police officer assigned to the district to work on school safety and preventing gang violence, he said.

“Over the past year, we’ve had a number of students make comments about shooting other students or blowing up the school,” Montenegro said. “We’ve had the police act on every one of these threats.”

In the last year, four Anaheim students have been arrested on suspicion of possessing bomb-making materials and making bomb threats on the Internet.

In one incident, two eighth-graders from South Junior High were arrested with an arsenal of pipe bombs, guns and ammunition. Investigators also found Nazi paraphernalia in the boys’ possession. Police said there was no evidence the boys had targeted anyone or had plans to attack the school.

In a second incident, two Canyon High School students were arrested on suspicion of using a computer to make bomb threats.

This month, a 16-year-old University High School student in Irvine was arrested after police allegedly found flammable chemicals and bomb-making instructions in her bedroom closet. The girl told police she was going to use the materials in an amateur film project.

Incidents like these make school officials jittery, said Orange Unified School District spokeswoman Judith Frutig.

“That’s why a zero-tolerance policy is so necessary,” Frutig said.