Teenagers who make school threats face almost no punitive consequences for actions that would be felonies if they were adults, a Times Union investigation has found.
Despite actions that can leave hundreds of children terrorized, juvenile offenders almost never go to juvenile detention, prosecutors and school administrators say. They rarely face a judge. Mainly, according to data from Albany, Schenectady and Saratoga counties, they are offered counseling.
Adults go to prison.
An adult who called in a bomb threat against a Clifton Park daycare in 2023 was sentenced to six years in prison, after being arrested on the same charge as many of the juveniles who have made school threats: making a terroristic threat. In New York state, the maximum prison sentence for that charge is seven years.
After a spate of school shooting and bomb threats against the Shenendehowa, Scotia-Glenville, Schenectady and Bethlehem schools in September last year, parents flooded social media and school board meetings, demanding that students be expelled, treated like adults in court, and jailed.
In Guilderland, parents objected when a student returned to school about six months after being charged with "making a threat of mass harm" that included a list of people he wanted to harm.
"The bothersome part for me the most is what about the mental health of those kids who were on that list," William Critcher, whose daughter attends the same school as the student, said at the time. He was among many who spoke at a school board meeting while school officials said the suspended student had a right to an education.
"What about the mental health of everybody else? One kid is more important than those 20, those 40, those 80 kids?" he asked.
That month, according to school officials, a Shenendehowa student sent threatening emails to school staff; a Scotia-Glenville student made a threat of mass harm on TikTok; a Schenectady student sent a Snapchat message saying he was "shooting the school tmr;" and two different juveniles made threats against Bethlehem, one a bomb threat and the other a repeated message about shooting members of the school.
It was a difficult month, as parents questioned publicly whether their children were safe at school. It was the same month that a teen in Georgia carried out a shooting at Apalachee High School, killing four people and injuring seven others in the most deadly school shooting in the state's history. The teen was suspected of posting threats against the school online a few months prior to the shooting. In the three weeks following the shooting, more than 700 students across the U.S. were accused of making threats against their schools, the New York Times reported at the time.
A 21-year Stony Brook University study of juveniles who made school threats on Long Island found that many of the students had no intention of acting on their threat. Instead, they were often suicidal and suffered from clinical depression or anxiety when they made the threat.
"Making a school threat may be a significant signal or clue indicating the presence of underlying psychiatric problems," the study said. The study looked at records for every student sent to the Stony Brook University Child and Adolescent Outpatient Clinic after a school threat.
Many of them had undiagnosed, but treatable, serious psychological disorders. And although most of them had no intention of following through with their threat, almost half of them made another threat, according to the study, which looked at 157 students who made threats from 1998 to 2019.
Representatives for Capital Region counties would not discuss with the Times Union the recidivism rate among local youth who make school threats. But in the study, 43 percent of the Long Island children made repeated threats.
It's this repetition -- day after day, at school and after school -- that eats away at students' feeling of safety at their school. Many local high schools have had at least one threat in recent years. Students often experience lockdowns for threats, as well as drills to practice safety plans in case someone ever does start shooting in their school. More than a dozen parents and students from Bethlehem, Scotia-Glenville and Shenendehowa school districts all described to the Times Union the same feelings of fear and anger regarding threats made at their schools.
After a series of threats against Bethlehem High School, about half of the students skipped school for the next two days, the school district said. One student, who the Times Union is not naming because of their age, went to school after a threat and said they checked every time someone walked past their classroom door, to make sure it wasn't a shooter.
Some local superintendents have responded to the threats by emphasizing the dire legal consequences in store for the person committing the crime.
After the Bethlehem threats, the superintendent wrote in a message to the community that the perpetrator would be held accountable.
"There will be zero tolerance for any situation that undermines our commitment to safety. Any threat made against a school in the Bethlehem Central School District will be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," Superintendent Jody Monroe wrote.
Two different teenagers made the threats against Bethlehem. One, a Canadian resident, was charged in that country.
The other was a juvenile in Albany County. He was charged with making a terroristic threat, a felony, and aggravated harassment, a misdemeanor. He never saw a judge.
"We try to keep cases out of Family Court. We know each step in that direction to appear in court has a negative impact on child and family," said Albany County spokeswoman Mary Rozak.
After another school threat, the Shenendehowa superintendent warned students that if they made a threat, they would face "serious repercussions in terms of criminal charges."
Those repercussions are mostly psychological treatment.
"We're looking for underlying problems that need to be addressed," said Ann Flower Stitt, Saratoga County assistant county attorney.
Her job is to prosecute all juveniles who make school-related threats. But the focus is really on treatment, not punishment.
"We do our best to advocate what's going to help the youth," she said.
Every juvenile in this situation in Saratoga County ends up with a probation officer. They may have to call the officer for regular check-ins, and the officer might review their internet browser history or confiscate their cellphone, she said. That monitoring could go on for a year. In Albany County, probation might be involved for five months, Rozak said. Sometimes, she added, the juvenile must write an apology letter or do community service.
Schenectady County takes a slightly harder approach. Juveniles still go through probation, but also go to Family Court. Before court, probation spends months determining a treatment plan.
"This involves weekly meetings with a probation officer, searches of their person and residence, and sometimes GPS monitoring," said county spokeswoman Erin Laiacona.
She called it a "zero-tolerance" approach.
"To date, no youth in these cases has been detained or placed in a juvenile facility solely on threat charges," she said. "While the focus remains on accountability and rehabilitation, the potential for more serious consequences exists."
Psychologists involved in the 21-year study on Long Island said the students need treatment, not punishment.
That's the strategy followed by Albany schools Superintendent Joseph Hochreiter. He's had difficult conversations with parents who want to know how a student was punished after terrorizing a school. He tells them the school district will help the victims recover -- but that details about the perpetrator must remain confidential. When students see the student perpetrator return to school a few weeks later, they complain that nothing was done.
But, he said, they don't know the student was often in-patient at a psychiatric hospital or receiving daily outpatient psychotherapy.
Counseling or psychiatric treatment has worked, Hochreiter said.
"We've had many, many kids resurrect themselves because they got the support they needed or they were crying out for," he said. "We try to prescribe discipline to kids based on what we believe will impact behavior change the most."
That usually doesn't mean forever removing them from public schools.
"That sometimes does happen," he said. "But we've got better data today on kids, their thinking and what precipitates their actions, so we need to use that data at a more personal level to try to change their behavior."
In the Long Island study, two-thirds of the students who made a threat were referred back to their previous school. Some were referred to therapeutic schools. But 92 percent of the students who made threats were determined to be of no danger to society, according to the study.
Only a handful -- 8 percent -- went to psychiatric hospitals or residential school settings. Those students often had a history of making repeated threats or made threats to staff, were physically violent, lacked remorse and had an interest in violent media, according to the study.
Who makes school threats? The study found that 88 percent of the Long Island children were male. The average age was 13. The study warned that school officials must take threats seriously even if they are made by elementary school children. Of the most serious threats on Long Island, nine were made by high school students and three by fifth grade students.
From the point of view of students at the schools, it appears there's no punishment at all. Students who made threats reappear, usually after a suspension, and go back to their normal routine.
"I can understand how some youth get the impression that nothing happens. But there are certainly consequences," Stitt said. "That youth may or may not have to go to mental health or substance abuse treatment. They might have a daily check-in call (with probation). It is somewhat invisible. I believe it's part of the protected privacy of the youth."