Kings Local superintendent outlines response, communications after swatting incident

Superintendent James Sears told the Kings Local School District Board of Education during a work session that a false report to a suicide-prevention hotline on the morning of Jan. 31 triggered a large police response and placed Kings High School and the junior high on lockdown.

Sears said the district received a text to the suicide prevention hotline at 10:42 a.m.; the district’s school resource officer at the high school, Officer John Downs, placed the buildings on lockdown at about 10:44 after dispatch notified SROs and multiple law-enforcement agencies. Police were conducting searches inside the buildings by about 10:45, and officers completed a room-by-room search about an hour later; officers cleared the buildings at roughly 11:45 a.m. and the district released students from lockdown at about 11:55 a.m.

The summary outlined why the district is limiting public detail about its internal safety plan: Sears said those safety-plan details “are not necessarily distributed to the public” and that they are “protected by law,” and that the board would not…