A highly competitive Brooklyn high school has been plagued with untraceable bomb threats “almost every single day” for months — leaving students and parents terrified, The Post has learned.
The NYPD has not been able to track down the sicko or sickos who have been targeting the Brooklyn Latin School since at least May, and some fearful families said they’re considering ditching the sprawling campus for safer options.
“I feel like it’s happening a lot and they’re not really telling us what’s going on,” one freshman said of the school administration during dismissal on Thursday.
“I am slightly nervous because we don’t have the information to know what’s going on. They kind of protect us by not letting us know,” she told The Post.
The student said she and her classmates at Brooklyn Latin — one of the city’s eight elite specialized public high schools — have been dealing with what feels like near-constant alarms ringing through the halls, making them nervous.
The alarms are followed by “shelter-ins,” where the building goes into lockdown, with kids forced to remain inside, until classes are eventually allowed to resume. Other times, the school is instead placed on “hold,” where kids don’t leave their classrooms, students said.
Cops said none of the threats have been deemed credible, and that the investigation is ongoing.
The disturbing situation was revealed this week by frustrated mom Gillian Telling, who wrote in a People article that there was “no end in sight” to parents’ distress.
All the calls have apparently been directed at Brooklyn Latin, two other schools — Lyons Community School and Williamsburg High School of Arts + Technology — share the same Graham Avenue campus and are subjected to the same evacuations and fear.
“I am afraid to send my children to school because we don’t know exactly what’s happening,” said Manuel Aruz, 62, whose 16- and 14-year-old girls attend the WHSAT.
“When you see the police every week, you know something is wrong and we don’t know exactly what it is,” Aruz told The Post.
Parents initially thought the threats were coming from kids looking to wriggle out of tests last spring — until the calls began surging this school year, after Labor Day in September.
The NYPD has so far not been unable to trace the source because the calls are being made through a VPN, or virtual private network, which masks IP addresses and encrypts a user’s data, Telling wrote.
“The NYPD has seen a sharp increase in swatting threats targeting schools over the last two years — namely false bomb threats being called into schools in order to provoke a police response,” a police department spokesperson said in a statement.
“This practice is disruptive, illegal, and diverts necessary public safety resources from where they are needed.”
The NYPD said that staff from the local precinct and School Safety agents “have continued to work closely with school officials regarding this investigation” and that “additional police personnel continue to conduct patrols in and around the school.”
But the boost in police presence hasn’t helped to put all families at ease, with multiple students saying the threats remain unsettling and distracting.
“I feel nervous knowing that there is a possible threat. It’s almost every single day that we get a bomb threat,” one 10th grader said.
“I feel like — even though it’s just a prank — it’s still possible threatening,” the student said, adding that authorities are “vague” about details.
“Everyone is saying it’s a joke, but it’s really a serious thing.”
One math teacher, who declined to share his name, expressed frustration with the police’s inability to stop the harassment.
“This is not an isolated situation where somebody calls something in and they have to identify whether it’s real or fake and ultimately find out who called it in,” the teacher said. “If they can track down Luigi Mangione in a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, they can find the person that’s making these calls.”
A WHSAT parent, who gave his name at Richardo, said he hoped the schools might reconsider the state-mandated cellphone ban in light of the threats.
“New York is not a safe place anymore. It’s like a gamble – you bring your kids to school. You expect to get them back the same way you bring them in,” he said.
“What happens if something is happening and they can’t get in contact with us?” he added. “I only got one out of two or three alerts. I want to know right away so I can come and pick them up. I would want to come and get my kids out of there.”
One student, Jacky, 14, said she’s grown used to the bomb threats as just another part of her day.
“I was fearful at first, the first few times, because I was really concerned about how common it was but now I just realized that it’s really nothing,” she said. “They haven’t found anything so I don’t think it’s gonna be serious. I just move on with my day.”
A spokesperson for the city Department of Education said: “The safety of our students and staff is our very top priority. We take every threat extremely seriously, including working directly with our local law enforcement partners, to keep every person in our community safe.”
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