converse middle school new.JPG

Converse Middle School in Palmer.

(Dan Glaun | MassLive)

On Tuesday afternoon, Dale Marsden waited to pick up her granddaughter across the street from Converse Middle School in Palmer, hours after yet another bomb threat led to an evacuation and police search of the school.

It is, to her frustration, a new kind of normal at Palmer schools, which have dealt with 13 threatening messages over the last month and a half.

"It's our daily bomb scare," Marsden said.

The notes have been found on clipboards and in trash cans, in classrooms and boys' bathrooms. Student Payton Jenkins, who is Marsden's granddaughter, and her friend Shyann-Storm Cooper said what began as a genuine concern for students has become a routine annoyance, with classes disrupted due to mandatory evacuations upon the discovery of each threat.

Students are now worried about the potential for collective punishment from an equally frustrated administration, according to Jenkins. Teachers, she said, have intimated that end-of-year field trips may be cancelled if the wave of threats continue.

"Everyone's just sick of it," she said.

Wednesday morning's threat, the third in three days at Converse, was found at about 8 a.m., said Palmer Fire Chief Alan Roy. School officials and the Palmer police department did not respond to requests for additional details.

34 threats were made in Massachusetts schools in the first half of this school year, according to a study from the consulting firm National School Safety and Security Services. Palmer schools have faced more than a third of that number since the start of April. Threats often occur in bunches, said National School Safety and Security president Ken Trump, and Palmer is no exception.

"You tend to have a situation that when you have them, you have them and you have a lot," Trump said.

Frequent evacuations, even for vague and unsubstantiated threats, have disrupted classes and frustrated students, parents and administrators. Those evacuations are a product of a school policy that requires them when any bomb threat is discovered; Superintendent Thomas Charko and Converse Principal David Stetkiewicz faced disciplinary action after failing to notify police or clear the building following the first threat on April 7. Each incident since then has triggered an immediate evacuation.

The Palmer school committee will consider a change to the district's threat policy at its meeting on Thursday that would allow schools to stay open if police and school officials determine a threat is not credible. It is a move that makes sense, according to Trump, who said that the current system provides an incentive to students threat-makers who want to disrupt school.

"They're getting a reaction," Trump said. "They're getting an automatic evacuation." Unnecessary evacuation can sometimes endanger students, Trump said, when they are moved to a less-supervised environment than their classrooms.

Several students who confessed to threats made in April said they wrote the messages to get out of class, according to Charko.

The district has communicated with parents during the threats. Converse shut down all but one boy's and one girl's restroom and assigned a staff member to sign students in and out of the facilities, after several threats were found written on bathroom walls.

Palmer is not the only Western Mass. school district to face threats this year, though other incidents appear to be isolated. False bomb threats have also forced evacuations at Amherst Middle School and Monson High School this year, and Springfield's Brunton Elementary School was evacuated Wednesday after a threat was found on a bathroom wall.

Marsden, waiting to pick up her granddaughter from Converse on Tuesday, said that while the first threats were chilling the regular scares have become more of an annoyance than a terror. But she was ambivalent about the proposed policy, and worried of genuine danger escaping notice.

"The first ones were really scary, but you don't know how to react to it, because it's like the little boy who cried wolf," said Marsden, a Monson resident.

"It's like the tornado that went through Monson," she added. "It's unbelievable."

Jenkins and Cooper, standing next to Marsden's car for their ride home from school, said they do not know who is behind the bomb scares. "Probably someone stupid," Jenkins said.

The several students caught in previous threats are facing criminal charges, and the new policy would make clear that making false threats is a felony and would result in suspension pending the resolution of charges. Robert Manseau, also picking up a grandchild from Converse Tuesday, said a strict disciplinary approach is needed.

"It should be severe enough that they learn a real good lesson out of it," Manseau said. "This is entirely inappropriate."