Adair County Superintendent, Jason Faulkner, has released a video statement addressing the school threat against Adair County Schools on Wednesday, September 11. The students responsible for making the threat have been identified and are in police custody. The video can be found on The Adair County Schools Facebook page.
Class will be back in session tomorrow in Adair County schools. Closed Wednesday and Thursday due to a threat, Adair became one of a number of Kentucky school systems to shut down due to safety concerns this week.
In the video posted to Facebook on Thursday afternoon it is said that law enforcement has since learned the original threat was a hoax and students were never endangered. Faulkner also revealed that two individuals have been arrested for the online threat and charged with terroristic threatening.
“Their intention behind this post was to pressure us into canceling school. These students will face charges for making terroristic threats and we will seek the maximum penalties associated with this offense,” Faulkner said.
The threat originated from a Snapchat account that investigaors learned from Snapchat was created, made the threat, then promptly deleted. It didn't mention any student names. To help trace the origin of the post, “we reached out to the state secret service agency in Louisville (…)additionally, we worked with (County Attorney) Jennifer Hutchison-Corbin to obtain search warrants that allow us to access personal information from Snapchat,” Faulkner said of the investigative process.
During the investigative process, some suspects’ homes were visited, but it was discovered their homes did not match the background of the original threat, which showed a pistol. Instead, the photo itself was found online by the students.
The original photo was taken from an innocuous post on the forum site, Reddit, of an anonymous user asking for advice on a beginner pistol. The original post was over a year old and was not connected to the two students being charged. “The students, from what we were told, didn’t really have access to a firearm,” Superintendent Faulkner said.
After these arrests have been made and any threat of danger dispelled, Faulkner has made the decision not to cancel classes for the remainder of the week.
“At this point, I feel very comfortable having school tomorrow (on Friday),” Faulkner said in the video.
To assuage fears of parents and guardians, measures will still be taken to ensure student safety on campus tomorrow. An increased police presence will be there courtesy of Police Chief Evan Burton. Four additional officers are planned to be patrolling campuses.
“We are going to have conversations with our students tomorrow about the severity of making threats,” Superintendent Faulkner stated. “It is crucial for our students to grasp the dangers and repercussions of making such threats. Even if they perceive it as a joke or mean no harm, we must treat it with the utmost seriousness.”
By Kenley Godby
kenley@adairvoice.com
