16 threats made to Beaufort County schools this year. How were students punished?

Halfway through the 2018-19 school year, at least 16 threats have been made to public schools in Beaufort County, according to district spokesperson Jim Foster.

Those threats have taken the form of comments made in classes, messages written on bathroom stalls and photos posted on social media.

A new code added to the state law earlier this year makes it illegal for any student to “make threats to take the lives of or inflict bodily harm upon another by using any form of communication whatsoever.”

But up until last week — when a student was detained on charges for carrying a gun on the Hilton Head Island High School campus — only one Beaufort County student had been petitioned to be charged for violating that code.

Law enforcement agencies in other areas of the state, however, are enforcing the code more strictly.

For instance, a 17-year-old teenager from Lexington, S.C. was charged earlier this year for threatening to “shoot up” and “blow up” his high school.

Earlier this week, a 13-year-old boy was detained in Aiken, S.C. for making a bomb threat.

“The result of this investigation shows that continued disruptions of schools will not be tolerated,” Aiken County Sheriff Michael Hunt told the Aiken Standard.

Last month, a 14-year-old Bluffton High School student posted a photo of a gun inside of a backpack on Instagram with a caption that read: “I’m going to become a school shooter tomorrow.”

Although the student was identified and he issued a clear threat against the school, he was not charged.

Parents in the community spoke out against that decision.

At a school board meeting last week, Scott Richardson of Bluffton called it “absolutely unfathomable.”

“As a county, as law enforcement, as a school board and as a community to send a message that you can threaten to shoot up a school and you may get suspended or possibly expelled and then have no criminal changes is insane,” Richardson said.

Capt. Joe Babkiewicz, spokesperson for the Bluffton Police Department, said the severity of the threat, credibility of the threat and the student’s age are all weighed before pursuing charges.

In most instances, the school’s resource officer meets with school staff and lets them decide if they want to bring charges against a student, Babkeiwicz said.

In last month’s Bluffton High School case, officers searched the student and his house but did not find any weapons or signs of a threat to public safety, Babkeiwicz said.

The student told officers the social media post was “only a joke” and that he reposted an image he found on the internet.

“We did not deem it to be credible, which often leads us to making that decision (not to pursue charges),” Babkiewicz said Thursday.

Bringing charges against a student depends on a number of factors, according to Capt. Bob Bromage with the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office.

First officers must identify the student and ensure that the evidence has been preserved.

When a message is written on a bathroom stall or a threat is made on the social media app Snapchat — where pictures often disappear within a few seconds, those two steps cannot always take place.

“We obviously take threats to school safety extremely seriously, so if we can identify the student and it raises to the level that they are a threat to the general public and themselves, then we will detain them,” Bromage said Wednesday.

The school district cannot disclose how it disciplines individual students.

However, any student identified as making a threat — whether he or she is facing criminal charges or not — goes through a separate discipline process with the district that can result in up 10 ten days of out-of-school suspension, expulsion or placement in the district’s alternative program Right Choices, according to the district’s code of student conduct.

The district’s hearing officer, Terry Bennett, determines the punishment for students who commit the most serious violations of the district’s code.

Last year, Bennett held 106 expulsion hearings and about a third of those students were expelled.

Bennett, who had four expulsion hearings scheduled for this week alone, said he is on track to exceed the number of hearings he held last year.

“It pretty much like any court situation,” Bennett said Thursday. “We hear both side, review the evidence and try to make the best decision for the school, the student, the parents, the teachers, everyone involved.”

This story was originally published December 20, 2018 at 2:18 PM.