HOUSTON — Students at Memorial High School in Houston are on edge after police thwarted an attempted attack on the school.
Spring Branch ISD police said two teens allegedly plotted to place pipe bombs at the school and shoot students. The two teens, only identified as a 16-year-old girl and a 15-year-old girl, were arrested Tuesday.
The FBI’s Houston office told KHOU 11 News that they received information about the threat, conducted a rapid investigation and then turned the case over to local authorities. According to a letter sent to families from the school on behalf of the Spring Branch ISD police chief, the FBI notified them of a “potentially credible threat in the planning stages identified on social media.”
SBISD police were then able to quickly identify and arrest an SBISD student connected to the threat. Another student, from Willis High School in Montgomery County, was also arrested.
Despite the threat being thwarted, Memorial High School students said they were still worried about coming to class this week.
“I was scared. I was really fearful of coming to school. It was very frightening,” Memorial HS senior Jia Lala said. “The fact that they traced and found those two were like a good thing, like now I feel secured.”
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In the wake of this plot, which the FBI called a “mass casualty attack,” KHOU 11 News asked the experts what tools are available for school districts to use to try and stop threats against their schools.
GoGuardian is an educational safety company that said they work with school districts across the country to keep around 25 million students safe.
“We provide technology that basically lives in the background of students’ devices and monitors for concerns relate to suicide, self-harm or threats of violence to others,” Tracy Clements, GoGuardian’s Education Strategist for Student Safety and Mental Health, said.
Clements explained that the school district sets the parameters for how the technology works, but essentially, the software alerts school officials when topics about violence are discussed on school-issued devices. Clements also adds that the technology works on school-issued accounts, even if they are accessed through a personal device.
Once certain words or phrases related to threats against students are identified, the proper school officials are then notified so they can address any potential issue.
“It uses machine learning to identify concerns, and it doesn’t just use single words,” Clements said. “It tries to look at contextual clues and be more robust than just keyword flagging.”
Clements added that GoGuardian’s numbers prove their software is making a difference.
“It’s estimated that we have helped prevent a little over 18,000 incidents involving student harm,” Clements said.
S. Daniel Carter, president of Safe Campuses, LLC, said that school districts can utilize other tools to be alerted to threats being made online, including technology that gets fellow students involved.
“There are software options for school districts to put in place that allow students to either be identified or to put information they’ve heard about potential threats, so having that type of sort of sensitive intelligence is one of the first steps a school district should take,” Carter said.
Carter added that if a threat ever escalates to weapons being brought onto a school campus, AI can be used to alert school police in a timely manner.
“Some of the newer technology involves using artificial intelligence to monitor CCTV, so that if there’s threatening activity, such as somebody actually bringing a gun or knife on premises, that can be quickly flagged to respond to,” Carter said. “I’ve tested the technology myself. They can tell what a gun is and what isn’t, and even if it offers a few false positives, that’s better than the alternative.”