The Hanover School Division (HSD) has outlined how they will deal with the students responsible for yesterday’s bomb threat to Clearspring Middle School.

Superintendent Randy Dueck says the two culprits are HSD students and are middle school aged. He adds the school division will not press charges but says they are working with the families to handle the situation.

"We have a very good team of psychologists that work for us and they have established a thorough safety risk assessment piece," notes Dueck.

He explains the division's team of psychologists are conducting safety risk assessments with these students which includes interviews with them and their families, a history review and potentially some testing. He says at the end of that process, their team will come up with a set of recommendations which will drive how they will move forward.

"They’re all different because individual students are all different and the backgrounds and the reasons and the ages and all of those things have so many variables in them that we need to take a look at each individual situation and look at the recommendations that come out of the risk assessment."

Dueck says after they were made aware of the potential threat yesterday morning, priority one was getting the students away from CMS.

"It was a specific threat to that specific school," Dueck explains. "We needed to get them away from the school and there is some speculation out there in the community that we should have been more secretive of where the kids were but parents still need to know where their kids are."

He specifies students were held on buses at an unknown location until arrangements were made with the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church to safely transport the students there. Dueck adds keeping that location of those buses "unknown is a little tough when you’ve got 20 buses holding kids, they’re not stealthy."

Dueck says when events of crisis such as this occur, they have a divisional crisis team that gathers together and executes HSD's crisis protocol. "It’s a team of five or six people and we all gather together in the same room and we’re all writing things on the whiteboards, we’re working on our laptops and we’re working on the phones and we all have our jobs to do," Dueck adds.

"The first half of the morning just working on the crisis itself and once we felt that was close to a resolution, we began a pretty lengthy debriefing process because we need to learn from every one of these situations and get better by having gone through the situation," he notes.

Dueck says CMS students had the chance to talk about the incident with their teachers this morning and adds the division has psychologists and mental health workers available at the school to talk with any students that feel uneasy about the situation.

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