Like schools in Lewiston and Bethel, Portland and Standish and in a dozen other communities this fall, Bangor High School and the city’s Fifth Street Middle School were closed Wednesday because of bomb threats. The persistence of these threats after school tragedies nationwide last year show that they are more than a mere twisted fad and deserve more attention from the public, especially from students.

False bomb threats may be a lark for a student looking for a day off or a pathetic cry for attention for an unfortunately misguided teen-ager. For everyone else affected, it is, at best, a threat to a day’s education or, worse, a frightening event that serves only to inure students to phone calls that might have a real bomb behind them. Just as school officials are forced to take the false threats seriously, the public should take seriously finding the proper response to the crime.

Maine currently has neither a reliable way to catch the caller of a threat nor a clear sense of what to do with one when caught. Given the number of school days lost so far, administrators are likely to become better at identifying the students at the other end of the phone. There remains a wide range of opinion about what should happen next, with some people pressing for criminal penalties and others saying that will only cause worse problems later. Here are two possible solutions that could help.

Cumberland County District Attorney Stephanie Anderson doesn’t think criminal penalties are the way to go, and instead believes students should be kept in school but denied privileges to “make their misery public.”

“He never gets to drive his car, he never gets to go to dances, if he was in the French club, he’s expelled,” she said. An expansion of that idea might be for a school to establish a required number of hours of service sprucing up a school for students who make false bomb threats and having them or their parents pay for the cost of inspecting the school for the bomb might help too.

The second idea comes from Bangor Superintendent Jim Doughty, who has proposed making up the recent lost day of school on a Saturday. The messages from the proposal are clear enough: Class time will not be sacrificed because someone in the community has a sick sense of humor. Further, if the caller Wednesday was a student, peer pressure should quickly let him or her know that classmates aren’t laughing at the joke. It is a shame that students who had nothing to do with the false report would be sent to school on a Saturday, but the class day must be made up anyway and better now than in June when the reason for the makeup day has been forgotten.

False bomb threats interrupt school days, cancel extracurricular activities, cost communities money to investigate, raise adult suspicion of students and, in turn, force school officials to scrutinize student backpacks, bags and purses more closely. Stopping them will require making the penalties clear and public and letting other students send the message that this is a prank that they will not tolerate.