Bomb calls away

A legislative committee this week recommended taking away drivers or hunting licenses of students caught phoning in bomb threats to schools, a post-Columbine phenomenon that is as creepy as it is pointless. Overall, the panel’s punishments seem fair, but it would be best if the punishments persuaded the callers not to act in the first place.

Schools in 14 of Maine’s 16 counties received bomb threats last year, 193 total calls, all of which were fake. Together they cost thousands of dollars in police response, and cost students far more. They not only lost class time, they were forced to endure the idiocy of peers who think empty threats and general disruption is an acceptable way to pass a day. Waiting outside or at a nearby school while police inspect your school because one of your classmates threatened to blow it up does not make for the proper learning atmosphere. Several students told the legislative committee they were fed up with it.

The panel concluded that students who were caught calling in the fake bomb threats might, in addition to losing licenses until age 20, be required to make public apologies. Committee members also want the caller or the caller’s parents to pay restitution, up to $10,000. Fair punishments, although they still do not recover the cost of wrecking a school’s atmosphere of trust. And one panel member, Rep. Thomas Bull of Freeport, objected with some justification that judges should have more leeway in setting the age at which licenses would be returned and that ordering the court to give preferential treatment to bomb threats, as the panel suggests, unnecessarily limits judicial discretion.

Bangor High School had a spate of bomb threats early last school year, until school officials decided to make up the lost class time on a Saturday. Not all students made it to classes that weekend, but the messages that academics would continue and that the caller would be the least-popular kid in the school were missed by no one. Since then the school has had only a single call threatening a bomb, and the call was so lame that school administrators cleared the building for less than an hour before resuming school activities.

Maine schools have received several bomb threats, but considerably less than last year, suggesting that this fad may be playing itself out. Let’s hope. In the meantime, spelling out clear penalties might keep them from picking up the phone in the first place.