On Wednesday, Sept. 25, Scottsdale police received a 911 call that there was a gunman on campus at Chaparral High School who had taken hostages into a bathroom.
The school was put into lockdown. Jack Hickman was in one of those classrooms.
“We got to second period and they called the lockdown and my teacher instantly grabbed a bat and was chilling by the door,” Hickman said. “He said something like ‘this is definitely real.’”
Police swept the school and found no credible threat. They later discovered that the call came from outside the U.S. The Scottsdale Unified School District held a town hall a few days later to talk about safety and security. That’s where Scottsdale Police Chief Jeff Walther said the same caller hit two other schools in two other states.
“After the Chaparral incident last week, the next day the city of Mesa and Mesa PD responded to six different swatting calls — just the next day,” Walther said.
He said threats have gone up exponentially across the Valley since the shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia.
“We really have seen the numbers go through the roof, not just here and in the Valley, but around the country,” Walther said. “This has turned into an everyday occurrence.”
Just in the month of September, it became a statewide problem. The Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center reported that it received 130 school threats in the span of 20 days last month. That’s compared to 177 for the first eight months of the year.
Those numbers led Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne to open up $15 million in carryover school safety funds to get more armed officers in schools.
“If you have that quantity of those kinds of threats, sooner or later something bad is going to happen,” Horne said. “And [with] the fact that we have another $15 million available, I’m hoping very much that the schools will apply for it.”
If there’s money left over, schools will be able to request counselors and social workers as well, but Horne’s priority is to get police officers on campus. He said he’s never seen this many threats in such a short period of time.
Neither has Andi Fourlis who’s been in education for 33 years and is the current superintendent of Mesa Public Schools.
“Generally after a school shooting, there then becomes some copycat kinds of things where schools will receive threats- nothing to this magnitude,” Fourlis said.

She said the swatting calls aren’t even their biggest problem
“The majority of the threats that we are receiving are from our own students that are reporting threats that they’ve overheard another student say ‘I’m gonna come shoot up the school,’” Fourlis said.
From Sept. 11 to Sept. 27 Fourlis said Mesa received more than 20 threats at different schools in the district. All were deemed non-credible.
“These threats have disrupted the learning environment and caused such fear and angst amongst not only our staff, but our students, our families and the community as a whole,” Fourlis said.
At a meeting on Sept. 24, Mesa’s governing board announced that 12 students from across the district, including one as young as 11-years-old had been charged by the Mesa Police Department with threatening and intimidating, false reporting of terrorism and interfering with an educational institution.
The district is seeing everything from elementary school students repeating things they hear, to high school students posting on social media. Fourlis said that’s why the safety measures they have in place are all the more important.
“It starts as simply as all of our students have a visible ID so we know the students that are supposed to be on campus,” Fourlis said. “We practice regular drills, we have trained security staff that work for Mesa Public Schools.”

District high schools are also equipped with weapons detection. Mesa junior highs will be getting detectors too after fall break. Fourlis said they would even consider it for elementary schools if they had the budget capacity.
“So it is just like if you go to a Diamondbacks game or if you go to any large venues,” Fourlis said. “It’s defined to us as weapons detection because it’s designed not just to detect metal, but to detect weapons, so knives and guns.”
She said it’s important for parents to regularly review their kids' cellphones and if they see something, say something.
“Report it immediately,” Fourlis said. “Do not repost it because if they repost, that slows down the investigation because that could be one more search warrant that the police department has to get because they have to investigate every way that this message has been shared or communicated.”
Both school officials and law enforcement say it’s important for kids to understand the severity of the threats and their potential consequences.