The recent trend of bomb threats at area schools has caused Algonquin administrators and staff to to review their protocols and prepare for a potential threat.

Thirty-two schools from surrounding towns received robocall bomb threats that resulted in temporary evacuations on April 14. However, all threats seemed to be hoaxes as no dangerous devices were found at any of the schools.

Algonquin is no stranger to bomb threat scares. On October 21 in 2008, the school was evacuated when a student wrote a handwritten bomb threat.

“A number of years ago there was a bomb scare,” Assistant Principal Mel Laughton said. “What we did was we evacuated the building and took kids out to the football field… Emergency personnel came in and swept the building and once that was over we moved everyone back into the building.”

The school has taken precautions to prepare for such an event to occur again. In addition to practicing fire drills and the A.L.I.C.E initiative, secretaries and Principal Tom Mead carry a checklist in the case of a phone-in bomb threat.

“This [the checklist] is held by all the secretaries at their stations,” Mead said. “I have it as well because I have a phone here that is the main line.”

The checklist, that is issued by Homeland Security, has a series of procedures and questions for the person who receives the call to follow. Questions include asking the caller his or her name, where the bomb is located, and what the bomb looks like. Procedures include listening carefully, remaining calm, and completing the bomb threat checklist.

“Whoever would take the call is expected to fill this [the checklist] out as much as they can,” Mead said.

If there was a potential bomb threat at school, there is a certain protocol that must be followed according Mead.

“Our procedure would be to treat it like a fire drill,”  Mead said. “So, we would get everyone out of the building and then we would probably move the entire group that is assembled outside and rotate them to one of the back playing fields.”

While everyone is being evacuated, the police and fire department will be contacted. Along with administrators, the police will select an assembly area. The area will be swept and once determined safe, students, staff, and faculty will be escorted there.

“Once they have determined it [the assembly location] was safe, we could come in as a school and assemble there,” Mead said. “The only place that could hold the entire school is the gym with the bleachers pulled out.”

While students and faculty gather at the assembly location, the police and fire department would sweep through the rest of school to make sure it was safe.

According to a summary written by National School Safety and Security Services in their national school threat survey, Massachusetts is number nine of the top ten states that received the most bomb threats between the months of August and December in 2014.

“It is amazing to me that people would still make these pranks considering the real life ramifications that are happening in the world,” English teacher John Frederick said. “It’s not funny and it makes people very uncomfortable.”

Frederick’s children attend Hopkinton Middle School, which along with the Hopkinton High School, received a bomb threat.

“I was nervous but I figured it was probably a hoax,” Frederick said. “Even though you rationally think that it is a hoax, you’re not comfortable until you are sure.”

The recent wave of bomb threats have been robotic calls that cause emergency responders to rush to schools and for schools to be unnecessarily evacuated. Though Algonquin is prepared for a potential bomb threat, the process is long and troublesome as explained by Mead.

“We are very ready for something like this although at the same time the particular bomb threats now are certainly annoying and very disruptive to the schools,” Mead said. “They also seem to be hoaxes, they are just a threat with nothing behind it. But we don’t know that for sure, so that’s why we have to take the precautions that we do.”