On Wednesday, February 22, 2023, a call came in through the University of Colorado Boulder’s non-emergency dispatch line at 8:33 a.m. of a male threatening to enter Boulder High School with semi-automatic weapons; realistic gun shots were heard on the recording. Boulder Police Department (BPD) and several other first responders acted quickly to first ensure the safety of the surrounding residents and then to assess the level of threat.

Boulder High School was scheduled for a delayed start of 9:35 a.m. on Wednesday, though there were an estimated 128 members of staff and 70 of the school’s 2,025 total students present in the building at the time of the threat. The school was placed on lockdown when BPD arrived, and by 9:00 a.m. Boulder law enforcement had placed a shelter-in-place order for the immediate neighborhood, which included the sixteen blocks from Broadway to 28th Street.

Law enforcement continued to scan the high school for any potential threats for several hours, including bringing in a K9 bomb-detection unit. At 9:55 a.m. CU Boulder placed a shelter-in-place order on their facilities between Broadway to Folsom Street and Pleasant Street to Canyon Boulevard.

Updates to residents and parents through online channels continued as BPD and other agencies failed to find any validity to the threat to Boulder High School. At 10:08 a.m. buses began arriving to evacuate all students and staff and deliver them safely to the reunification center, Macky Auditorium at CU Boulder, located at 1595 Pleasant Street. At 10:40 a.m. BPD shared the details of reunification with the public, and at 11:00 a.m. the reunification process began.

“This is one of the worst things that can happen for our staff and students,” BVSD Chief Communications Officer Randy Barber told The Mountain-Ear. “It’s something that everyone is terrified about; that we worry about on a constant basis.”

As the Boulder community had been terrorized by the threat of violence, it was being revealed throughout the day that many other Colorado cities, towns, and counties were experiencing similar threats.

Brighton High School, Central High School in Aurora, Englewood High School, Estes Park High School, Fort Morgan High School, and Glenwood Springs High School all received threats of gun violence before 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday. As did the Alamosa, Aspen, Clear Creek County, Durango, and Wiggins school districts, with most of the threatening calls featuring realistic gun sounds in the background.

Littleton High School also received a similar threat later in the day on Wednesday, at 1:55 p.m. Cañon City High School received a bomb threat and the Gilpin County School went on lockdown for a “suspicious incident” earlier the same morning.

The Denver Police Department also received a threat via phone call which involved a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) facility in Denver. This threat, along with the others made on Wednesday, was determined to be unfounded, as were all the other threats made to Colorado schools that day.

“FBI Denver is aware of numerous threats made today to a variety of organizations and institutions across Colorado,” the FBI’s official statement reads. “The FBI works closely with its law enforcement partners by providing resources and guidance in these investigations and can recommend cases for federal prosecution. While we have no information at this time to indicate a specific and credible threat, we continue to work with our local, state, and federal law enforcement partners to gather, share, and act upon threat information as it comes to our attention.

“It is important to note that law enforcement will use all available resources to investigate a threat until we determine whether it is real or not. Investigating hoax threats drains law enforcement resources and diverts officers from responding to an actual crisis.

“More information about the consequences of posting hoax threats can be found on fbi.gov. We urge the public to remain vigilant, and report any and all suspicious activity and/or individuals to law enforcement immediately.”

It has been determined that the threatening calls made on Wednesday were the result of a statewide swatting attack. The FBI defines “swatting” as hoax calls, usually involving threats to human life, that are made with the specific goal to draw a response from law enforcement to a specific location. The FBI writes that “swatting may be motivated by revenge, used as a form of harassment, or used as a prank, but it is a serious crime that has serious consequences.”

“It appears based on the media reports that it likely was a hoax, a swatting incident…but, regardless, to the people involved it felt very, very real,” Barber said.

Boulder Valley School District Superintendent Rob Anderson sent an official statement to residents and parents in an email.

“As you may have heard, Boulder Valley School District appears to be the latest victim of ‘swatting.’ We’ve heard that false calls were also made today to several Colorado communities, including Alamosa, Aspen, Brighton, Canon City, Durango, Englewood, Estes Park, Fort Morgan, Gilpin County, and Glenwood Springs – and this adds to similar swatting incidents in several other states over the past several months.”

Anderson’s statement refers to swatting calls made to other states the same week as the calls to Colorado on February 22, prompting school lockdowns in Idaho and Illinois. Swatting incidents also caused the closing of Denver Public Library on September 21, 2022, and the lockdowns of Alamosa High School, East High School in Denver, and the Montrose School District that same week.

“It’s not necessarily a new situation. This has been happening nationally and there have been some cases here in Colorado previously,” Barber said. “The difficult part on our side is, you really don’t know what you don’t know when you get one of those calls. What we would be afraid of is people not taking these things seriously. We always want to take the report seriously, we want the police to do that, we want our students and staff to do that. We don’t know if the next time is going to be a real situation.”

According to the Educator’s School Safety Network, a non-profit organization founded in 2010 to give educators more of a voice in critical conversations concerning school safety, there has been a notable 607% increase in false reports of active shooters in the US from 2019 to 2022. It is believed that the difficulties in investigating swatting incidents include law enforcement’s inability to determine motive in the crime, and, in many cases, the source of the calls is determined to be from outside the country.

“We recognize that this situation may be concerning to our community as a whole, especially given the recent tragedies, including the mass shooting in March 2021,” Anderson’s statement continues, referring to the King Soopers shooting, which is just one example of the very real gun violence that Boulder, and Colorado, have been threatened by and endured in recent years.

Denver’s East High School students and staff suffered a real shooting on Wednesday, February 15, 2023, and in Boulder, BPD responded to shots fired in a hotel room at the Millenium Harvest House on Monday, February 20, 2023. These very real incidents of gun violence cause real trauma which is triggered by swatting “hoaxes” like those made on February 22.

“You don’t really know who it is or if they have an agenda, but it’s terrorism. I can’t think of a better word for it,” Barber stated.

“Some students may need support after today’s event. If you or someone you know needs social-emotional help, please contact your principal or school counselor,” Anderson wrote in his official statement, in which he also provided links to helpful resources from the National Association of School Psychologists.

BVSD also has a Trauma Response Team, which is composed of school counselors, social workers, psychologists, and mental health advocates who volunteer to mobilize and provide students with support and grief and trauma counseling. The team responded to Boulder High School the day after the incident, providing counselors to meet with any staff and students impacted by the events.

“We’re lucky enough to have really qualified counselors at our schools and so when it comes to schools that were not directly impacted, but may have kids that need help, we certainly encourage them to reach out to their school administrator and that counselor directly,” Barber told The Mountain-Ear before adding that a school that is seeing a rise in impacted students can request use of the Trauma Response Team.

In reference to BVSD schools that were not impacted by the statewide swatting incident, Superintendent Anderson wrote in his official statement: “Since the threat was specific to Boulder High School, other schools were notified about the situation but were not directed to take any further action.”

Neither Nederland Middle-Senior High School (NMSHS) nor Nederland Elementary were affected by the threats made on February 22, despite Boulder, Estes Park, and Gilpin County being affected.

“There are no active threats at Nederland Middle Senior High School,” NMSHS Principal Gavan Goodrich wrote in an official statement emailed to the Nederland public on Wednesday, February 22. “We will stay indoors for the remainder of the day and the front office staff will, as always, be extra vigilant in their screening of visitors.

“We have numerous safety procedures and protocols in place and I feel very confident in those safety procedures and protocols. I will send any updates or additional information as it becomes available,” Goodrich’s statement concluded.

“We received a notice from BVSD at 8:52 a.m., and they said there was no concern for our school and they were assessing the situation and that they would keep us informed,” Goodrich said in an interview with The Mountain-Ear.

“Hypothetically speaking, if there was something mentioned more widely, or another school mentioned directly, we would additionally put a school like Nederland Middle-Senior High School or Nederland Elementary into a secure lockdown, depending on the information,” Barber said in regards to BVSD procedures for all schools in the district.

“Our counselor is available and our doors are always open for kids who have concerns to come in and talk about it,” Goodrich responded, to a question about student outreach in the aftermath of the swatting incident. Nederland Community Library also provided a mental health expert from Mental Health Partners for anyone in the community to talk to about Wednesday’s events.

“We try and get back to business as usual. If we can get them back to class then we can teach them; and when kids are learning their minds are off of any threats that could be made up or real.”

“You have to keep a level head and you have to make sure you’re following your procedures as tightly as possible so that you can minimize any threat that possibly can walk in your door,” Goodrich said.

Both Barber and Goodrich expressed confidence in the current existing protocols that BVSD has in place to utilize during such things as lockdown and reunification procedures in response to a perceived threat.

“We don’t want to have to use them, but the standard response protocols when we do depend upon them work very, very well,” Barber said. “Students have been trained and do lockdown drills twice a year. Unfortunately, in our society it’s become a reality of what you have to prepare for.” Barber explained the Locks, Lights, Out of Sight drill that students practice, which involves locking the door to their classroom, turning off the lights, and staying away and out of sight from the doorway.

“We’re constantly working to improve our efforts; when things happen in other places around the country, which unfortunately has become all too common, we look at the reports that come out of those places and we fine tune our efforts based on those things,” Barber continued.

“All of our schools have been enhanced for security; we have a layered approach that we use to try to make sure our schools are safe. We take security very seriously on a daily basis because you really don’t know what might happen,” Barber said.

“We periodically do tabletop reviews of our protocols and work through it, talk through it, and facilitate it. As a matter of fact we had one a week or two ago; we went over our reunification plan,” Goodrich explained. “And we’ll do another tabletop in a week or so, just so that we can work through all the details and have it fresh in our minds.”

“We have a really tightly secured building, we have some safety personnel here that do a great job, and we have good procedures about people being in our building. I can’t always control the outside noise going on but what I have to do is control what I have going on in this school, and that’s what I try to do,” Goodrich continued.

“I feel like we have a good plan in place and we’re cognizant that we need to be on top of it and we need to be prepared. I feel confident with the training and preparation that we’re doing and just hope we never have to use it.”

The events that took place on February 22 tested the bounds of the procedures and protocols that BVSD has in place and tested the resolve of students and educators across the entire state. Luckily both procedures and resolve were proven to be strong and acted as the perfect defense against this senseless act of terrorism.

Local students and educators realize there is not much they can do to stop swatting incidents from occurring in the future, but at least they know that there are systems in place to protect them, as well as people dedicated to the assurance of their safety.

The Nederland Community Library has been expanding its services in relation to mental health. Kaelan from Mental Health Partners visits the library in-person on the second and fourth Wednesdays of every month from 3 to 5 p.m., the first and third Wednesdays of every month from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., and the first and third Thursdays of every month from 3 to 5:30 p.m.

You can also call the Mental Health Partners warmline at 303-545-0852.