South Cumberland Elementary was just one of many schools to receive what is being called an ‘automated bomb threat call’ Friday.  Several schools have been getting these calls lately causing a disruption and putting fear into students, personnel and parents.  Friday’s call came around 10am to South Cumberland which prompted local authorities to evacuate the school and move all faculty and students to Lantana Baptist Church.  Most all local media broadcast or published that there was a bomb scare at South and where the students would be taken with the additional information that parents could opt to pick up their children at the church.  Some parents have expressed concern that the media should not have released the information on where the kids were taken.  CNF published the information with intentions of informing parents that there was a bomb threat called into South School and that students were being moved to a safe location while authorities searched the school for any explosives.  We felt parents had the right to know exactly what was going on with their children during the scare and, since parents were being allowed to pick up their children if they wanted,  they needed to know where to go to get them.  There was never any risk to the students being relocated to the church nor was there any information or even a suspicion that the bomb threat would follow the students and faculty to the church after being evacuated if the location were to be made public.  Obviously local authorities were quite certain the church was a safe (and dry) location to move the students and faculty

Bomb threats were also reported in Hickman, DeKalb, Overton and Rutherford counties. In many cases, the students were moved to the school’s football field while the search for explosives took place.  In the past month alone, more than ten schools in Tennessee have received what is being called ‘low risk’ bomb scares which apparently are part of an automated calling system which calls the schools with a non-specific threat – most not even mentioning the name of the school they’re calling.  Even though these are deemed ‘low risk’, all threats are taken very seriously by authorities.  All law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, have been vigorously investigating these ‘robo-call’ threats but it’s very difficult to trace the calls when it’s so easy to mask the origin of the calls using throw-away cell phones and even the internet to make anonymous calls.