The Saranac Lake and Tupper Lake school districts, and both village police departments, investigated threats of school violence made by students this week. In neither case were the threats credible or were the schools in danger, police and school administrators said.

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TLCSD student charged with felony

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On Wednesday, the Tupper Lake Police Department charged an 11-year-old student at the Tupper Lake Middle-High School with making a terroristic threat, a felony.

Tupper Lake Central School District Superintendent Russ Bartlett said the response was “very fast.”

A press release from TLPD said an investigation it conducted with New York State Police and TLCSD led to “quick apprehension of the suspect.”

“We were able to determine, almost immediately, that the threat was not legitimate,” Bartlett said. “There was never a time at which we felt that there was a concern for anybody’s safety.”

The student was released to the custody of the Franklin County Probation Department and issued an appearance ticket, according to the TLPD. Bartlett said he can’t say much more, because the student has not been before a judge yet.

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SLCSD student arrested

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On Friday, at a Saranac Lake High School assembly on school security, Saranac Lake Police Department Chief Darin Perrotte said a student allegedly made a hand gesture — something to the effect of making a gun shape with their hands. Students who saw the gesture reported it to school staff, who notified the SLPD.

“There was no threat to the safety of the students,” Perrotte said. “There was no credible threat.”

Perrotte said the student was brought to Adirondack Medical Center for a mental health evaluation. They were arrested under the mental hygiene law, but had not been charged with a crime as of Friday night. Perrotte said they may be charged with a crime at a later date.

Perrotte said the incident is still under investigation.

Saranac Lake Central School District Superintendent Diane Fox said an emergency alert call went out to families and school staff via phone.

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Responding to threats

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The Tupper Lake Middle-High School has a school resource officer from the TLPD stationed inside the building at school hours and the officer was in touch with school officials immediately, Bartlett said.

He said the incident was taken seriously and was handled “very quickly,” so the school did not notify families of the incident.

“I understand people in the community being concerned that they hadn’t heard anything,” Bartlett said. “It was a situation that was over and solved within a matter of a very short period of time.”

He said after speaking with police, they decided, due to the recent mass shootings at a supermarket in Buffalo and a school in Uvalde, Texas, they did not want to hit a “raw nerve” with a threat they knew was over.

“We felt that this was over and done with and closed, and there was no imminent threat or safety concerns,” he said. “We felt that, rather than putting everybody on heightened alert that there was a thing that had already been solved, that we would just wait.”

Bartlett said “everybody’s on edge” and warned that making a threat of violence is a serious thing to do, pointing out that the 11-year-old was being charged with a felony.

“It’s very abnormal to see a kid of that age being charged with a crime that serious, but I think that’s where we are, that you have to take everything so seriously,” Bartlett said. “I think the thing that’s disturbing is that we live in a time where that’s a thing.”

Perrotte said in cases like these, the SLPD investigates if people in the students’ life own guns and if they would have access to firearms or other weapons. He was spending Friday afternoon interviewing the student’s family to assess if the student is safe and the school is safe. He also said police were making sure the student gets the resources they need.

“When you have mental health or other things involved, we have to make sure the student, the family are getting the resources they need so that they’re not sort of getting left behind,” Perrotte said.

Bartlett said he’s worried for kids in his schools and around the U.S. He wondered how gun violence is impacting young people’s psyches.

“I’m a little afraid kids are kind of numb to it,” he said. “They’ve grown up in a whole world where that’s just a thing that happens on the news all the time, and I don’t know how seriously they take it.”