New records show disarray in Bend police, school district response to Bend High threat

Published 9:15 am Wednesday, April 5, 2023

The caller told nonemergency dispatch he was in the Bend High School parking lot with an assault rifle and bombs and was going to kill people inside. Within three minutes, dozens of police officers responded, racing into the school with rifles, ready to search for a potentially armed threat, police reports show.

But Bend High was placed in what the district calls a “secure status,” a lower-level safeguard, for more than hour on Feb. 9. Students were confused. If they were in secure status — not lockdown — then why were they being told to stay in place, with armed officers roaming the hallways?

The threat could have prompted authorities to place the school into lockdown, the highest level safeguard against a potential threat. But at that hour, district officials didn’t know the exact details of the call and wouldn’t until the following morning, Superintendent Steve Cook acknowledged Monday.

“Everyone seemed confused,” said Liam Schmitt, 18, a senior at Bend High. “Everyone thought it was a lockdown, but a weird version of a lockdown … No one knew what was going on and was freaking out.”

As the Bend community reels from the shooting at Safeway in August and repeated school shootings nationwide, the response to the Bend High threat — which was unfounded — by the two agencies has raised concerns among some students around how prepared authorities are to respond to a legitimate emergency at an area school.

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A secure status is declared when a threat is perceived to be outside of a school, said Scott Maben, communications director at Bend-La Pine Schools. Regular learning continues. Exterior doors are locked. Students and staff are allowed to be in different parts of the building. No one is allowed to enter or leave, according to district policy.

A lockdown occurs when a threat is perceived to be inside a school. Students and staff are instructed to lock the doors, stay hidden and out of sight, said Maben. Teaching stops.

Bend Police spokeswoman Sheila Miller said a school resource officer immediately communicated with school personnel that they should go into secure status. Officers were then escorted around campus by school officials. She said officers entered the school believing that someone might be inside with a gun, a situation that she acknowledged could seem more like lockdown.

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Although there may have been confusion, Miller believed the level of communication and the police response was appropriate to the level of the threat.

“Our officers treated the incident with the seriousness that we think it deserved,” Miller said, adding that police did “exactly what we trained them to do.”

Emails obtained by The Bulletin through a public records request show that in the hours after the threat, there was still disagreement between the school district and police, but not about the seriousness of the threat — this time it was over how to communicate to the public what had happened.

More than two hours after police responded to the school, Miller sent a press release to officials for fact checking before sending it out to the public. In response, Bend-La Pine Schools Director of Safety Julianne Repman recommended removing information that the caller had stated he had weapons, was in the parking lot and was going to enter the school, emails show.

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She also recommended removing from the public release any details about the speed of the police response, as well as the number of law enforcement personnel and agencies involved, striking through blocks of texts.

Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz and Miller disregarded her suggestions.

“I can’t remove what you’ve crossed out,” Miller said in an email at 3:58 p.m. that day. “We have to explain what the threat is and why we responded in the way we did. We also need to share how many officers responded and how quickly we did.”

Repman responded with her concerns in an email at 4:14 p.m.

“I feel that the content you are sharing about the direct threat has the potential to inform and encourage copycats,” Repman said. “That is why I believe it should not be released in that level of detail.”

Krantz said in an email to Miller and school district officials shortly thereafter that the department had gone forward with releasing the information, which he said was “all relevant to share and is in the overall public interest, and parents interest.”

He said to officials in the email thread — Cook, two Bend-La Pine Schools spokespersons, Repman and Miller — that the department needed to be transparent around the large police response and the concern it raised among the community.

“This is available information all over the internet,” Krantz said, adding that it wasn’t “reasonable” to believe that the information the department released could “cause copy cat type issues.”

“This is not something new to our world,” he said. “Unfortunately.”

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Cook told The Bulletin Monday that on Feb. 9, the district didn’t know the full details of the call.

“That is why the details in the draft news release appeared to us to overstate the alleged threat and the fact our schools had been placed in Secure and not a Lockdown by law enforcement,” Cook said in an email. “We also expressed concern that releasing certain details could encourage copycat behavior.”

On Tuesday, Repman further explained why she wanted to remove this information from public release at that time: “I thought that information was erroneous at the time because we did not have details of the threat until the next day.”

“The police department had information that we didn’t quite have yet, and I think the information that was shared was appropriate from the police department,” she said.

Cook told The Bulletin on Monday that, since the incident, district officials have “had a series of productive conversations with police leadership about how we continue to improve coordination of safety responses and communications.”

Repman said the district is assessing its response through interviews and plans to finalize an “after-action report” of the Feb. 9 incident as soon as this month.

Schmitt, the Bend High senior, said he wishes the school had been placed on lockdown from the beginning “because it would have helped students who felt unsafe feel a little bit safer.”

“I feel like they didn’t communicate very well with students, and it just confused everyone and made everyone a little worried,” Schmitt said.

Tobin Jansen, a 17-year-old senior at Bend High, said he understands that it can be difficult to communicate during an emergency situation. He believes authorities did the best they could given the circumstances.

“They can’t give out too much information or else people go into a full-out panic,” Jansen said. “And if they give out too little information, they go into a full-out panic.”