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"A day after a lockdown in the Shawnee Mission School District, the district's new superintendent said he's working to improve ways of communicating.Jim Hinson said the district made the decision to lock down all of the district's schools after a caller warned Overland Park police about a possible threat.Police said a woman called to tell them she was worried that her son might have a gun and might be heading to a Johnson County school. Police said they weren't sure which school, but they suspected it might be Shawnee Mission West High School, just across the street from the police station.Police said the woman later called back to say that her son had come home. Investigators made additional attempts to reach the woman, but a recorded message said the line was disconnected.The call came in at 7:30 a.m., but Hinson said his office didn't learn about the threat until 11 a.m. He said it was more than 90 minutes later when he learned that Shawnee Mission schools could be the target.\"My decision was, yes, we're going to lock down every school because we simply don't know,\" he said.Police determined later in the day that the woman's threat did not seem credible. But the district still opted to move after-school activities inside.\"If we're going to err, we're going to err on the side of student safety,\" Hinson said.A text alert to parents went out at 3:32 p.m., when most students in the district had been dismissed for the day.\"We have to figure out how we can we communicate with everyone in the district within a very short period of time, because yesterday, it took hours,\" Hinson said. \"That has to change.\"Many parents received emails about the lockdown hours later because, Hinson said, sending 27,000 emails at once jammed the school's system. He said he's already looking at programs to better get word out to everyone.Police said that the threat was vague and directed to a Johnson County school, so they also notified the Blue Valley and Olathe school districts. Both districts said they learned about the threat between 9:30 a.m. and 10 a.m.Experts said the call may have been a case of \"swatting,\" the practice of calling 911 about a fake crime in order to generate a police response. People have been making these calls using apps that disguise phone numbers.\"I've heard about it but I've never tried to do it,\" said high school senior Connor Klinder. \"Because it was never something I was going to take seriously -- to use other technology to try and get away with it.\"\u00A0Many young people do use this type of technology to play jokes on their friends.\"We live in a day and time when we have to take everything seriously, and so if people have the ability to make false accusations or threats, that's really inappropriate and I think we have to have ways to prevent that from happening,\" said Hinson.Police increased patrols around Shawnee Mission schools on Tuesday as a precaution."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.kmbc.com/article/superintendent-blames-poor-communication-in-lockdown-alert-delay/3678158>