(WHTM) -- A 14-year-old boy is facing charges after police say he posted an online threat aimed at the Waynesboro Area School District. Waynesboro schools shut down June 1 because of that threat, and the incident is putting some Midstate educators on edge.
The threat came just a week after the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were killed.
"It weighs on us as teachers," Red Lion high school math teacher Rachael Curry said.
Already on edge, Curry said the social media threat aimed at the Waynesboro area school district is not helping.
"Waynesboro is awfully close to home, it's in our area," she said.
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Curry was not teaching in the Red Lion Area School district in 2003, when a teenager opened fire in the junior high cafeteria, killing a principal before turning the gun on himself. However, many of her colleagues remember.
"It just brings a lot of that up again," she said.
Over her 23-year career, Curry has seen the threat of active shooters grow.
"When I started teaching, we weren't doing drills for these kinds of things, we were doing fire drills and sometimes a tornado drill," she said.
She has also watched as threats and conversations about planned violence have moved online
"They're not passing a physical note anymore that can be intercepted," she said. "It makes it a lot harder to track"
On June 2, Waynesboro police identified the 14-year-old boy as the person who created a fake account and posted the threat against the district. Curry said when people are that young, it can be easy for teachers to blame themselves.
"You think to yourself, what did we miss, how could we have missed that?" she said.
Chris Lilienthal, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA), a major teacher's union in the state, said the threat of active shooter situations impacts teachers' mental health, as well as their students'.
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"To have on top of this the added stress of worrying about school safety and worrying about risk or potential of a shooting in the school, that does take a tremendous mental health toll," he said.
Lilienthal said PSEA is trying to address school safety by pushing for more mental health funding.
"That means advocating for a school budget at the state level that will ensure that we can invest in hiring school counselors, school nurses, school psychologists," he said.
For Curry, mental health is a big part of the solution, and she said it is everyone's responsibility. She said COVID has made things difficult, but she hopes more adults can engage with young people about mental health.
"We need to work on being more of a community and actually paying attention to the mental health," she said.
Curry also said this conversation is on everyone's minds because of the massacre in Texas, but she is worried the attention will fade as kids head home for summer break. She said she wants to continue talking about this when students return in the fall.
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