Franklin High School was placed on lockdown Monday morning after police said a bomb threat was called into the school, one of at least three Tennessee schools hit by threats that triggered emergency responses before the school day was fully underway.
The Franklin Police Department said Page High School was also threatened Monday morning and placed on lockdown while investigators worked the calls. Officials said three schools in Rutherford County and one school in west Tennessee were among those affected, underscoring how widely the threats spread across the state in a matter of hours.
The Tennessee Department of Safety said it was responding to reports of potential threats at schools across Tennessee and that the calls were believed at that point to be hoaxes. Still, the department said every report was being taken seriously and fully investigated to protect students and staff.
The day’s threat calls fit a pattern that has left school leaders and police treating each report as real until it is checked out. In Franklin, that meant two schools were locked down while investigators assessed the danger, even as state officials said the wider wave of calls was not believed to be credible.
For Franklin families, the answer to the most immediate question is simple: the threat prompted a real lockdown, but officials said the calls were believed to be hoaxes while the investigations continued. The larger test now is whether authorities can determine who made the calls and stop the false alarms before they ripple through more Tennessee schools.
