For those of you who missed it, here is the reported text of the letter found at a Hudson country club on Monday night, Labor Day Weekend.
''It is time for taking a stand and stopping the takeover,'' the note reads. ''It will stop. It won't happen. 09/08/09 will be the day it ends. Too late to stop the chaos.
''Before or after 10 a.m.? It is known. Hudson will know?
School is dangerous. Bloody. You will know. Hungry children. Boom. Bye.''
I submit to you that any business that learned of a potential threat such as this one would have notified its employees immediately. I think the same is true for most organizations. Suppose somebody threatened the police force, or the post office, or city government, or a small business in town. In any of these cases, I can't imagine that the employees of these organizations would not have been notified immediately.
In fact, I would imagine most businesses would warn their customers of potential threats, too " much the way responsible food companies pull products from the shelves at the first hint of the possibility that there might be something dangerous about their product.
But what did our Hudson School System do when they encountered the above threat? Well, at first they informed nobody and let our children come to school on Tuesday morning as if nothing had happened.
I personally received a automated message from the school superintendent on Tuesday morning " well after I sent my three children to school. The message was vague when it should have been specific. And it was tardy.
My opinion is that parents should have been given an opportunity to decide whether they wanted their children to go to school that day " or not " before school started. Not after. And certainly nowhere near 10:00, based upon the text of the above letter.
In fact, I think the decision to wait to inform parents is inexcusable. If it happened in my business, then the person who failed to put safety ahead of everything else would be " at best " seriously reprimanded. At worst " relieved of his or her responsibility.
I explained to my 9-year-old son that the people who run his school let him get on the bus Tuesday morning even though they knew about the above letter. When I asked him how he felt about that, he felt like they made the wrong decision. And he added that he feels like he can't trust those people to make decisions about his safety in the future.
That's how I feel, too.
If I knew of a threat to a child or a loved-one of anyone in the school district, I certainly would warn them about it immediately. I wouldn't let them ride a bus straight into the threat without sharing everything I knew in a very specific manner.
I'm surprised and disappointed that the folks who make these decisions did not extend the same courtesy to me.
Sincerely,
George Carson
Hudson, OH