Dickerson MS student facing ‘criminal’ charges for threats

Dickerson MS

The Cobb County School District said Wednesday that a Dickerson Middle School student is facing criminal charges for “making threatening statements.”

A “Dickerson safety message” that was sent to the school community didn’t specify what those statements were, but said that the student is “not a threat to the school.”

The message said that the Cobb school district’s police department and administrators investigated the statements of the Dickerson student in the wake of last week’s fatal school shooting in Winder.

The Cobb school district said in response to a request for comment and further information from East Cobb News that the Dickerson administration learned of the threat “from one student to another.”

But “the details of those charges and the serious, disciplinary consequences are not publicly available,” according to a district spokeswoman, due to state and federal student privacy laws.

She said in a statement to East Cobb News that the district has received more than 50 reported threats in the last six days—since the deaths of two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Winder.

But all of them have “not been proven to be actual threats to a Cobb school,” the district said.

“All applicable policy, and the law, have been strongly enforced and we can confirm there is no active threat to Dickerson’s students or staff,” the spokeswoman said.

She also included a link to the district’s “A Parent’s Guide to School Safety.”

The message sent to Dickerson families urged them to help “by talking to your children” about the district’s Cobb Shield safety resource page and the district’s tipline to report incidents.

School districts around metro Atlanta and north Georgia have been pressing charges in similar incidents since the Apalachee incident. A 14-year-old student, Colt Gray, has been charged with four counts of murder, accused to taking an assault rifle to the Winder campus.

His father has been charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter and child cruelty after Barrow County authorities said he bought an AR-15 rifle.

According to a family member, the boy’s mother called the school to warn a counselor less than an hour before the shooting about her son’s mental health issues, according to published reports.

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