The calls arrived all the same: a garbled, AI-generated voice, speaking from the same script, warning seven Vermont schools of a bomb threat.
In Burlington, Newport, Winooski and Montpelier, school buildings were cleared, classes were evacuated, and students were sent home for the day. But Wednesday’s threats were unfounded, according to law enforcement officials.
The false reports, called “swatting” incidents, usually involve a false bomb or shooting threat that draws a large emergency response. And data, as well as anecdotal news reports, suggest that swatting incidents have become more commonplace across the country’s K-12 schools and colleges and universities. Local officials seem to agree.
Jennifer Morrison, the commissioner of the Vermont Department of Public Safety, said during a press conference Wednesday that these types of hoaxes are “unfortunately very, very common these days,” particularly around the end of the school year, she said.
Wednesday’s incidents were not the first of these false threats made against Vermont school districts. In 2023, 20 school districts were sent into lockdown after a set of simultaneous hoax calls were made to schools.
“It’s a really low level type of domestic terrorism,” Morrison said, meant to “create fear in communities.”
In Burlington, Wednesday’s fake bomb threat forced the evacuation of students in Edmunds Elementary School.
“We quickly evacuated all students, and the police are currently on the scene investigating the threat,” reads an email sent Wednesday to parents and staff by district Superintendent Tom Flanagan.
Similar bulletins were sent in Winooski and Montpelier. At the Newport City Elementary School, students in grades K-6 were evacuated. North Country Supervisory Union Superintendent Elaine Collins, and Aaron Larsen, the school’s principal, were on scene coordinating with local law enforcement officials.
Newport City Elementary School students were relocated to East Main Street Church and were sent home early for the day, Collins said.
In each case, police conducted a sweep of the buildings and deemed them safe. Adam Silverman, a spokesperson for the Vermont State Police, said that the incidents remain under investigation, and police are working in coordination with the FBI, as well as local police.
It marked a disturbing bookend for the North Country Supervisory Union’s 2025-26 school year, which started off with a more credible bomb threat and is now ending on a similar note.
“It’s all hands on deck when something like this happens,” Collins said. “It is an intensive and super disruptive event.”
David Riedman, creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and co-founder of the Homeland Security Advanced Thinking Program, began tracking incidents across the country in 2023, after serial swatters called in threats to multiple schools across the country, including in Vermont.
His research, part of the K-12 School Shooting Database, found there were 728 swatting incidents nationwide throughout the 2023-24 school year.
The number of swatting incidents nationally leveled off following the arrest of several serial swatters, Riedman wrote in a blog post last year.
He’s since stopped tracking the incidents. There are “still a few swatting calls per week,” he wrote, “but the current situation is nothing like it was in February and March of 2023.”
Still, there’s plenty of disruption when the incidents do occur, be it missed class time, missed work for parents of students caught in these hoaxes, even physical damage to school buildings because of the police response.
Riedman wrote that there’s no single reason why these calls happen. They could be students playing pranks or foreign operatives trying to cause disruptions in the U.S. And because these calls are often so hard to trace, it’s unlikely there’s a way to prevent the incidents from happening, he wrote.
“The lack of a uniform purpose and method is exactly what makes these swatting calls so hard to stop,” he wrote.
Morrison, during the press conference Wednesday, said it was “incredibly likely” that the calls were connected to a single person or party, but she said she couldn’t say definitively, citing the pending investigation.
“The sad reality is that many of these cases are done in bulk and volume, automated processes that are very easy to mask, and frequently, when you think you’ve found an IP address where maybe it came from, it’s in another country,” she told reporters.
“It’s, candidly, an obnoxious waste of resources,” she said.
Collins said the incidents are traumatizing for everyone involved, from the children to the staff and administrators coordinating a response.
“This is not the business of schools, but it feels like it’s become the business of schools,” she said, “and that’s kind of sad and frightening all at the same time.”
