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A weekly show from the folks at East Lansing Info breaking down all the news and happenings in East Lansing, Michigan.
Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of East Lansing Insider brought to you by East Lansing Info on Impact Radio. I'm East Lansing Info's deputy editor, Anna Liz Nichols, and today, I'm joined by our managing editor, Lucas Day, to give a roundup of our most recent stories. First off, over the last two weeks, East Lansing Public schools have seen two swatting calls in just three school days. These were two separate false emergency threats leading to lockdowns, heavy police response, and anxious students, parents, and staff. Lucas, you did the bulk of the reporting here.
Lucas Day:Yeah. So there were, two swatting calls in three school days. The first one came in Friday morning and ended up with the kids the high school kids, getting dismissed early for the day after the school was evacuated out to the football field. The call came in relatively early in the morning or dismissed around 10:30. Then the second call came in at the end of the day.
Lucas Day:I think it was actually right after they let the kids out, but, obviously, there were still many kids in the building on Tuesday. And, the first call was a bomb threat. The second call was reports of an armed suspect is what teachers have told us.
Anna Liz Nichols:For listeners, this would have been May 1 and May 5 because this podcast comes out on Sunday.
Lucas Day:Right. Right. So, yeah, it was the second time in three school days on Tuesday when they got the call. And, they were able to they were able to clear the second one pretty quick. Like, the the public information officer for ELPD was able to text one of our reporters relatively quickly that we think this is, like, the first call, which was a swatting call.
Lucas Day:But, you know, it doesn't make it any less scary for the kids or the teachers that, you know, lived in the same areas, the MSU school shooting, see this stuff on the news every day. And then there is another threat. Like, there's another threat earlier this semester, at the high school, that involved a FaceTime call. And so I I think that they're getting pretty worn down in the building is what it seems like. We're gonna have some reporting out on this in the future or at least that's the plan.
Lucas Day:But these swatting calls and this is what I talked with David Carter who, has done counterterrorism classes at MSU. He's the director of the intelligence program at MSU, a former police officer. He David Carter told me that these calls are getting more and more common. And so the an example would be Okemist has had a couple of these, and David talked about how scary it was for him because he had, grandkids in Okemist schools while they got him. And even though he's, you know, research swatting as much as he can, when the calls come in, they seem real, or at least you've gotta treat them like they're real because if you're wrong, like, the stakes are just so high.
Lucas Day:So you kinda gotta send every available resource to address the swatting calls, and then they try to do a threat assessment as quickly as they can. One of the things that David told me that's kind of that that's kind of interesting is that, just, I think it was last year, California man was arrested for making 375 swatting calls in less than two year period. He called them into churches churches and other religious groups, schools, universities, like you name it, just big big venues. And with these swatting calls, how they've kind of evolved over time is they started mostly being individuals targeting targeting other individuals. Right?
Lucas Day:So, typically, people who knew each other, maybe it was they thought it was a prank. Maybe they're getting back at the other person for something, but they're trying to it's called they're trying to get cops to go to their house. It gets its name swatting. I probably should've said this at the start from, special weapons and tactical teams, which is a SWAT team. Mhmm.
Lucas Day:You tried to make the threat sound serious enough, whether it be, like, a bomb threat or a hostage situation that a SWAT team shows up. And, I mean, these have been fatal. Like, David mentioned that there is a 2017 incident where a cop responding to these shot the person who had been swatted. It was a fake threat. So, like, they're they're very serious.
Lucas Day:It's a growing trend. They're getting more and more frequent. And, increasingly, what they're doing is they are targeting large entities like schools and churches. And that that David said that's the biggest difference that they've seen. I think it's interesting that these are he described the people that are placing these calls predominantly as a digital collective.
Lucas Day:He said he wouldn't quite call it a criminal enterprise. I just don't think it's that organized, but a digital collective of people who probably communicate online, and they're responsible for a lot of these calls. He said that when they pop up, they tend to come in sprees, and that was my thought on Friday when when this happened was I just looked up bomb threat. And I saw that they've come into zoos and hospitals and other schools all in the same day, and it reminded me of the Alchemist, swatting call in 2023 where there were several other schools in Michigan, that got the same call on the same day. And where it gets a little bit tricky is David said that there's been a tremendous amount of resources poured into trying to figure out more about these calls.
Lucas Day:You know? Why do you like, how do you pick your targets? And they're they're really not sure. He said that it would be helpful to know that because it would help with threat assessments. Mhmm.
Lucas Day:It would help them, you know, dictate whether threats are real or not. What he said is why did these calls come into East Lansing High School and, you know, say, Williamston? And, I don't think there's a clear answer to that. The calls that we saw on Friday and Tuesday and, you know, there's some individuals do do these calls sometimes, so there's always a chance that East Lansing was separate from the rest of the calls all over the country. But he told me that it's much more common that it's done by this collective.
Lucas Day:And so why are you calling in threats to places in Michigan and Kentucky and Pennsylvania, you know, among the other places these calls came into? And I just don't think there's a good answer to that right now.
Anna Liz Nichols:You know, there's a lot of negatives. The the the zapping of resources so much that happens with these swatting calls. But what is concerning and has been concerning for years now to, I 'd say, criminal justice experts and and and law enforcement officials, including our attorney general, Dana Nessel, who issued a warning about these calls following the, the initial swatting incident, is that once there's one call, so often there's copycat calls. I'm thinking back to 2021 when the Oxford High School shooting tragedy happened, and that was in, you know, late November. By the time it was close to Christmas break for schools, there were so many and this is a little different than the concept of swatting.
Anna Liz Nichols:It's it's about the copycat calls. Mhmm. There were so many calls at schools across Michigan, definitely more pointed at the Metro Detroit surrounding Oxford, but, like, all over Michigan where schools were on the daily getting so many threats. And, like, you have to you have to respond to these. Like, you have to determine how credible they are.
Anna Liz Nichols:It's it's a nightmare for administration and for parents and families to to to navigate. But there were so many calls come December. There were some school districts that simply, like, concluded school early for Christmas break, which is monumental in Michigan because we given, you know, snow days and we have to make those up, we're kind of protective of of just closing down school early. And just it's once it starts, there's so much concern that it just keeps happening. It's one of those things that can really gain volume and and bleed into other districts.
Anna Liz Nichols:So you even mentioned, like, why not Williamston? I'm like, by the time this podcast goes out, and I hate to articulate this, there might be a copycat call.
Lucas Day:Yeah. And one of the things that David said is sometimes when you see the calls from individuals, it could be something as simple as a kid doesn't wanna take a test. Yeah. And, you know, I'm not saying that's what happened in East Lansing. It sounds like it's it's unlikely that's what happened in East Lansing.
Lucas Day:But, you know, in these school districts, these that are these big they're this big. We are talking about kids. You just need one kid to make a, you know, dumb choice. You know, they see they get let out of school when this call comes in on Friday. They think, hey.
Lucas Day:Maybe they'll let me out of school again. The difference there may be that the collectives use, like, VPNs to throw off their location, so you can't tell where they're calling from. It's very hard to find the people who do these calls. I don't know if a kid well, the kids are pretty tech savvy now. Maybe they know how to do that too.
Lucas Day:Yeah. I mean, it's it's something that you've gotta you definitely gotta be in watch about, especially because we've seen the repeats at different districts. Like I mentioned, Okemos got 01/22 '23. Got another 01/2020 I don't know if it would be, you know, a local copycat or if the digital collective that David described likes to, you know, kinda terrorize the same districts. But, twice in three school days is just so alarming, especially when you've seen so many districts that this has been a repeat problem for.
Anna Liz Nichols:Yeah. And, yeah, we we don't know yet if it's the the the kind of outside forces versus potentially a student. But that was one thing that Nestle alluded to in this warning and has articulated in the past as well as other county prosecutors that, you know, in the instances that it's students who just, I don't know, maybe don't wanna take a test, maybe they're getting bullied, who knows why they don't wanna come to school, that because they're young, there might be, you know, not a lot of forethought in the full consequences of of what happens when you do this. Several county prosecutors have issued warnings just saying, like, this can really it's a crime. A false report is is at least a misdemeanor.
Anna Liz Nichols:If it results in a physical injury, it can be felony. It can carry periods of incarceration. It's a serious offense that, you know, law enforcement and criminal justice officials are concerned that students don't take in account or that they don't know, that it's not a a victimless crime. This has real cost to to local municipalities. It's can be traumatic for students and families.
Anna Liz Nichols:It's it's a problem in Michigan.
Lucas Day:Yeah. And I did see that the attorney general in that statement where she mentioned the high school swatting threat, she did call on lawmakers to pass harsher penalties for these crimes. So, I mean, she clearly, she's acknowledging that it's a problem in the state. It's a problem nationwide. I saw one of the Kentucky sheriffs said that it was that their incident on the same day as East Lansing's on Friday I called it part of a nationwide hoax, Friday, May 1, I guess.
Anna Liz Nichols:Mhmm.
Lucas Day:So, yeah, I I I guess you just have to hope you don't get another one because, as I mentioned, it's it's so hard to find the people that are doing these. There's not just not a ton of arrest for it.
Anna Liz Nichols:Yeah. And another story coming out of last week was the special election on May 5 concerning special education. Voters in East Lansing and across Ingham County by, I wanna say, 55% of voters, voted to approve, a nearly 100,000,000 bond for Ingham ISD to rebuild its special education one of its special education buildings and to renovate the other. So it's the Beakman Center over in Lansing and then the Hartwood School over in Mason. The Beakman Center was built sixty some years ago prior to federal requirements for ADA compliance, Americans with Disabilities Act, and for the federal mandate for special education.
Anna Liz Nichols:So though at the time, how it's been explained to me by Ingham ISD superintendent Jason Melima that though the Beakman Center, particularly, that's the one that needs to be completely dismantled and rebuilt, whereas the Hartman Center only requires renovations. The Beakman Center, at the time it was built, was the first of its kind. It had it mixed different therapies, medical, professionals along with physical therapists to help with special education. So all services for students requiring special education lived under one umbrella. But now their ceiling tiles are are falling apart.
Anna Liz Nichols:Like I said, pry it was built prior to the federal rules, about disability and infrastructure. A lot of the hallways are pretty narrow, specifically the door frame. Some of the bathrooms aren't the best for students with mobility aids to navigate nor the classrooms. There's not great spaces. I I did a walk through.
Anna Liz Nichols:There's narrow hallways where large mobility aids, whether that be, wheelchairs or or or walking aids, have to be in, you know, kind of, man made corrals that aren't in in indicative of of ease of access for students or or faculty. According to the superintendent, they're going to start construction on the Beakman Center come 2027, and then it'll take around two years to to finish construction. The main priority, again, being the Beakman Center. And then he said, following the Beakman Center's completion, the renovations would be made to the Hartwood School.
Lucas Day:Yeah. And I think one of the things that came out of this that I was interested in is, so we just saw a parks millage fell about six months ago, and it wasn't really all that close. It was about 40 to 6060% voted against it. And this was after millages and tax increases were, like, rubber stamped in East Lansing. I know that the income tax failed once before it was eventually passed, but that that was, you know, a more significant thing.
Lucas Day:Tax is a little bit harder, I think, to get people to swallow than a millage. And so I was wondering if, like, East Lansing voters would bounce back and they'd go back to supporting millages again after they just postponed six months ago, and they did. You know, you said that you this passed with about, 5455% of the vote. But if you narrow it down to just the East Lansing precincts, about 70% of East Lansing voted in favor of the millage. So I I I that that was the major takeaway that I took about is that there is still an appetite for millages in the city even, with cost of living concerns, even with, property taxes being high.
Lucas Day:There was still a pretty pretty big appetite for residents to vote for this in East Lansing.
Anna Liz Nichols:Yeah. What was the anecdote you had about millages? When was the last time a millage failed in East Lansing? Was that something that you knew?
Lucas Day:I couldn't find it. Well, I tried to look it up too. I went through the voting records. Like, I like the the ones that I went back quite a while. I could I could not find it.
Anna Liz Nichols:Well, you've been reporting on East Lansing for a while. Do you have any recollection of millages failing in in
Lucas Day:Oh, no. It's not even it's usually not even close. I think when I analyzed it for the student voting story, I went back, like, ten years, and they usually passed, like, with around what this one did, like, around, like, 70%. Like, they usually pass pretty easily.
Anna Liz Nichols:Yeah. I will say in terms of popularity for this millage, just by my own social media sweep, like, nothing ironclad data, there was a lot of dialogue and and families and past employees, current employees at Ingham ISD really singing the praises and being willing to talk about the stories coming out of particularly the Beekman Center about how the resources and opportunities that students get there are life changing, not only for the students, but for, the parents where just for my walk through, some of the things the kids are learning in in addition to, you know, curricula, like math, world studies, that kind of stuff, they're learning tools of independence. Like, they're doing cooking. There is a, a practice apartment within the Beakman Center where students can the kitchen for for cooking class is is within there, but there's also, like, an apartment where students learn things like how to make the bed, how to, keep a living room clean, like that kind of stuff. It's like teaching independence, which is monumental for for families.
Anna Liz Nichols:In addition to all the positive reviews and encouragement from, you know, people in the sphere of of of special education in Ingham County, there were residents that were, you know, concerned that this would really impact their their property taxes because it does levy a 55¢, property tax for every thousand dollars of taxable value.
Lucas Day:Yeah. I think the schools did a good job communicating this with people. They held several meetings around. The thing that jumped out to me, it was, my parents are special education teachers in a small public school district in Northern Michigan, and I can remember, and this student is probably different than the Beekman students, but, my mom used to go in to a a student's home because she couldn't go into public schools because she had autoimmune issues. My mom used to teach her, you know, two or three days a week.
Lucas Day:And I even though this this situation is different, she had to be away from kids because it was you know, it could have been hazardous to her health. Wonder how many of these kids that are at Beekeman would be able to, come to school every day and if they were in regular special education programs. Usually, these kids are pretty high need. So you got specialized teachers there. They're going to make the the new buildings ADA compliant, obviously, so they're able to get around with their mobility aids.
Lucas Day:And so even though these schools don't necessarily have a ton of kids in them, I I I just wonder how many of these kids wouldn't be able to operate day to day in regular public schools through regular, special education programs.
Anna Liz Nichols:So in addition to the election on May 5, East Lansing Info has had the opportunity to cover a variety of topics since start the of this month, including a new, director being selected for the East Lansing public library, a story on the concerns of parents with, Chromebook usage in the public schools. And then in the coming days, East Lansing is going to have to formulate its its city budget. Where are we with that that process, Lucas?
Lucas Day:So the public hearing for the budget's gonna be on, Tuesday, May 12. So if you got something to say about the budget, go in and say it. It's probably your last good chance to, you know, if you think that you got something the city council's gonna listen to, it's probably your chance to do that. They're gonna adopt the budget on May 26, but they like to make changes, you know, ahead of time, so they know what they're adopting. They can, of course, make a budget adjustments throughout the year, but, yeah, the public hearing is gonna be on Tuesday.
Lucas Day:And since the last time we talked about this on the podcast, there's been some major changes to the budget. East Lansing has pretty much a balanced budget going into next year. It looks like they're gonna make a few changes, and I'm assuming that it's gonna be a few $100,000 use of fund balance, use of reserve funds going into next year, which is a lot better than we expected. The mayor had predicted a four or four and a half million dollar deficit the city was running at just a few months ago. The changes that they made are really fascinating because part of it, it isn't cutting anything.
Lucas Day:It isn't raising fees even though they did both of those things. A big chunk of the money that changed is just how they budget. So $643,000 got slashed off right away just because they're gonna start budgeting for vacancies. I know they've saved about a million dollars, in some past fiscal years just because they haven't been able to fill those positions. But what they've been doing is they've been budgeting as though every position's filled for the entire year, and that's obviously just not gonna happen.
Lucas Day:And so this what what the entire idea of this was would is to give us a better look at what the budget actually is and how they did these and how and how they budgeted this year. And it cut what was expected to be a pretty big they've called it a significant operating deficit, and it's down to almost nothing. Now part of that is fee increases. City manager wants to raise about $400,000 to cover some, costs in the parks and recreation department. The two major ones were cost that had to do with the before and after school childcare program and then some parking parking lot, repairs to the aquatic center, I believe it was.
Lucas Day:And it's about $400,000. And, the parks director, Justin Drwencke, said, well, can we not just lobby it on these two programs? You know, a lot of people need our childcare program, especially the aquatic center, something that we want to be accessible to kids. So let's not just, absorb the entire burden, I guess, into these two programs. Can I spread it out across all of my programs or however you see us fit?
Lucas Day:And we'll cover the $400,000. And the city manager gave him the go ahead to do that, and I think we're gonna see what that new fee schedule looks like on Tuesday.