An Oakland public elementary school was evacuated Tuesday morning after a bomb threat with “racial undertones” was emailed to the principal.
Just days earlier, the school had drawn scorn from a right-wing social media account.
Anthony Chabot Elementary School, a campus with a little more than 500 students in kindergarten through fifth grades, was evacuated by Oakland police around 8:30 a.m., shortly after the department was made aware of a threat.
School had not yet started, which meant there were roughly 30 students along with faculty and staff on campus, according to Oakland police Capt. Lisa Ausmus.
“The students have been safely reunited with their parents,” Ausmus said at a news conference.
Ausmus said school employees were evacuated after the threat “to a safe area,” where they waited until they could be cleared to return to campus. The campus was cleared around noon, according to police.
There were 50 total people evacuated, according to Oakland police spokesperson Rosalia Lopez.
The Alameda County Sheriff’s K-9 bomb-sniffing team was at the school earlier in the day searching for explosives, according to Ausmus. No information on what might have been found was provided.
The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to questions.
Ausmus did not elaborate on what the email sent to the school’s principal said, only that there were “some racial undertones.” She added that the FBI was investigating as well.
Additional off-campus sites were named as targets. Ausmus said there were bomb threats aimed at “residences,” adding that the homes were not those of students or parents.
Lopez said there were three total locations targeted.
Libs of TikTok, defined by the Anti-Defamation League as “a popular anti-LGBTQ+ twitter account,” posted on Monday about the school’s “Playdate Social” held the previous Saturday.
The event was advertised as open to “Black, Brown and API families,” according to a flier. That notice drew the ire of the account’s handlers, who posted that the social was “race segregated” and was not for “the white kids.”
The account also posted a comment from an alleged “brown” parent that read, “I’m genuinely upset about what ultimately boils down to a ‘no whites allowed’ playdate. How is this productive?”
The post garnered more than 1.3 million views as of Tuesday afternoon. Libs of TikTok has a history of amplifying and framing social media posts by LGBTQ+ creators, particularly for right-wing scorn.
A Reddit post about the event entitled “Black, Brown, Asian Playdate…” created on Sunday was deleted, though a comment thread with a few hundred responses remained.
As of Tuesday, Chabot Elementary’s website was not functioning.
Oakland Mayor Sheng Tao tweeted she was “outraged that our children, educators and neighbors have been targeted by malicious threats. My office is in contact with Oakland Unified School District and Oakland Police as we seek answers. We are monitoring the situation closely.”
Andrew J. Campa
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