We have a policy here at the newspaper when it comes to bomb threats.
We don't normally cover them, especially if they turn out to be baseless and the public is not affected.
Obviously, as anyone looking at our front page today can attest, we veered from that policy yesterday.
We did so for a couple of reasons, and no, selling newspapers was not really at the top of that list.
The Chichester School District was one of many school districts up and down the East Coast that were dealing with a phone threat against the district and students.
A similar situation was taking place down in Delaware, where three schools were evacuated.
Chichester chose to evacuate all their students.
They followed their protocol in these instances.
The fact that the district chose to evacuate changed the way we looked at the story. That certainly has an effect on the public. The district notified parents, and at the same time urged them not to go to the schools to pick up their children. We started receiving notification from parents on social media wondering what was going on.
This is the world school officials and law enforcement now live in every day.
Gone are the days when bomb scare are considered harmless pranks.
The images of Sandy Hook and Columbine - seared into our national consciousness - changed all that.
The county District Attorney's Office has worked with schools in their annual Safe Schools Summit on how to react to these situations.
Chichester officials used those protocols yesterday.
To be honest, I was hoping we would hear from someone from the district talking about how angry - and no doubt frustrated - they are in dealing with these kinds of hoax threats.
We were unable to connect with Chichester officials.
Superintendent Dr. Kathy Sherman did post the following message on the district's Facebook page:
"I want to thank the entire Chichester staff, the police and fire departments, and township officials for working together to ensure the safety of our students," Sherman wrote.
The offer still stands. If Dr. Sherman wants to talk about how difficult this kind of decision is, and how this is the world school officials now live in, and the issues they wrestle with every day, we'd be all ears.
If not an interview, maybe a guest column.
I for one am not going to blame the district for anything they did yesterday.
Like I said, the time when these situations could be passed off as some kind of harmless gag are over.
Consider, for just a millisecond, what the reaction would be if a threat was received and officials did not act, only to have the worst occur.
I don't envy them - and the decisions they have to make - for a minute.
I hope they feel the same way about the decision we made as well.
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