Dive Brief:

• Elementary, middle and high schools in California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin reported receiving phoned threats this Monday that appeared to be automated, including some bomb threats. 
• These robo-call threats are known as "swatting," a term for a hoax campaign executed with the goal of igniting a large-scale response from law enforcement, the Post Crescent reports.
• Experts say swatting is increasing across the U.S., with more calls than ever being recorded in the last two years.

Dive Insight:

Some schools were put into lockdown mode, such as San Diego's Clairemont and Lincoln high schools and Bakersfield's Washington Middle School, while others were evacuated while law enforcement rolled out school-wide safety sweeps. Delaware, Florida, and Iowa schools received bomb threats. 21 calls were also made to schools in the U.K.

Responding to perceived emergency situations is a serious draw on often-scarce school resources. Arkansas, Delaware, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Virginia, and Washington already have laws that deal with threats at schools, but other states do not.

In December, after a threat was made to the Los Angeles Unified School District, LAUSD decided to shutter 900 schools, affecting around 640,000 students. In New York, the same month, a threatening call about jihadists was deemed to be a hoax, and the city schools, which serve roughly a million students, remained open. Those two different responses had distinct consequences, with officials in both cities criticizing each others' responses.

Recently, the National School Safety and Security Services found a 158% increase in the number of threats schools received in 2014 as compared to 2013. Some state lawmakers want harsher penalties for school threats;  Wisconsin's Ed Brooks has proposed legislation "that would make a public death threat a medium-grade felony," while Connecticut's Tony Hwang has mentioned reintroducing a bill to "beef up the state's threatening laws, making them more serious felonies."

Others have proposed arming teachers. The number of school shootings in K-12 classrooms has reportedly tripled since 2011, and the Los Angeles Times has reported 64 school shootings occurred in 2014, while 2013 saw just 38.