County Sheriff’s Deputies are investigating the sources of an apparent fake bomb threat against a Nipomo area high school.
According to a news release from Sheriff’s spokesman, Tony Cipolla, at about 10:15 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 24, deputies responded to a reported bomb threat at Central Coast New Tech High School, located at 523 N Thompson Ave., in Nipomo adjacent to Nipomo High School.
“A student at the school,” Cipolla said, “received a text message containing the threat and reported it to school staff. Out of an abundance of caution, students were evacuated to nearby Nipomo High School.”
Deputies brought bomb-sniffing police dogs to the scene and the K-9s and their handlers began searching the tech school.
“An exhaustive search was conducted,” Cipolla said. “No device was located.”
Central Coast New Tech High is a free, public, college prep high school, within the Lucia Mar Unified School District, according to the school’s website. Admission is open to all students in SLO and Santa Barbara counties. The school employs a so-called “Project Based Learning” or PBL learning method.
According to pblworks.org, PBL is where “students learn by actively engaging in real-world and personally meaningful projects.”
Or put another way, “Project Based Learning is a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an authentic, engaging, and complex question, problem, or challenge.”
The incident is still under investigation as it is a crime to phone in a bomb threat — fake or real — to a facility like a school.
