Threats by boy, 13, start a probe

A pair of Secret Service agents, called in by school police, interrogated a seventh-grader at his Rhode Island middle school this week, just hours after the boy wrote a half-page essay threatening to hurt President Bush and kill Oprah Winfrey.

The superintendent of West Warwick public schools, however, has decided not to suspend the boy for his threatening essay. The boy just made a bad choice, said Superintendent David Raiche, who hopes to decide today when and if the boy can return to John F. Deering Middle School.

The boy, whom school officials would not name, is receiving counseling and will stay home until he undergoes a mental health evaluation, Raiche said.

''I'm looking at a young man right now who made a bad choice in terms of expressing anger and frustration about things," he said. ''This isn't something more than that. It sounded to me like somebody who had been reading too many articles about corporate America and elected officials."

The school system's response to the essay sparked criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union, which said that officials went overboard.

But leaders of education groups and parent-teacher organizations said they were not disturbed or surprised. They said the school system's decision to notify police, the same policy that Boston public schools follow, was not unusual in the post-Columbine age. School administrators have been forced to take all threats seriously to prevent violence in schools, they said.

A national spokesman for the Secret Service concurred, saying such responses by the agency to juvenile threats are not uncommon, though he did not have statistics on other incidents.

The Secret Service is continuing its investigation of the boy's threat against the president, which it considers a felony, and expects to wrap up its investigation next week, said Thomas Powers, the resident agent in charge of the Providence office.

Powers said it was the first time in the three years he has worked in Rhode Island that his office had sent agents to a school to deal with such a threat.

''Our posture is whether it was a 13-year-old kid or a 33-year-old man, we would respond and conduct our investigation in the same format," Powers said. ''We cover all our bases, because you never know."

The boy, school officials said, had written an assigned class essay saying that his idea of a perfect day was to hurt President Bush, kill the popular talk show host, and harm executives of Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart. He did not threaten teachers or students, and the Secret Service came to the school because police were following their protocol in the case of a threat, Raiche said. After the boy submitted his English assignment on Tuesday, the boy's teacher alerted school administrators, who contacted police.

West Warwick School Committee members said the school system adopted a policy on how to handle student threats after the Columbine High School shootings in Colorado in 1999, which resulted in 15 deaths.

School board members praised administrators for following the guidelines. ''You can't overreact to something like that," said Daniel Burns, chairman of the School Committee.

Local police have finished their investigation and called the essay ''an act of stupidity," he said.

Steven Brown, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Rhode Island, said the Secret Service interrogation does more harm to the boy than good.

''I'd be shocked if anybody suggested that this essay created a real threat to the president," he said. ''It's all this post-Columbine knee-jerk reaction that just throws common sense out the window."

Others, though, said they preferred to err on the side of caution.

''A lot of kids write weird essays," said Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees. ''This guy could be a young Kafka or Stephen King. On the other hand, if the next thing he's going to do is shoot one of his classmates at recess, this is the best time to diagnose that kind of situation."

Tracy Jan can be reached at tjan@globe.com.