Federal Swatting Guidance Says Treat Every Threat as Credible. Counselors Are the Ones Who Handle the Day After.

The call is fake. The lockdown is not.

That gap is the whole problem with swatting. Someone reports a violent crime that never happened, police arrive ready for the worst, and a building full of kids and adults spends an hour in the dark behind a locked door not knowing which kind of day it is. By the time the all-clear comes, the threat has been disproven. The fear has not.

On September 25, the U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Justice issued joint guidance telling schools and colleges how to prepare for exactly this. It is a preparation document. If you work in a school, the part that lands on your desk is the part it does not dwell on.

What the guidance asks schools to do

According to K-12 Dive, the guidance calls for staff training to spot false threats early, clear partnerships between on-campus security and outside law enforcement, multidisciplinary threat assessment teams, emergency response exercises, and a designated point person for communications and threat evaluation. It also calls for training the people who actually receive reports, which is usually a front office, not a command center.

The guiding principle is blunt: all threats should be treated as credible when they are received. Nobody gets to decide in the first ninety seconds that a call is a prank.

“Staff preparation is key and should be the foremost priority in front-line awareness.” Nicholas Kent, Under Secretary, U.S. Department of Education, and Stanley Woodward Jr., Associate Attorney General (2026)

That is sound operational advice. It is also advice about the first hour.

The numbers are falling. The exposure is not.

The trend is genuinely encouraging. K-12 Dive reports 446 swatting incidents in K-12 schools in 2022-23, 158 in 2023-24, and 124 in 2024-25. That is a 72 percent drop from the peak and a 22 percent drop from the year before.

Now read the other end of that sentence. A hundred and twenty-four incidents in a single school year is not an outbreak that has ended. It is a standing risk that has shrunk. Every one of those incidents put a school into lockdown, and the guidance itself describes the result as significant disruption and trauma to school communities.

So the odds that your building gets a call this year are lower than they were. If it does, the consequences are the same as they ever were.

The day after is a counseling problem

NAPSA’s summary of the guidance centers on identifying threats, training staff, and educating communities to detect false ones sooner. All of that happens before and during. What happens when the doors unlock is a different job, and it belongs to people who were locked in the same room as everyone else.

You know what that day looks like. A ninth grader who was fine at 9:40 is in your office at 1:15 asking whether it was real. A teacher who held a classroom quiet for fifty minutes goes home and cannot say why she is shaking. Parents have read a school alert, a group text, and a rumor, in that order, and they want to know why nobody told them sooner. A student who already carries a trauma history just had it reactivated by a drill that was not a drill.

Those are not edge cases. They are the predictable output of a false threat treated as real, which is exactly what the guidance requires.

Threat assessment teams are built to answer one question: is anyone in danger? Nobody on that team is assigned the next question, which is who is not okay. That one needs a name next to it before the call comes, not after.

What to do this week

You do not need a new federal mandate to close this gap. You need a page and a meeting.

• Ask for a seat. If your school has a multidisciplinary threat assessment team, confirm a counselor is on it. If it does not have one, the guidance is your argument for forming one.
• Write the day-after protocol. Who checks on students and staff, in what order, in which rooms, and who tells families what. Decide it while nothing is happening.
• Plan for staff, not just students. The teacher who ran the lockdown and the front-office aide who took the call are part of the community the guidance says was traumatized.
• Keep the routine. Predictable schedules after an incident do more for anxious students than a speech does. Bring it up in the debrief.

The federal guidance tells schools to treat every threat as real. Fine. Then treat every aftermath as real too, and put a counselor’s name on it before the phone rings.

Sources

• Federal anti-swatting guidance calls for better preparation by schools — K-12 Dive, September 2026
• U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Justice Issue Guidance on ‘Swatting’ Threats — U.S. Department of Education, September 2026
• Federal Anti-Swatting Guidance for Schools Focuses on Preparation — NAPSA, September 2026
• Week In Review: A slew of new K-12 policies and guidance — K-12 Dive, October 2026