Nassau police are investigating an online threat made against Great Neck South High School in a group chat over the weekend, officials announced Sunday.
Great Neck School District Superintendent Teresa Prendergast, in an email to the community Sunday, said a student in the group chat “immediately reported” the threat to the Nassau County Police Department, although the specifics of the threat had not been disclosed as of Tuesday.
“Please be assured that the safety of our students and staff is our top priority and that any threat of violence is taken extremely seriously and will not be tolerated,” Prendergast said in the email. “I commend the student who brought this incident to the attention of their parents and for their immediate action in contacting the police.”
Prendergast also said the building administration and the school district’s security “conducted a thorough search” of the building Sunday and that the school had increased patrols from the Nassau and Lake Success police departments Monday.
Efforts to reach officials from the Nassau County Police Department for an update on the investigation were unavailing.
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman and Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder announced the launch of an Overwatch program on Friday, which assigns additional officers to patrol high-profile areas such as schools, places of worship and shopping centers.
The Nassau County Police Department will send out teams of four police officers and a supervisor who will spend an equal amount of time in each of the four quadrants Nassau is broken down into under the initiative. The program is designed so that police can be present within 15 minutes of any location in Nassau County, without interrupting the department’s usual response times to crimes or incidents.
The Overwatch teams will be “traveling at or below the speed limit” with their lights on to make their presence felt in the county, according to Blakeman.
