Many parents have spent years repeating a litany about the importance of education. They keep an eye on homework, buy books, provide learning opportunities, enforce disciplinary rules at least as strict as those their children must follow at school. They limit television time and provide a safe, supervised environment for interaction with friends. They make sure their children eat breakfast in the morning and are in school, on time, ready to learn.

Some of those responsible parents didn’t send their children to school yesterday. Who can blame them for deciding to err on the side of caution?

Parents should not have to choose between safety and education, and yet that’s a reality of life in the post-Columbine era. The threats have proliferated, and although the majority of them have been only threats, we’ve seen enough school violence lately that we know better than to trust that every one is hollow. Some of them are real.

Parents cannot be criticized for attempting to shield their children from violence, and it’s understandable that some of them believe they haven’t been given enough information, early enough, to know what the right choice might be.

Teens, like adults, are innocent until proven guilty, and until they’re actually charged, as adults, with a serious crime, their identities are protected. Police and educators understandably are reticent to provide explicit information about the threats, because they know that such attention can prompt copycat activities by other alienated students.

Blaming the media for "encouraging" threats of violence is fashionable, but students and their parents desperately want more information about what’s happening. That’s what makes the cycle so vicious. Parents, and the community at large, need to know what they’re facing so that they can make informed decisions about the risks involved, but when such behavior is rewarded with attention, events multiply and it grows ever harder to sort out fact from fakery.

Life holds few guarantees. Much as we’d like to believe otherwise, no one can promise that our children will be safe from harm while they’re out in the real world. The best anyone can do is to make a calm decision based on available information.

With that in mind, here’s a message to all the young people who might once have found it amusing to posture about violence toward their peers and toward authorities: Someday you’ll understand. Someday someone will make threatening noises toward a person you love. You won’t know whether to believe them or not, but your heart will race, your stomach will hurt, and you’ll have to make a decision. You’ll want to believe that people are basically good and that the world is basically a safe place, but you won’t know. Even worse, you’ll have to accept the fact that no one ever knows.