Across Western Pennsylvania, kids are going back to school.

College dorms are overflowing. High school football games are lighting up Friday nights. School buses are back on the roads taking little ones with backpacks and new shoes to class.

The lazy days of summer are over, and the jam-packed schedules of the school year begin. It puts everyone back on the familiar merry-go-round: Get up, get dressed, get breakfast, get to school.

It also puts us back on a darker track — the all-too-constant reminder of threats and violence at school.

It started with ugly pretense on college campuses.

Last week at Villanova University in the Philadelphia suburbs, a report of an active shooter situation triggered alerts from the school’s official system. The Associated Press reported that students were told to get to secure locations and lock down. Stay away from the university’s law school, they were warned.

Hours later, police cleared buildings and reported there were no injuries.

“We now know it was a cruel hoax,” the university’s president, the Rev. Peter Donahue, said in a statement.

That hoax was repeated at schools across the country. At least 11 colleges, including the University of Arkansas, Iowa State and Kansas State, were subject to false alarms and swatting calls.

It is disruptive. It is stressful. It is also not original. The same thing happened at high schools across Pennsylvania in 2023 in the wake of the Covenant School shooting in Nashville.

Faked emergencies have consequences, including the expense of lockdowns, searches and police presence. There’s also the cost to people’s mental health, which should not be underestimated.

On Wednesday, there was no hoax. In Minneapolis, Catholic school students attending Mass at Annunciation Church were hit with a hail of bullets. An 8-year-old and a 10-year-old died. Fourteen other children, as well as three other people, were injured.

There was a time when “back to school” meant back to packing lunches, doing homework and practicing clarinet.

Today, it means preparing exit strategies and planning for mass-casualty events.

Schools have become political battlegrounds as well, with struggles over curriculum, books, vaccinations and policies. On a state level, Pennsylvania’s leaders continue to wrestle with what to fund and how to fund it.

But from kindergarten through the highest levels of higher education, going back to school should be a safe experience. If it isn’t, does anything else matter?

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