FARMINGTON — An 18-year-old student has been charged with felony terrorizing regarding a Dec. 9 bomb threat at Mt. Blue High School, a Farmington police official said.
On Tuesday, the Mt. Blue Regional School District Board of Directors held a disciplinary hearing in executive session with the student and voted unanimously to expel Andrew Coscia of Farmington from the high school, according to the minutes of the meeting. Coscia is scheduled to appear in court Feb. 24.
Chief Deputy Shane Cote of the Farmington Police Department said Thursday that the school resource officer, Bridgette Gilbert, led the department’s investigation. The school administration also conducted an inquiry.
There have been three bomb threats at Mt. Blue this school year. The district’s policy requires students to leave the school whenever a threat is made. In practice, students are not sent home but are bused to other district schools until police search the building and parking lot.
According to the minutes of the Dec. 20 school board hearing, at the beginning of the third period in the morning, a student reported finding a note which threatened that a bomb would go off at 11:20 a.m. The administration immediately began an investigation and the school was emptied.
Over the next few days, the student who reported the threat was questioned and gave “multiple, different and conflicting statements about the creation of the bomb threat and hindered the investigation,” the minutes stated.
The investigation was based on interviews, a handwriting comparison, and statements from other students.
Earlier this month, the school board expelled a 16-year-old student for hindering the course of the investigation into a written bomb threat found in a boy’s bathroom on or about Nov. 14. A second threat, found on Nov. 22 in one of the portable toilets on campus, was also investigated, according to the minutes of a Dec. 8 disciplinary hearing.
That student had a disciplinary record at the school with repeated suspensions, according to the minutes.
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