Winnipeg school officials and police are urging parents to talk to their kids about the consequences of making threats.

This week, police in Bridgewater, N.S., said they were alerted by international police agency Interpol and the FBI about online communications between a 15-year-old girl in that town and a 14-year-old boy in the western Manitoba town of Rivers.

The two communicated about their desires to “murder multiple students” in attacks at their local schools, Park View Education Centre and Rivers Collegiate, police said. Rivers Collegiate has fewer than 150 students in grades 7-12.

The news came after a rash of threats hit Winnipeg schools earlier this year.

Winnipeg police couldn’t say how many school threats they’ve investigated this year, but said last month that it responded to 11 reported threats targeting schools in the city.

Three of them led to the arrest of a 30-year-old woman from Toronto and two teens, ages 13 and 16, who were charged with uttering threats, police said previously.

Insp. Jennifer McKinnon of the Winnipeg Police Service said investigations into the threats are a top priority and begin as soon as they are reported.

“They continue on until we either determine that there is no threat, we’re able to identify where the threat is coming and sometimes even make an arrest,” McKinnon told CBC News.

She said the investigations can involve an enormous amount of resources, including patrol officers, the major crimes unit and canine teams, as well as forensics, if needed.

“We certainly don’t want the messaging going out there that, you know, if you write something on a bathroom wall, you’re going to get out of that exam or that day of school,” McKinnon said. “But you just don’t know anymore, so we have to take these very seriously.”

She said she worries there could be a threat that turns into tragedy.

“I bet you if you asked that community in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., if this was ever going to happen to them, such a close-knit community, they probably would have said, ‘Absolutely not,'” she said.

“I think we all worry. I think law enforcement around the world worries because this has become our reality.”

McKinnon’s advice for parents is to have conversations with their children about the threats, to pay attention to changes in behaviour, and connect with schools if they notice something out of the ordinary.

“Not every kid who’s struggling is going to be someone who is going to threaten to hurt a school, but there’s something underlying, obviously, that goes on that needs to be looked at, and conversations are the way to start.”

Winnipeg School Division superintendent Matt Henderson said a handful of the division’s schools were targets of some of last month’s threats.

Henderson previously said a “school shooting-type threat” was made against St. John’s High School in the North End, prompting the school to close on Feb. 9.

He urged parents to talk to their children about why it’s wrong to threaten a school.

“It’s so disruptive, and it’s alarming,” he said.

Henderson says his division’s schools are “incredibly safe,” but the threats can weaken families’ confidence.

“Sometimes they’re electronic and from outside, and sometimes it might be within, but we always work side-by-side with Winnipeg police and get their advice,” he said.

“We don’t want to make a habit of this.”

Kids can get ‘radicalized much earlier’

Michael Arntfield, a criminologist and professor at Western University, said the arrests of the Nova Scotia and Manitoba teens this week appears to be a rare case.

“Outside of recognized terror groups, you seldom see that level of organization and co-ordination among certainly suspects of this age, or school shooters for that matter,” said Arntfield, who’s also a retired police officer.

But he’s not shocked the accused are teenagers, as mass casualty events at schools are typically carried out by current or former students, he said.

“They are skewing younger and younger, I think strictly as a result of the fact that more and more children are getting on devices earlier,” he said. “So, you’ve kind of got that familiarity and the ability to be radicalized much earlier.”

Arntfield said he’ll be watching to see whether the Nova Scotia-Manitoba pair are allegedly connected to an extremist group that could have groomed them through online radicalization.

“Increasingly, we’re seeing no ideology — just people intent on creating mayhem.”

It can be difficult to determine whether a mass killing was a copycat event because the perpetrators often die in their attacks, said Arntfield.

“The scary thought is that there are people dormant and in [a] sort of pre-planning state all the time, so all it takes is the revelation of somebody else doing it, and then they follow suit,” he said.

Arntfield said people traditionally “sort of succumb” to the stereotype that Canadians don’t need to worry about mass killings in their schools.

“And we do,” he said.

“Intelligence services need to take this problem more seriously.”