Springfield schools closed after another wave of threats leads city to cancel diversity festival

Turmoil in the Springfield, Ohio, continues as two more schools were evacuated on Monday after police said there were more threats of violence, local television stateion WHIO first reported. 

Simon Kenton Elementary School and Kenwood Elementary School are the fifth and sixth schools in the Springfield City District School Board to be targeted by threats in the last week amidst an onslaught of racist smears spread about Haitian immigrants. 

Also on Monday, city officials announced they were canceling CultureFest, an annual celebration of “diversity, arts and local culture,” over concerns about “potential risks to attendees, staff, vendors and volunteers,” city officials said in a statement on Facebook.

“We deeply regret having to cancel CultureFest, as we know it is a beloved event for our community,” City Manager Bryan Heck said in the statement. “However, the safety of our residents and visitors must come first.”

Tensions in Springfield have been steadily rising after debunked that Haitian immigrants in the area were eating local pets spread on Facebook. The debunked claim garnered national attention after it was repeatedly shared by former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said in the presidential debate last week.

The city of 58,000 has since been plagued with bomb threats, lockdowns and hate towards the Haitian-American community. Asked by reporters on Saturday about the recent threats, Trump said, “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats,” claiming that all he did know is that Haitians have “taken over” and “that’s a terrible thing that happened.”

Despite officials having found no evidence that the pet-eating claim are true, Republicans like Vance refuse to drop the story, further inciting chaos in his home-state.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance said in an interview with CNN over the weekend.