The schools have a strong incentive to CYA - who would want to be the one who ignored the one-in-a-million real threat? - and no incentive to not scare kids needlessly. This in turn creates a strong incentive for every anon or crank with a 3-line python script to spam out these robocalls. It's the same reason swattings happen: no matter how many innocent people the cops shoot, or how many babies they severely burn in their cribs with flashbangs, they have the same incentive to CYA and act on every implausible, anonymous TTY message.

> but we need to figure out a way to stamp this shit out

Right on. Stopping automated phone calls, or just not accepting them as a pretense for lockdowns and SWAT raids would go along way. Just having to actually call, expose your caller ID, and speak (with your actual voice!) would stop 99.999% of cranks cold.

Longer term, we should seek to change the material conditions which breed the sort of bleak nihilists that call in bomb threats (or worse). That's unlikely to happen, because asking why people's lives are so precarious, lonely, alienated and hopeless that they'd act out anti-socially inevitably leads back to our cruel economic system, and profits for the billionaire-pedo-island-class must be preserved at all costs. Expect lots of band-aid approaches and blaming identity groups (men/Muslims/xyz category) instead.