The story’s not over yet, though anonymous threats that have plagued the Spirit Lake High School since last summer forced other area teams to drop out of the big annual track meet this week. Superintendent Tim Grieves says the Cheryl Maahs Relays are a big event for the local team. This year they happen to have 23 girls out for track and they’re doing the best a school team’s done in years. But this year the other participating schools regretfully dropped out of the relays one by one, as they learned of the anonymous threats.He says they’ve been getting the threats for about 9 months and till this event they hadn’t been specific, but recent letters named girls and said they’d “have an accident” at some event. School officials were pretty sure the threats were groundless, but stepped up security anyway. And even without the other teams, the Spirit Lake girls ran all the events. They did the whole meet, each event, because they had to have a qualifying meet to go on to the district meet set for next Monday — also in Spirit Lake. Superintendent Grieves says so far, they plan to hold that track meet as scheduled. It’s been a frustrating season but at the same time brought the team together and focused them, and the superintendent’s proud of them. Nobody’s been attacked or hurt since the threats began last summer, but the superintendent says there have been a couple incidents of vandalism at students’ homes. A reward fund put up by Spirit lake community members and organizations has grown to ten-thousand dollars, for help in catching the author of the threatening letters.
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