Wichita ? In the two months leading to the Columbine school shooting anniversary, students have threatened violence in 10 schools across the nation, with many of those beleaguered schools sharing some common underlying factors, a safety expert said Tuesday.

“We tend to see more plots leading up to the Columbine anniversary,” said Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, based in Cleveland. “However, the spate of incidents, many quite serious, since March 1 seems to be a very unusual cluster – an unusually large cluster of plots and threats in a very short period of time.

“If there is any legacy from Columbine, it is that it can happen anywhere,” he said.

The list of places where students were arrested recently after allegedly threatening attacks at their schools reads like a cross-section of small-town America: Riverton on April 20; Puyallup, Wash., on April 24; North Pole, Alaska, on April 22; Platte City, Mo., on April 17; Pierce County, Wash., on April 7; Atco, N.J., on April 5; Foley, Ala., on March 24; Rochester Hills, Mich., on March 20; Greenwood, Ind., on March 2; and Muscatine, Iowa, on March 1.

“One of the things we know from all of the foiled plots – as well as the school shootings that have occurred – is that they involve a good deal of planning and preparation. They don’t just happen overnight,” Trump said.

But Trump warned about dismissing the incidents as copycat plots of the April 20, 1999, Columbine High School massacre where 15 people died, including two gunmen. There are several underlying dynamics at play when it comes to keeping schools safe, he said.

Budget cuts have led more districts to cut back on overall school safety resources and forgo staff training programs that help them identify signs of violence or mental health issues among youths, he said.

A Cherokee County Sheriff's deputy drives through the parking lot at Riverton High School, in Riverton, Kan. Friday, April 21, 2006. Boys, ranging in age from 16 to 18, were arrested Thursday, the anniversary of the Columbine massacre, just hours before they planned to shoot fellow students and school employees, authorities said. The plot was uncovered after one of them discussed it on a popular web site.

That was only partly the case in Riverton High School in Kansas. When the district lost its funding for a school resource officer, it made up the funding itself and maintained the position, Supt. David Walters said.

Since he came to the school three years ago, the district has stepped up its in-service training regarding bullying, but it does not have a similar program regarding profiling for violence, he said.

School districts today also are under tremendous pressure to meet mandated test scores, Trump said, and anything not directly linked to instructional time – such as prevention programs that offer support services to children – falls by the wayside.

The Internet is a recurring theme in the recent spate of foiled school plots. Tom Nolan, a Boston University professor of criminal justice and a former police officer, said much of the violence is fueled by the connections children are making on the Internet, where they can interact with like-minded students around the world.

“The Internet is there for endorsement, support and certainly collaboration among kids who may be possessed of the same kind of inclinations,” Nolan said. “That ability to communicate across a broad spectrum of similarly disturbed kids didn’t exist a generation ago.”

In Kansas, Riverton High School officials learned that a threatening message had been posted on MySpace.com. In Mississippi, two Pearl Junior High School students allegedly made threatening statements on the teen site Xanga. The student charged in the alleged plot at Puyallup sent an instant message to a fellow student.

“The Internet and technology is adding a whole new dimension to school safety – particularly in terms of threats,” Trump said.