Everybody loves a snow day off school. In Western Pennsylvania you might call snow days the cost of doing business — they happen, and people have to adjust accordingly.

But so far this season, students in Butler County have been more likely to miss instructional hours because of bomb threats than inclimate weather.

It’s easy to fall into the habit of considering these hoaxes rare events, but that’s far from the truth. Here are some school evacuations sparked by bomb threats in our county this year.

- On April 4 Evans City Elementary and Middle schools were evacuated after a bomb threat was discovered in a bathroom stall that afternoon.

- On Sept. 7 Seneca Valley Intermediate High School was evacuated after a handwritten threat claiming that the school would blow up at noon was found in a bathroom. A 15-year-old boy later admitted to writing the threat and then reporting it to school officials.

- Knoch middle and high schools were evacuated on Wednesday, Dec. 14, after a message written on a bathroom wall in the high school was noticed by a student, who reported it to a custodian.

- Mars Middle School was evacuated Friday afternoon, after a message in a girl’s bathroom claimed that a bomb would detonate at 2 p.m. that day.

None of these hoaxes proved true, but the costs associated with the pranks were all-too-real: emergency responders pulled away from other duties, lost instructional time, after-school activities canceled in some cases.

What’s there to be done in response? Heretofore, our assumption has been that stiff penalties would eventually whittle down the number of people willing to risk fines and fail time to disrupt the school day with terroristic threats. Depending on a district’s policies, students who are found to have perpetrated a bomb scare or issued a terroristic threat of any kind can face discipline that ranges from being forced to pay emergency response costs to criminal charges and/or expulsion.

The problem is, that hasn’t happened — here or elsewhere in Pennsylvania. Statewide, districts have reported more than 500 cases of terroristic threats each year since the 2009-10 school year, according to the state Department of Education. For the 2014-15 school year they reported 548 cases, a less-than-stunning 3 percent drop since 2012-13.

The conclusion is clear. The current playbook isn’t working. Perpetrators are being caught less frequently, and the penalties they face have proven an ineffective deterrent to future pranksters.

We’d like to see districts rethink their strategies when it comes to terroristic threats in general and bomb scares specifically. There has got to be a more efficient and effective way of handling the people who create these incidents.