A week after a series of threatening text messages disrupted operations within the Cherokee County School District, investigators from three different agencies are continuing to probe where the messages began.

"We are working to back track and get to the origin of the text message," said Chief Deputy Joel Hill of the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office.

So too are the Gaffney Police Department and the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the latter of which was brought in to assist with the investigation.

Both the Gaffney Police Department and the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office are involved because the threatening text messages appeared at schools located in different police jurisdictions.

According to some students who spoke with The Gaffney Ledger outside Gaffney High School last Tuesday, a threatening text message, warning students of a situation that was going to happen at school during lunch periods, began appearing before classes started that morning.

The message advised those students who received it to pass the message along, meaning police would have to work backwards in their attempts to find how and where the message began.

Students within the alternative school at the Cherokee Community Learning Center on Allison Drive, which falls under the jurisdiction of the sheriff's office, received the same threatening text message that students at Gaffney High School received last Tuesday.

"We're dealing with a lot of different agencies, phone companies and so forth," Hill said of the investigation.

The Cherokee County School District informed parents of the threatening message through its Alert Now automated phone system, leading hundreds of parents to converge on Gaffney High School last Tuesday to take their children home. Disruptions continued the next day, when 67 percent of the high school students stayed home.