Katie Schindler texted her husband on Nov. 15 to say she loved him as she hid in her office at Sanford High School.

Schindler, the school’s career exploration coordinator, needed to stay safe after the principal put the school in lockdown following a report of an active shooter.

“I looked around my office trying to figure out where I could safely hide,” Schindler told the Legislature’s Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee Monday. “I hit the floor and squeezed into an 18 by 20 space behind a shelf and file cabinet, knees pulled to my chest so my feet could not be seen.”

She hid for about an hour until the school was evacuated. It wasn’t until she got to a community gymnasium that she learned that the incident was a hoax.

Across Maine that day, 10 schools — 5,679 students — were “victims of these threats,” said Sen. Anne Carney (D-Cape Elizabeth), who is sponsoring legislation to make it a felony if a false report leads to evacuation or generates an emergency response.

Carney said the bill updates a 45-year-old statute to address the modern-day threat of swatting, which is when someone knowingly calls in a false threat with the intention of drawing a large law enforcement response.

On that day in Portland, every police officer responded to the high school, along with the fire department and federal officials.

“You have to think about creating that situation as being not just scary and emotional and potentially dangerous, but you have to think about the widespread impact,” she said. “What else could be happening in the city where those people who are drawn to a false report would be needed?”

Bill co-sponsor Rep. Vicki Doudera (D-Camden) said state law needs to be updated to adequately deal with these situations. She said when she heard about the incident in November, she felt “panic and dread.”

“The panic and dread I felt was nothing compared to what the students at the 10 impacted schools felt,” she said. “It was nothing when measured against the anguish and adrenaline of the law enforcement officers and other first responders who responded to those calls.”

She said they are not pranks, but in her mind, are “closer to acts of terrorism.”

The bill is supported by the Maine Prosecutors Association, Maine Municipal Association, Maine Education Association and the Maine Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

In opposition, the American Civil Liberties Union said there’s no evidence that elevating a crime from a misdemeanor to a felony serves as a deterrent.

“I understand there’s an extraordinary amount of grief and trauma attached to the false public alarms that have happened in Maine, last November especially,” said Michael Kebede, policy counsel for the Maine ACLU.

But creating a new felony-level crime “is an excessive reaction to that level of trauma,” he said.

The committee will hold a work session on the bill in the coming weeks.