by Aliya Swaby
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When Belle got a call last September that her 10-year-old had been sent to the evil principal’s company, she rushed over to the school. Her brother Lee watched irately as the evil main explained the situation: The fifth grader had furiously pointed his finger in the shape of a gun.
Belle scolded him for no thinking before he acted, agreeing with executives at the East Tennessee public elementary school who felt that he had misbehaved.
The main called Belle while Lee spent a few days serving a disqualification at home. The class had conducted an investigation and determined that Lee would be kicked out for an entire calendar month. In a later email, Belle wrote to ProPublica,” I regret that it has come to this.” ( At Belle’s request, ProPublica is identifying her and her son only by their middle names and leaving out the name of the district and school to prevent her child from being identifiable. ) The district and the state of Tennessee “take such dangers quite really,” the principal continued in the email.
Belle was horrified. Lee had never before been placed in college confinement. His scores often flagged, but he had been working hard to improve them. Lee would have no idea where to get a gun since the family did n’t own one. Belle recalls the principal saying on the phone that she knew Lee was a great person. Belle perceived his abuse as a severe reaction.
The associate producer of institutions declined ProPublica’s request for comment, also though Belle signed a kind giving college officers permission to speak about Lee’s situation.
The principal’s activity was the result of a brand-new state law that had become law just months prior, enforcing stricter sanctions for individuals who threaten students at school. Passed after a former pupil shot and killed six people at The Covenant School in Nashville, the law requires students to be expelled for at least a year if they threaten mass murder on school property, making it a zero-tolerance act.
Legislators in Tennessee claimed that increasing punishments for threats may help stop severe acts of violence. ” What we’re really doing is sending a message that says ‘ Hey, this is not a joke, this is not a joking matter, so do n’t do this,'” state Sen. Jon Lundberg, a co-sponsor of the legislation, told a Chattanooga news station a week and a half after the law went into effect.
Tennessee and a number of other states have made it simpler for schools to halt or remove students over the past couple of years. But study after study has shown that severe disciplinary methods such as mandatory evictions are ineffective at reducing violence in schools. In addition, research has shown that these behaviors frequently result in Black students and students with disabilities receiving proportionally suspended and expelled, increasing their chances of entering the criminal justice system.
Tennessee school officials have used the rules to eliminate students for somewhat destructive behavior, according to activists and attorneys across the position who spoke with ProPublica. Expulsions are n’t necessarily permanent in Tennessee and a number of other states. Some individuals have been expelled actually when officers themselves determined that the risk was hardly credible. In May, lawmakers approved a new rule that forbids expulsions from students who make “valid” threats of large violence. But that still leaves it up to executives to determine which risks are acceptable.
In some instances, officials delegated responsibility for handling small occurrences to law enforcement next school year. As a result, the type of wrongdoing that would normally result in a scolding or short suspension has led to children being not only expelled but also arrested, charged and placed in adolescent detention, according to immature defense lawyers and a recent lawsuit.
Some students have found it difficult to get any kind of education while some students are expelled. Tennessee allows school districts to decline to enroll students who have been suspended or expelled in another district. Like Lee, some children who are expelled for making threats end up staying at home and muddle through online courses alone, or have no education at all.
Lee’s mom worried that her son’s minor mistake could derail his future. He has kind of developed into a little bit of a recluse, she said. ” He does n’t want to go back to school at all”.
Students like Lee who have been disciplined for making threats might have trouble finding a second school to attend. ( Andrea Morales for ProPublica )
Lee was a new student at his elementary school when he first started fifth grade last fall. His family had recently moved to the area from Middle Tennessee. He had a hard time making friends despite being typically outgoing and sociable. In the second month of the school year, a girl in Lee’s class asked him if he had been vaccinated for COVID-19, Lee’s mom said. Lee informed her that he was n’t sure. The following week, as students walked outside for recess, Lee realized his classmates were avoiding him and he had no one to play with, according to his mother. She claimed that he had been deterred from speaking with him because the girl had spread a rum that he had n’t been vaccinated.
As the fifth graders filed back into the school at the end of recess, Lee expressed his frustration to a classmate, Belle told ProPublica. Her son told her,” I’m so angry, I could just —,” before folding his hand in a gun shape to mimic the staccato of a machine gun. According to Belle, the classmate reported what Lee had said to a teacher, who told school administrators.
Belle had the option to appeal the expulsion, but the principal’s letter, which provides scant details of the incident, instead chose to homeschool Lee. She worried that teachers and other students at the school would consider Lee a bad kid, especially given the pervasive fear in the months after the Nashville school shooting. She said,” These people are going to totally overreact about this,” and I was like,” This is going to be crazy.” ” There’s no way that they would be able to treat him fairly after this”.
Contact Us
Do you have a tip about how officials in education, law enforcement or the courts are handling threats of mass violence in Tennessee schools? Contact reporter Aliya Swaby at aliya. swaby@propublica .org. She can also be reached via text or securely via Signal at 404-981-1190. If you’re concerned about confidentiality, check out our advice on the most secure ways to share tips.
Months later, when her concern for her son’s difficulties with home education made her even more irate about the school’s actions, she sought legal counsel. But the window to appeal had long passed, and the lawyer told her that the law seemed to allow the school’s actions. Belle recalls thinking,” There’s really no point in fighting this,” and she recalled thinking.
Tennessee makes it difficult to determine how many students have been expelled for threats of mass violence, the state does not collect data on the reasons for expulsions. It requires school districts to notify the state of all incidents involving threats of widespread violence, but some districts have reported unintentionally sending inaccurate information.
ProPublica requested the number of expulsions for threats of mass violence from the state’s 20 largest school districts as well as five other smaller school districts where we received tips about specific cases. According to those figures, 66 expulsions occurred in total last school year in ten school districts. Tennessee has nearly 150 school districts.
Several districts released data showing that they fired students who made threats more frequently after the law was in place. For example, Metro Nashville Public Schools reported 42 expulsions for making any type of threat in the 2023-2024 school year, including 16 threats of mass violence. Before the law was in place, the district expelled 22 students for making any kind of threats in the previous school year despite conducting roughly the same number of incidents investigation. A spokesperson for Metro Nashville Public Schools attributed the increase to the creation of the zero-tolerance law, along with the seriousness of the offenses and “heightened sensitivity and awareness following the Covenant shooting”.
Rutherford County Schools south of Nashville reported 33 expulsions last school year for making threats, including 27 expulsions specifically for threats of mass violence. The previous school year, it reported just six expulsions for any type of threat, despite investigating a larger number of incidents. A spokesperson cited a change in state law that required expulsions for mass threats when ProPublica asked officials to explain why the number had increased so significantly.
State law leaves it up to the school districts to decide whether students who have committed a zero-tolerance offense are required to attend alternative school while they are expelled. Some areas, like Metro Nashville, require it, while others, like Rutherford County, do not in most cases. Alternative schools in Tennessee primarily serve students with disciplinary issues who have been suspended or expelled from their traditional schools.
Several school districts informed ProPublica that students who threaten mass violence may be sent to alternative schools without having their names officially removed. This past school year, Anderson County Schools, northwest of Knoxville, sent 17 students to its alternative school or offered them virtual education options. Four students, two 8-year-olds, a 7-year-old, and one 6-year-old, were sent to the nearby alternative school by Robertson County Schools, which is located just outside of Nashville. The 7-year-old and one of the 8-year-olds were removed from their regular schools for an entire calendar year.
A lawsuit filed in May on behalf of two families in the suburban Nashville district of Williamson County Schools highlights how some administrators havehurly removed students from classes in response to the new law. The lawsuit was first reported by Tennessee Lookout. It describes how a 14-year-old student was detained, held in juvenile detention, and kept out of school for weeks last August, and claims that it all came about as a result of an unsupported rumor that he had planned to shoot up the school. The complaint said the middle schooler had been talking about another student who he heard bragging about the number of guns his grandfather owned.
According to the lawsuit, the student was transferred to the nearby alternative school, which is located in the juvenile justice center, where he received a” significantly inferior” education to that provided by his regular school. He sat in a classroom trying to teach himself on a Chromebook while a teacher went over different material with other students in the room.
The school principal initially explained to the family that the law required the institution to suspend the 14-year-old for a full year. The family appealed the discipline at the school level. The family then appealed to the district superintendent when the school rejected the appeal. Under the law, only a superintendent can reduce the punishment of a student who makes a threat of mass violence. The superintendent allowed the student to return to school about a month after he was suspended, stating that he had spent” an appropriate amount of time” at the alternative school.
After the teenager returned, the principal allegedly told him he never thought of him as a threat and that his suspension was a result of the zero-tolerance law. According to the lawsuit, the principal told the family,” You can blame Governor Bill Lee.
The Williamson County school board filed a motion in August to dismiss the lawsuit, stating that the students “received all the process they were due under the law”. The 14-year-old was informed of the allegations against him and given the opportunity to fight for his own, according to a separate filing from the board, and” the process he was given worked in his favor by significantly reducing his suspension.”
The school board also said in the filing that threats “made in jest” disrupt students ‘ learning and strike fear into parents, staff and other students, especially in the aftermath of recent school shootings. The board stated that “despite the fact that both threats may not have been serious, they nevertheless warranted punishment.”
The board also argued in the filing that school officials had to punish the students to the full extent of the law, noting that its policy “required that Plaintiffs be punished as zero-tolerance offenders regardless of the threat level because they made threats of mass violence”.
The school district did not respond to inquiries or requests for the number of suspensions or expulsions resulting from threats of widespread violence.
Tennessee has put in place a safeguard to prevent students from receiving overly harsh punishments for inconsequential threats.
Threat assessments, which bring together police and school administrators to assess whether students pose a real threat to others, provide context before school administrators finalize discipline. They also can help determine whether students need other resources, such as mental health services. Some districts in Tennessee have been conducting threat assessments for more than a decade, but the state only mandated that all school districts use them starting in 2023. A new state law that went into effect in May clarified that a threat assessment had to be complete and determine a threat was valid before school officials can proceed with expulsion.
However, according to parents and juvenile defense attorneys who spoke with ProPublica, district administrators frequently conduct threat assessments inconsistently, with districts using varying definitions for what constitutes a threat’s legitimacy or credibility. And some officials allow law enforcement to take the lead in incidents that would otherwise be handled at the school level.
The attorneys representing the families in the school board lawsuit claim that “it essentially delegates everything that should be handled in a relatively minor matter in the school.” ( A third family recently joined the lawsuit, which also now names the local district attorney as a defendant. ) ” Anything of this nature that is referred to law enforcement has an almost automatic reaction, which is horrible for the child.”
The lawsuit states that school officials let law enforcement take charge of investigating the 14-year-old’s comments during the threat assessment process. The principal told parents there was nothing he could do after police apprehended the teenager and taken him into custody, according to the lawsuit.
In its legal response, Williamson County’s school board said state law” compelled” school administrators to report the” threat-related speech” to law enforcement and does not allow any discretion on that matter.
The 21st Judicial District’s district attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
The tenor of a disciplinary investigation or threat assessment often becomes more serious once law enforcement gets involved, lawyers and advocates told ProPublica. According to a recent analysis from the Government Accountability Office, arrest rates increased by more than twofold in schools using police as opposed to those without, and that arrests were more common when officers were involved in student discipline.
Cashauna Lattimore, an assistant public defender in East Tennessee, has represented several students in cases involving threats of mass violence over the last few years. She claimed that the majority of them were arrested and that all of them had been expelled.
Lattimore described the alleged details of one incident from last school year: In the Jefferson County School District, a high school student who was known as a class clown made an offhand joke about committing an act of violence. The students were irked by his comment, which caused it to become unpopular. He was called to the principal’s office, where a waiting police officer asked whether he had a gun in his backpack. He assured them that he did n’t, and he insisted that he had just been making a joke, and urged them to search his home if they did n’t believe him. Law enforcement did not send anyone to his home. School administrators conducted a threat assessment and gathered the students ‘ statements, which were then used as evidence against him. He was expelled for a year.
According to Lattimore, the school’s investigation was not intended to shield the student from unfair discipline. ” That was to make their case against this young man. It was not about whether or not the threat was real.
According to data that the Jefferson County School District provided to ProPublica, just two students were expelled for making threats last school year, even though in both cases the threats were labeled as” transient”, which the district describes as having” no sustained intent to harm”. According to the district’s information, the students were also charged in juvenile court in both cases. Conversely, several students made what the district considered to be” substantive” threats, but none were charged or expelled.
School officials declined to respond to inquiries from ProPublica about the differences that the data revealed or the case Lattimore described.
Lattimore said schools should help keep students who do n’t pose a threat from being arrested instead of referring the incidents to law enforcement. They are” taking the easy way out so that they as the educational entity do n’t have to deal with it,” she said. ” Because once law enforcement gets involved, they can just expel the kid and wash their hands of it”.
No matter the specifics of the incident, a student who is disciplined for making a threat of mass violence may receive a scarlet letter.
The 14-year-old boy whose family sued Williamson County Schools has transformed from a top student into a disengaged one, according to the lawsuit. He has had to work overtime to finish the assignments he snuck in during the lengthy appeals process. Once he returned, he noticed classmates gossipping behind his back, saying they were scared of him and falsely calling him a drug dealer. According to the lawsuit,” He suffered a severe and serious emotional injury and was unable to adequately deal with the mental stress caused by the circumstances of his case.”
Lee, who turned 11 during his expulsion, also struggled to adjust. He spent the rest of the school year and the summer with his mother in her modest home office, using an online program to complete fifth grade instead of sitting in front of his teacher. He complained to Belle when her phone calls to her boss and colleagues distracted him from his lessons.
During his expulsion, Lee struggled to finish the fifth grade online.
In some ways, Belle has watched her son drift backward, becoming less able to emotionally regulate without the structure of a school day or the opportunity to regularly socialize with kids his own age. He finally made it to grade level in math just before the expulsion after falling behind during the pandemic remote learning. But while learning from home, he howled in frustration when he could n’t understand a math problem. Bella gave him time to retake his lessons, which occasionally meant doing so herself while still struggling with her own work. She sent him up to his room to play video games to give him a mental break between assignments. It “is pulling teeth every single day,” Belle remarked.
In late July, after school administrators declined to comment to ProPublica on Lee’s case, Belle emailed the director of schools and asked her to shorten the expulsion. Bonne hoped that rather than weeks later, he could begin his first year of middle school on the first day of class. The director of schools responded that he could start middle school immediately. You chose to remove him and homeschool him, the email stated.” Before any expulsion was put into place, we. Therefore, the expulsion was never activated”. ( Lee’s expulsion was made clear in the initial letter Belle received, and a follow-up two days later revealed that Lee was prohibited from re-enrolling regardless of whether he had been homeschooled. ) District officials did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the expulsion not being activated. )
When Belle learned that her son would start attending school, she was overcome by a mix of confusion, relief, and apprehension. She wrote a long email to all of Lee’s teachers introducing herself and explaining that he might need a bit of extra help filling gaps in his knowledge after months of homeschooling. She wrote,” I will do what I can to put him in a good place.
But Belle still worries that her son will struggle in school or make another mistake. She ponders whether she should quit her job to focus on his full-time education. It’s not an easy choice, but she wants to protect him from what might happen at school.
WPLN’s Paige Pfleger contributed to the reporting.
