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When a mother in Tennessee reached out to ProPublica last year to share that her 10-year-old had been kicked out of school for making a finger gun, she wondered how many other kids had experienced the same thing.
The state had recently passed laws heightening penalties for making threats of mass violence at school, including requiring yearlong expulsions. There was a lot of speculation among advocates and lawyers about how broadly schools and law enforcement would apply the law. As a longtime education reporter with experience reporting on student discipline, I assumed I would be able to get meaningful data to help me understand whether this 10-year-old’s experience was a fluke or a trend.
After several months of investigating, I found that the state laws had resulted in a wave of expulsions and arrests for children accused of making threats of mass violence, sometimes stemming from rumors and misunderstandings.
But in the course of publishing stories on that 10-year-old and other children ensnared by these laws, I realized that the process of determining just how many students were affected was more frustrating than illuminating. I learned that Tennessee gives public agencies wide latitude to refuse to release data, which could reveal whether the laws were working as intended or needed to be fixed. And due to inconsistencies in how school districts collect and report information, lawmakers themselves are sometimes as in the dark as the public.
I began my quest by asking a couple dozen school districts, including 20 of the state’s largest, how many students they had expelled for making threats of mass violence over the past few years. I also wanted, if possible, the demographics of those students. I live in Georgia, and Tennessee allows agencies to deny records requests from people without a Tennessee address — so I partnered with Paige Pfleger of WPLN News in Nashville, who has spent years reporting on guns and criminal justice in Tennessee.
Tennessee, like all states, must submit school disciplinary data to the federal government, and it requires school districts to collect this data throughout the year. Some districts like Metro Nashville Public Schools and Rutherford County Schools provided us with numbers relatively easily, which showed they expelled students for making threats more often once the zero-tolerance law was on the books, despite investigating similar or smaller numbers of incidents.
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But other districts fought against releasing data, claiming in some cases that sharing any of this basic information would violate the confidentiality of their students or even lead to violence on their campuses. “We believe that it would have an adverse impact on our security plans and security operations,” a private lawyer for the Putnam County School System, east of Nashville,