by Aliyya Swaby
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When Belle got a call last September that her 10-year-old had been sent to the vice principal’s office, she rushed over to the school. Her son Lee looked on anxiously as the vice principal explained the situation: The fifth grader had angrily pointed his finger in the shape of a gun.
Belle scolded him for not thinking before he acted, agreeing with administrators at the East Tennessee public elementary school who felt that he had misbehaved.
While Lee sat at home for a few days serving a suspension, the principal called Belle. The school had conducted an investigation and determined that Lee would be kicked out for an entire calendar year. “I regret that it has come to this,” the principal wrote in a subsequent letter, which Belle provided to ProPublica. (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.) In the letter, the principal added that the district and the state of Tennessee “take such threats very seriously.”
Belle was horrified. Lee had never even been sent to school detention before. His grades sometimes flagged, but he had been working hard to improve them. The family didn’t own a gun and Lee would have no idea where to get one. Belle recalls the principal saying on the phone that she knew Lee was a good kid. His punishment, Belle thought, seemed like an extreme overreaction.
The assistant director of schools declined ProPublica’s request for comment, even though Belle signed a form giving school officials permission to speak about Lee’s case.
The principal’s action was the result of a new state law that had gone into effect just months earlier, heightening penalties for students who make threats at school. Passed after a former student 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 violence on school property, making it a zero-tolerance offense.
Tennessee lawmakers claimed that ramping up punishments for threats would help prevent serious 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 don’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.
Over the last couple of years, Tennessee and several other states have been making it easier for schools to suspend or expel students. But study after study has shown that harsh disciplinary practices such as mandatory expulsions are ineffective at reducing violence in schools. What’s more, research shows that such practices often lead to Black students and students with disabilities being disproportionately suspended and expelled, making them more likely to end up in the criminal justice system.
Tennessee school officials have used the law to expel students for mildly disruptive behavior, according to advocates and lawyers across the state who spoke with ProPublica. (In Tennessee and a number of other states, expulsions aren’t necessarily permanent.) Some students have been expelled even when officials themselves determined that the threat was not credible. Lawmakers did put a new fix in place in May that limits expulsions to students who make “valid” threats of mass violence. But that still leaves it up to administrators to determine which threats are valid.
In some cases last school year, administrators handed off the responsibility of dealing with minor incidents to law enforcement. As a result, the type of misbehavior that would normally result in a scolding or brief suspension has led to children being not just expelled but also arrested, charged and placed in juvenile detention, according to juvenile defense lawyers and a recent lawsuit.
While they are expelled, some students have found it hard to get any kind of education. Tennessee allows school districts to decline to enroll students who have been suspended or expelled in another district. Some children expelled for making threats, like Lee, end up staying at home and muddling through online programs alone — or getting no education at all.
Lee’s mom worried that her son’s minor mistake could derail his future. “He’s kind of turned into a little bit of a recluse,” she said. “He doesn’t want to go back to school at all.”
Students like Lee who’ve been disciplined for making threats may have trouble finding another school they can attend. (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)When he started fifth grade last fall, Lee was a new kid at his elementary school. His family had recently moved to the area from Middle Tennessee. Normally outgoing and sociable, he had a hard time making friends. 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 told her he wasn’t sure. The following week, as students walked outside for recess, Lee........