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, emailed back. Publishing the data “could lead to threats and/or actual incidents,” the lawyer added.
Several said they didn’t maintain a database that would make it easy or possible to give us the information, citing state public records law they said allowed them to deny the request.
In other instances, districts released incomplete or inconsistent data. Several were willing to tell us how many times their staff investigated alleged threats from students but said they couldn’t share the number who had been expelled. Some lumped together threats of mass violence with a number of other disciplinary offenses, inflating the numbers.
I wondered how lawmakers would be able to assess whether the expulsions were working if they didn’t even know how many students had been expelled. So I asked the state’s Department of Education to let me know what it was seeing. Turns out school districts were also sending their inaccurate data directly to the state. The department told me that school districts had reported about 170 “incidents” of threats of mass violence last school year. But our sample from fewer than 20 school districts showed almost 100 more incidents than that, and I couldn’t get a clear explanation about the discrepancy.
One Nashville reporter found that the Clarksville-Montgomery County School System wrongly reported data about disruptive school incidents, including threats of mass violence. When I reached out to a representative for the district, he told me that it had improved its records but that he couldn’t “pull accurate data for the past.” He recommended I ask the county sheriff’s office for data about the number of students charged with threats of mass violence. (The sheriff’s office had already denied my request, claiming it was confidential information.)
This year, as the legislative session ramped up in Tennessee, I asked Rep. Gloria Johnson, a Democrat and a former special education teacher, to see if she could succeed where I failed. She asked the Education Department for the number of expulsions for threats of mass violence last school year.
Likely due to reporting errors, the department could only definitively confirm 12. Our digging had uncovered 66 expulsions for threats of mass violence across just 10 school districts.
In response to questions about the difficulties I encountered, an Education Department spokesperson said that the agency is training districts on how to accurately report their data.
The spokesperson also said the department had passed along the responsibility of tracking threats of mass violence to the Department of Safety and Homeland Security, which has been helping investigate them at schools. Early this year, I asked that department what it would be tracking and whether any of that data would be public in the future.
That information, a spokesperson responded, was confidential.