After a shooter killed six people at Nashville’s Covenant School in 2023, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature ignored calls to pass gun control measures. Instead, they passed a series of increasingly punitive laws aimed not only at preventing future violence but dissuading kids from making threats that disrupt school and terrify other students.
Two contradictory laws went into effect before this school year began. One requires school officials to expel a student only if their investigation finds the threat is “valid,” a term that the law does not define. The other mandates that police charge people, including kids, with felonies for making threats of any kind, credible or not. As a result, students across the state can be arrested for statements that wouldn’t even get them expelled.
Tennessee has not yet released statewide data on how many arrests for threats of mass violence have been made since school started in August. But Hamilton County arrested 18 students in the first six weeks of the school year, more than twice as many as Nashville’s Davidson County — despite Hamilton having far fewer students. Data that ProPublica and WPLN obtained through a records request shows that at least 519 students were charged with threats of mass violence last school year, when it was a misdemeanor, an increase from 442 the prior year. Many of them were middle schoolers and most were boys. The youngest child charged last school year was 7 years old.
Went back to a TN high school recently for the first time since graduating to do some work.
They had to call local police to check my tool box to make sure it didn’t have a gun hidden anywhere, which took almost an hour.
Every single door is locked constantly. Every classroom is locked with a key, so anyone needing to get inside needs the knock to be let in and disturb class. If the teacher needs to go to the bathroom between periods, all the students not already in the class are locked outside.
At one point, I left a door propped open cause I didn’t want to disturb the people running lines. The principal, who used to be my principal at another school, attempted to give yell at me over it.
They’ve also distributed an iPad to every student to act as a hall pass. Except they have to request the pass, raise their hand, ask to use the bathroom, then the teacher has to pull out their iPad and approve it. All of this takes a ton of time.
Starting this year, they only get 3 passes a day. Period. Anymore and the principal has to approve it personally or it’s detention. They have nothing in place to make it so kids with intestinal issues can have more passes, and this systems been in place for 3 years now. Every student I talked to told me they knew someone who pissed their pants in class because they weren’t allowed to leave under threat of detention or suspension.
TN schools and TN in general is just fucked beyond belief now. And the people who put all these ridiculous policies into place are all currently running unopposed.
The Covenant School shooting and moronic conservative parents having an insane amount of control has straight up regresses TN schools to a worse point of security theatre than post columbine or 9/11. All over a single shooting.
Edit: apologies for my horrendous grammar. However, I’m currently too tired to fix it right now
Wow that’s horrible, and has to be terrible for kids’ mental health and general perspective on the world. Kids should know what freedom feels like and expect it as the default, and this kind of repression is liable to result in more outbursts of any kind.