Last month, Swaby published a new installment in her series on Tennessee’s threat laws, on a 12-year-old student who was expelled from his Nashville school for reposting a concerning screenshot to his Instagram account. Experts who were shown the threat assessment the school conducted called it inadequate, with officials making no real effort to determine the validity of the threat. District officials declined to answer detailed questions about the case.
Along with Paige Pfleger of WPLN/Nashville Public Radio, Swaby has also written about a 13-year-old with autism who was arrested despite school officials knowing a stuffed bunny, not a bomb, was in his backpack as well as how one school failed to act on a student who eventually shot and killed a classmate, only suspending him for a few days for threatening another student with a knife. Swaby has covered the lack of comprehensive data to understand how many students are getting swept up by these laws and the outcomes they face.
In October, Swaby and Pfleger reported on an 11-year-old boy who was tracked down and arrested outside a family birthday party. The boy’s school last month agreed to pay his family $100,000 to settle a federal lawsuit claiming school officials wrongly reported him to police. The school district didn’t respond to questions at the time of the investigation, but a spokesperson wrote an email acknowledging the importance of identifying and assessing threats in partnership with police. The school did not respond to questions about the settlement.
I spoke to Swaby about the process of reporting these sensitive stories and what she learned about threat assessments. Our interview has been condensed and edited.
(As a brief aside, this is my last Dispatches newsletter — but you’ll continue hearing from Logan and ProPublica’s journalists every Saturday. Thanks for reading.)
You’ve quoted experts who say zero-tolerance policies don’t actually keep kids safe. Can you explain why?
What the research shows is, especially when you look at kids with disabilities, there are kids who have behavioral issues that get read as dangerous or threatening, and so you end up with higher proportions of those kids being arrested or being expelled. That increases the chances that they will end up in the criminal justice system or dropping out, or both. If you have more kids from your district or from your school ending up in the criminal justice system, they’re still in your community. That doesn’t make you safer.
If you expel a kid for a year and don’t give them any support or intervention for that year, then after that year, they’re back in your school and likely worse off because they have been isolated without a good education. It creates more risk factors.
Can you tell me a little bit more about what we do and don’t know about how many students are being arrested or expelled under this law?
We have some data that’s pretty solid on charges and arrests. It’s not comprehensive — there are juvenile courts that don’t report that data, so it’s definitely an undercount. But in the last fiscal year, there were more than 500 charges of threats of mass violence. We recently got data that the number has increased a ton since it became a felony. The fiscal year isn’t even over, and there’s already 650 charges.
The data we don’t have is how schools are handling this. I went to schools to figure out exactly what they were doing. Some of them didn’t keep the data in ways that they could provide me and some are reporting it inaccurately to the state — I actually ended up collecting more cases of expulsions than the state had record of.
We did get a comprehensive dataset from Hamilton County, which is where Chattanooga is located. They sent us data from the first six weeks of this school year, and it was clear that the kids that were disproportionately affected were Black kids and kids with disabilities. In the research, whenever you have really harsh, broad discipline, those two student groups are the ones that are disproportionately affected. At least in Hamilton County, in the first six weeks, that’s what’s happening.
What would a good threat assessment look like? What was missed in your recent story on a student arrested and expelled for reposting a screenshot of a text exchange that he told school officials had come from the Instagram page of a Spanish-language news site?
A good threat assessment is preventative. An administrator, or whoever is taking charge of the assessment, should talk to as many people who know that kid to try to understand, Is this a pattern? Is this something that we’ve noted before? Does this kid have other issues at home? Does this kid have access to weapons? They both assess whether this kid is in trouble and whether to be worried for other people in the school. You’re trying to figure out, if a child is moving toward making a plan to hurt people, how do you intervene in ways that will divert that plan?
Most of the time, experts say, kids who act out are not actually planning a mass shooting or anything like that. The earliest stage is when they act out, and if you get to them then, you can provide them resources.
In the story you have a kid who posted a screenshot on social media, the FBI flagged it for law enforcement and for the school, and law enforcement ended up arresting him after they confirmed that it was his account. State law doesn’t require them to look at whether or not it’s a threat that’s going to be carried out.
But the law says that the school investigation has to determine whether a threat is valid before you can expel a kid. It seems like in this case, the school took the arrest as their determination that the threat was valid.
There was an option that they could have talked to his parents about whether or not they owned a gun and whether they kept that gun safely locked up, especially if they really thought the child posed a threat. They did not do that. They could have checked to see if he had access to counseling — he had been seeing a school counselor.
If a school is just taking law enforcement’s investigation instead of doing their own investigation, it means they don’t know everything about what’s going on with this kid.
What do you think is important to understand about these policies?
If a state is really set on harsh punishment, if it’s really set on zero tolerance, if it’s really set on tough on crime policies, it makes it harder for schools to actually carry out their threat assessments and interventions. The people who are charged with carrying them out are not fully clear on what their responsibilities are. You have a lot of people erring on the side of: We don’t want another shooting.
The thought process is that it’s better to capture more kids and potentially violate their rights than to allow the one or two dangerous kids who are planning a shooting to slip through the cracks. I think that’s very understandable if you’re pitting the two things against each other, but it means that you’re increasing the risk factors for all these other kids. If your main worry is risk and danger, experts say you are actually potentially creating more danger for your community than preventing it.
