When the mother in Tennessee stretched in Prapublica last year to share her 10-year-old, she was expelled from school for preparing a finger pistol, she wondered how many other children survived the same thing.
Recently, the state has adopted laws that reinforce the punishment for the threat of mass violence at school, including demanding many years of expulsion. Among the supporters and lawyers there were many speculations on how wide school and law enforcement agencies would apply the law. As a perennial reporter who has experience in the discipline of students, I suggested that I would be able to get significant data to help me understand whether this 10 years of work experience was.
After a few months of the investigation, I found that state laws led to a wave of expulsion and arrest for children who are accused of massive violence, sometimes following rumors and misunderstandings.
But during the publication of stories on that is a 10-year-old guy and Other children arising from these lawsI realized that the process of determining how many students suffered was more unpleasant than lighting. I learned that Tennessee gives state agencies a wide latitude to refuse the release of data that may detect whether the laws work as intended or must be corrected. And because of the inconsistencies in how the school districts collect and report information, the legislators themselves sometimes come as in the dark as the public.
I started the search by asking a couple of dozen school districts, including the 20 largest in the state, how many students they expelled for the threat of mass violence over the past few years. I also wanted to, if possible, demographics of these students. I live in Georgia, and Tennessee allows the agencies to deny the requests of people without Tennessee addresses – so I collaborated with Page Pfleger from WPLN NEWS in Nashville, who for many years conducted reports of weapons and criminal justice in Tennessee.
Tennessee as all the states, must submit a school disciplinary data to the federal governmentAnd it requires that the school districts collect this data throughout the year. Some areas such as the Nashville subway, public schools and schools reserford gave us numbers relatively easily, showing that they expelled students for threatening more often when the law on zero tolerance in books, despite the study of a similar or less incidents.
But other constituencies fought against the release of data, claiming that in some cases the exchange of any of this basic information violates their students’ privacy or even leading to violence on their towns. “We believe that this would have a negative impact on our security plans and safety operations,” – a private lawyer of the school system of Putnam, east of Nashville, sent an email. Data publication “can lead to threats and/or real incidents,” the lawyer added.
Stands out from this series
A few said they did not support the database that would allow us to easily or can give us information, referring to the law on state state reports, which, they said, allowed them to refuse the request.
In other cases, the counties published incomplete or inconsistent data. Some were ready to tell how many times their staff investigated allegedly threats to students, but said they could not share the number that was expelled. Some fell threats to mass violence with a number of other disciplinary crimes, inflating the numbers.
I was wondering how the lawmakers would be able to evaluate whether the expulsions were working if they didn’t even know how many students were expelled. So I asked the State Department of Education to inform me what it sees. It turns out that the school districts also directed their inaccurate data directly to the state. The Department informed me that in the school districts last academic year, 170 “incidents” of mass violence were reported in the school districts. But our sample with less than 20 school districts showed nearly 100 incidents than that, and I couldn’t get a clear explanation about the inconsistency.
One reporter Nashville found that it discovered The Clarksvil-Monthomers’ school system mistakenly reported on data on devastating school incidents, including the threat of mass violence. When I addressed the area representative, he told me it improved my records, but that it couldn’t “pull out the exact data for the past.” He recommended me to ask a sheriff’s district office for the number of students accused of mass violence. (Sheriff’s service has already denied my request, saying it was confidential information.)
This year, when Tennessee intensified the legislative session, I asked Gloria representative Johnson, the Democrat and the former special education teacher to find out if she could succeed where I failed. She asked the education department about the number of expulsion for the threat of mass violence last academic year.
Probably because of the error -in reporting, the department could only finally confirm 12. Our digging revealed 66 expulsions to threaten mass violence in only 10 school districts.
In response to questions about the difficulties I encountered, the press -secretary of the education department stated that the agency was training in the districts, how to report on my data.
The press secretary also stated that the Department took responsibility for tracking the threats to the Security and Internal Security Department, which helps to investigate them in schools. Earlier this year, I asked the department what would be monitored and whether in the future it will be any of these data.
This information, the press -secretary, replied, was confidential.
