A few days ago I covered the new "discipline matrix" unveiled by the Denver Public Schools, which could put kids who carry a gun into school back on campus after a three-day suspension. The soft punishments deployed by the district in response to serious crimes are downright nonsensical, but some school districts can be just as extreme in the opposite direction; offering unduly harsh punishments for minor infractions or even kids being kids.
At first glance, that appears to be the case in a district in east Tennessee, where a mom claims her son was suspended from school for a year after he pointed his index finger and thumb in the shape of a pistol.
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.”
Now, if this was the entire story, I'd say the school overreacted. But when ProPublica placed the blame for the school's punishment on Republican lawmakers, I had a sneaking suspicion there might be more details than what was included in their lede.
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.
Did "Lee" actually make a threat? While ProPublica initially presented Lee's suspension as the result of just making a finger gun, later in the story they reveal that there was a little more to it. According to his mom, Lee was a relatively new student at the elementary school and was having trouble making friends. One afternoon at recess, he noticed other students avoiding him, and voiced his frustration to a fellow student as they were walking into the building.
As the fifth graders filed back into the school at the end of recess, Lee expressed his frustration to a classmate, Belle told ProPublica. Her son told her that he said, “I’m so angry, I could just —” and then folded his hand into a gun shape and mimicked a machine gun’s staccato. According to Belle, the classmate reported what Lee had said to a teacher, who told school administrators.
Well, that's a little different than just angrily pointing his finger in the shape of a gun, isn't it? And ProPublica also waited until deep in the story to reveal that Lee might have been able to return to school, but his mom chose not to appeal the disciplinary action.
The principal’s letter, which offers scant details of the incident, gave Belle the option to appeal the expulsion, but Belle instead decided to homeschool Lee. She worried that teachers and other students at the school would consider Lee a bad kid, especially given the pervasive fear in the months after the Nashville school shooting. “I was like, ‘These people are going to totally overreact about this,’” she said. “There’s no way that they would be able to treat him fairly after this.”
Maybe that is the case, but if so, it wouldn't just be the punishment that teachers and students would be reacting to. "Belle" never said what she thought an appropriate reaction to a kid saying he wished he could shoot his classmates would be, but a statement like that is bound to generate some consternation among students and staff, and rightfully so.
But speaking of fairness, I'd say it's unfair for ProPublica to present this as a problem created by the legislative response to the Covenant school shootings.
ProPublica headlined their story on Lee's suspension "A 10-Year-Old Pointed a Finger Gun. The Principal Kicked Him Out of His Tennessee School for a Year", which leaves out some pretty critical pieces of information. A more accurate headline would have been "10-Year-Old Suspended From School After Saying He Was So Angry He Could Shoot His Classmates".
Was a year-long suspension appropriate? We only have ProPublica's version of the story to go by, but based solely on their reporting I'd say it's an excessive punishment. It's also one that could have been appealed, but Belle decided to pull her child from the school system entirely instead. I don't blame her for making that call, but I also don't blame Republican lawmakers for the actions of the school district. If there was an overreaction, it was on the part of district officials, not legislators in Nashville.
