This story was originally published by the Nashville Banner. Sign up for their newsletter at nashvillebanner.com/newsletters.
On the afternoon of Feb. 5, the parents of students at Inglewood’s Dan Mills Elementary received an email to inform them of “a situation that occurred at school today.”
“A student made a threatening statement, and we immediately followed district protocols, including notifying law enforcement,” Executive Principal Robby Yates wrote. “Metro Nashville Police responded to the school and have been actively investigating the matter. The student involved has been removed from campus, and authorities are conducting a further review.”
The Metro Nashville Police Department did not announce an arrest related to that incident. But the following day, officers arrested a 12-year-old student at Head Middle School near Midtown. He’d been identified as the child responsible for “a concerning post on social media” that included “a threat to shoot up the school.” He was charged with making a threat of mass violence against a school, which is now a felony in Tennessee.
When it comes to student safety, Nashville’s 2024-25 school year, which ended two weeks ago, was marked by a fatal shooting at Antioch High School on Jan. 22. On that day, 17-year-old Solomon Henderson opened fire with a pistol in the school cafeteria, killing 16-year-old Josselin Corea Escalante and grazing another student before turning the gun on himself. But the academic calendar was pocked throughout with other incidents in which students — including some as young as 11 and 12 years old — were arrested for making threats of violence or falsely reporting them. According to data from the Police Department’s School Safety Division, there were 44 students arrested for threats of violence in Metro schools this year compared to just 12 the year before. There were also 15 arrests related to possessing a gun on school property.
The nearly four-fold increase in arrests related to threats is not necessarily an indication of an increase in talk of violence among Nashville’s student body. Since the Covenant School shooting in 2023, Tennessee legislators have passed laws ratcheting up the consequences for threats of mass violence by students, first requiring expulsion for the offense and then elevating it to a felony last year. The increase in arrests that followed — and the Police Department press releases that accompanied them — put a spotlight on the fine line between frivolous and violent intent and the complicated questions surrounding it.
MEDIA MICROSCOPE
A series of articles by ProPublica, in partnership with WPLN’s Paige Pfleger, has documented and scrutinized the effect of Tennessee’s increasingly punitive laws related to threats of violence at school, real or perceived. A 10-year-old in East Tennessee was expelled from school in 2023 for pointing his finger in the shape of a gun. In January, two families in Chattanooga sued the school district there over the arrests of an 11-year-old and 13-year-old for allegedly threatening violence. In January, following the shooting at Antioch High School, a 12-year-old student at DuPont Tyler Middle School in Nashville was arrested for making a threat of mass violence even though his father said he’d only posted a screenshot of a threatening text exchange with the naive but sincere goal of sounding the alarm. Last week, ProPublica reported that the student’s arrest and expulsion came after school officials conducted a threat assessment improperly.
The heightened scrutiny about how schools respond to such incidents, and the highly sensitive nature of them, has made parents, teachers and school administrators reluctant to discuss the issue.
Many of the Nashville Banner’s requests for interviews received either no response or one pointing to the ProPublica coverage as a reason to decline.
CLASSROOM PERSPECTIVE
Metro Nashville Public Schools spokesperson Sean Braisted said the district could not provide anyone for an interview about school threats. Asked whether he could provide the number of incidents that were reported to police but did not lead to an arrest, Braisted said he was not aware of any system for tracking such cases. A school official reporting a potential threat, he said, can often be as simple as telling the school resource officer assigned to the school. These officers often work with threat assessment teams at the school or district level to review the matter.
Braisted said he didn’t anticipate any major changes to district policies around threats or school safety. But the district has put Evolv concealed weapons detectors in place at all high schools. The company behind those detectors is the same one that provided the AI weapons detection software that failed to detect the gun in the Antioch shooting. However, the Evolv detectors were credited with detecting three guns at Nashville schools in May.
The Banner did speak to two Metro teachers who work at schools where students were arrested this year.
Paige La Grone Babcock teaches sixth grade literature at Apollo Middle School, where she’s worked for eight years. A 12-year-old student there was arrested in January for allegedly threatening to shoot four of his classmates around dismissal time and showing one of them a picture of a gun, according to police. He was one of eight Metro Nashville Public School children arrested for making school threats in the days after the Antioch shooting.
La Grone Babcock was on leave when the incident occurred, she said. But she recalled the way she started hearing about it in her group text with fellow teachers. She praised the team of administrators at Apollo for their thoughtful response to the situation and others like it.
“I know there’s not going to be a knee-jerk response to something, nor is there going to be a disregard of something,” she said.
She also spoke optimistically about the school’s social-emotional learning program, which focuses on teaching students to recognize and manage their emotions, along with developing healthy relationships and other life skills. The approach has come under attack by Trump administration officials, but La Grone Babcock said it has helped students feel more confident reporting things they see or hear that make them feel unsafe. She emphasized the importance of an environment that creates a holistic sense of safety.
“I don’t just mean safety from bombs or guns or knives or whatever, but just emotional safety … to show up in a classroom and be who they are,” she said. “Because if a kid can’t make a mistake in a classroom, they’re not going to be able to learn.”
At the same time, she stressed the importance of having “a lot of eyes” on threatening posts or comments that are reported.
“Did it actually come from them?” she said, reciting the questions that have to be asked. “Are they actually sharing something that they’re worried about? Are they spreading something because, as a 10, 11, 12-year-old, drama is intriguing and compelling? What is the motivation behind it?”
Noting how many of the incidents include something seen or said on social media, she questioned whether “our kids fully understand what the consequences of what they’re doing and saying are.”
That question is especially pertinent when it comes to younger students. One source, who asked not to be identified to protect the privacy of the children involved, shared an anecdote about an elementary school student who was reported to police after making a comment about TNT — an explosive compound he only knew of as a feature of the video game Minecraft.
‘MORE GRACE’
But there are also incidents involving real weapons in real life.
In August, a 17-year-old McGavock High School student was arrested after school administrators caught him with a vape pen and subsequently found a handgun in his car. In December, an 11th grader at the school was arrested for having a rifle-style pellet gun in his vehicle along with a machete and hunting knife, although he said the weapons had only been left there after a hunting trip. The following month, a day after the Antioch shooting, an 18-year-old student was arrested for having a handgun in his backpack while playing basketball in the gym after school.
He was one of Jacob Gambrell’s students. Gambrell has been a Spanish teacher at McGavock for two years. He’s also the father of a student at Dan Mills Elementary, where the principal alerted families to a student threat in February. Without getting into the details of his student’s arrest, he said he hoped the legal system handled it as what he believed was a more innocent mistake than it might have appeared.
When it comes to students accused of making threats, he thought out loud about the tension between taking potential violence seriously and understanding the youthful context these incidents arise from. He said he thinks a lot of Tennessee’s laws are “too draconian.”
“I understand the motivation and the mindset behind the law, behind the policies when it comes to threats,” he said. “But I wish there was a little more grace in the system.”
With Tennessee’s laws as they are, Gambrell said one thing that’s needed is more education for students — at home and at school — about what they can and can’t say at school and how to appropriately express themselves online.
“I teach high schoolers and I’ll have students go, ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna kill myself,'” he said. “I have to be like, ‘Please don’t use that language. I know what you’re conveying by that language, but that’s a serious thing to say.'”
La Grone Babcock observed that a common thread connecting many young people who commit violent acts or threaten them is a sense of isolation.
“The antidote to that from my perspective, as an adult who I hope goes in not just to teach the way to write an argumentative essay or figure out what the metaphorical language in a novel is, is a sense of belonging and unity and place,” she said. “A sense of how we are part of a community and that we belong to each other and we really must take care of one another.”
This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.