A 10-Year-Old Pointed a Finger Gun. The Principal Kicked Him Out of His Tennessee School for a Year.

by Aliyya Swaby
Aug. 23, 6:30 a.m. EDT

Reporting Highlights

- New Law About Threats: A 2023 Tennessee law requires a minimum yearlong expulsion for students who threaten mass violence. Some students were expelled for mildly disruptive behavior.

- More Frequent Expulsions: Expulsions for threats went up in some districts after the law passed, even when the total number of threats remained the same or decreased.

- Police Involvement: Some school administrators handed off the responsibility for dealing with minor incidents to police, resulting in students being arrested and charged.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

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Tennessee school officials have used the law to expel students for mildly disruptive behavior, according to advocates and lawyers across the state who spoke with ProPublica. (In Tennessee and a number of other states, expulsions aren’t necessarily permanent.) Some students have been expelled even when officials themselves determined that the threat was not credible. Lawmakers did put a new fix in place in May that limits expulsions to students who make “valid” threats of mass violence. But that still leaves it up to administrators to determine which threats are valid.

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Paige Pfleger of WPLN contributed reporting.