One School Proposes Handguns for Professors in Wake of VT Shootings

As Nashville colleges reassess their campus security, at least one school official wants to partially loosen restrictions on guns. Chief of security for Nashville School of Law, John Claybon, says he wants to have several instructors licensed to carry and trained to use a handgun on campus. “If we have one person in that office […]

The Metro Police Department is offering a free threat vulnerability assessment for Nashville colleges and universities. Captain Anthony Carter of Metro’s special operations division calls it a first step toward tightening security on campuses following last week’s shootings at Virginia Tech. “We have pretty much just been inundated with doing all the high schools, grades […]

Dickson County is turning to the ground to increase its road fund. After years of requests from the county’s highway department, the county commission voted last week to create a mineral severance tax. While the state reserves the right to tax coal mines, natural gas and crude oil, counties can look to five kinds of […]

The governing board of the Tennessee Valley Authority is scheduled to vote at the end of next month on a blueprint that will direct future growth of the public utility. A public hearing will be held tonight at the Cool Springs Marriot in Franklin on what’s being called a 10-year strategic plan. It addresses how […]

Governor Phil Bredesen’s cigarette tax increase is closely tied to the state’s funding formula for education, called B-E-P, the Basic Education Program. How the governor wants to spend the money from the cigarette tax increase varies dramatically from how some legislators want it spent under the BEP. The BEP is the mathematical formula by which […]

If you have an idea to improve the city of Nashville, now’s the chance to voice it.  Tomorrow is the last day that Nashville’s Agenda will be accepting comments. First put together in 1993, Nashville’s Agenda brought ideas together about how to improve the city.  It led to the creation of the Frist Center for […]

The Cumberland Trail State Park is about to become 300 acres larger. Tomorrow, Crossville-based Plateau Properties will make an outright gift of its holdings on Brady Mountain to the Tennessee Parks and Greenways Foundation.  General Manager Rob Harrison says the timeline has been sped up because his family wanted to honor legendary Tennessee trails advocate […]

The city of Franklin is slowly piecing back together the site of its famous civil war battle…one parcel at a time. The task force charged by the city to oversee the process approved the purchase of three-and-a-half acres yesterday for the deeply discounted price of 45-thousand dollars. It had been spared from commercial development in […]

School officials at Virginia Tech say they knew through his disturbed writing that the student who became Monday morning’s shooter needed help. But a federal privacy law makes contacting parents difficult if not impossible. Tennessee is trying to get around that, but only if the students will allow it. Middle Tennessee State University tested out […]

The shootings this week at Virginia Tech echoed a problem that Tennessee tried to address two years ago. Authorities at the Virginia campus say they knew the student who became the shooter needed help — but were barred by federal privacy law from informing his parents. In 2005, Senator Rosalind Kurita of Clarksville guided a […]