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.”

Belle was horrified. Lee had never even been sent to school detention before. His grades sometimes flagged, but he had been working hard to improve them. The family didn’t own a gun and Lee would have no idea where to get one. Belle recalls the principal saying on the phone that she knew Lee was a good kid. His punishment, Belle thought, seemed like an extreme overreaction.

The assistant director of schools declined ProPublica’s request for comment, even though Belle signed a form giving school officials permission to speak about Lee’s case.

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.

Over the last couple of years, Tennessee and several other states have been making it easier for schools to suspend or expel students. But study after study has shown that harsh disciplinary practices such as mandatory expulsions are ineffective at reducing violence in schools. What’s more, research shows that such practices often lead to Black students and students with disabilities being disproportionately suspended and expelled, making them more likely to end up in the criminal justice system.

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.

In some cases last school year, administrators handed off the responsibility of dealing with minor incidents to law enforcement. As a result, the type of misbehavior that would normally result in a scolding or brief suspension has led to children being not just expelled but also arrested, charged and placed in juvenile detention, according to juvenile defense lawyers and a recent lawsuit.

While they are expelled, some students have found it hard to get any kind of education. Tennessee allows school districts to decline to enroll students who have been suspended or expelled in another district. Some children expelled for making threats, like Lee, end up staying at home and muddling through online programs alone — or getting no education at all.

Lee’s mom worried that her son’s minor mistake could derail his future. “He’s kind of turned into a little bit of a recluse,” she said. “He doesn’t want to go back to school at all.”

Andrea Morales for ProPublica

Students like Lee who’ve been disciplined for making threats may have trouble finding another school they can attend.

When he started fifth grade last fall, Lee was a new kid at his elementary school. His family had recently moved to the area from Middle Tennessee. Normally outgoing and sociable, he had a hard time making friends. In the second month of the school year, a girl in Lee’s class asked him if he had been vaccinated for COVID-19, Lee’s mom said. Lee told her he wasn’t sure. The following week, as students walked outside for recess, Lee realized his classmates were avoiding him and he had no one to play with, according to his mother. She said he assumed that the girl had spread a rumor that he hadn’t been vaccinated and discouraged others from talking with him.

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.

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.”

Months later, when her concern for her son’s struggles with learning from home made her even angrier about the school’s actions, she consulted a lawyer. But the window to appeal had long passed, and the lawyer told her that the law seemed to allow the school’s actions. “There’s really no point in fighting this,” Belle recalled thinking.

Tennessee makes it difficult to determine how many students have been expelled for threats of mass violence; the state does not collect data on the reasons for expulsions. It asks school districts to inform the state of all incidents related to threats of mass violence, but some districts have reported accidentally sending inaccurate data.

ProPublica requested the number of expulsions for threats of mass violence from the state’s 20 largest school districts as well as five other smaller school districts where we received tips about specific cases. Ten school districts provided those numbers, reporting a total 66 expulsions last school year. Tennessee has nearly 150 school districts.

Several districts provided data showing they expelled students for making threats more often once the law was on the books. For example, Metro Nashville Public Schools reported 42 expulsions for making any type of threat in the 2023-2024 school year, including 16 threats of mass violence. The prior school year, before the law existed, the district expelled 22 students for making any type of threats, despite investigating roughly the same number of incidents. A spokesperson for Metro Nashville Public Schools attributed the increase to the creation of the zero-tolerance law, along with the seriousness of the offenses and “heightened sensitivity and awareness following the Covenant shooting.”

South of Nashville, Rutherford County Schools reported 33 expulsions for making threats last school year, including 27 expulsions specifically for threats of mass violence. The previous school year, it reported just six expulsions for any type of threat, despite investigating a larger number of incidents. When ProPublica asked officials to explain why the number had gone up so significantly, a spokesperson cited a change in state law “that required expulsions for mass threats.”

State law leaves it up to the school districts to decide whether students who have committed a zero-tolerance offense are required to attend alternative school while they are expelled. Some districts, like Metro Nashville, require it, while others, like Rutherford County, do not in most cases. Alternative schools in Tennessee primarily serve students with disciplinary issues who have been suspended or expelled from their traditional schools.

Several school districts told ProPublica that students who make threats of mass violence may be sent to alternative schools without officially being expelled. This past school year, Anderson County Schools, northwest of Knoxville, sent 17 students to its alternative school or offered them virtual education options. Robertson County Schools, just outside of Nashville, sent four students — two 8-year-olds, a 7-year-old and one 6-year-old — to the local alternative school. The 7-year-old and one of the 8-year-olds were removed from their regular schools for an entire calendar year.

A lawsuit filed in May on behalf of two families with children in Williamson County Schools, a suburban Nashville district, illuminates the way some officials hastily removed students from school in response to the new law. The lawsuit was first reported by Tennessee Lookout. It describes how a 14-year-old student was arrested, held in juvenile detention and kept out of school for weeks last August — and alleges that it all stemmed from an unsubstantiated rumor that he had joked about shooting up the school. The complaint said the middle schooler had been talking about another student who he heard bragging about the number of guns his grandfather owned.

The student was sent to the local alternative school, located in the juvenile justice center, where he received a “significantly inferior” education to that offered by his regular school, according to the lawsuit. He sat in a classroom trying to teach himself on a Chromebook while a teacher went over different material with other students in the room.

At first, the school principal told the family that the law required the school to suspend the 14-year-old for a full year. The family appealed the discipline at the school level. When the school denied the appeal, the family then went to the district superintendent. Under the law, only a superintendent can reduce the punishment of a student who makes a threat of mass violence. About a month after the student was suspended, the superintendent allowed him to return to school, saying he had served “an appropriate amount of time” at the alternative school.

After the teenager returned, the principal allegedly told him he never thought of him as a threat and that his suspension was a result of the zero-tolerance law. “You can blame Governor Bill Lee,” the principal told the family, according to the lawsuit.

The Williamson County school board filed a motion in August to dismiss the lawsuit, stating that the students “received all the process they were due under the law.” The 14-year-old was notified of the charges against him and given chances to defend himself, the board wrote in a separate filing, and “the process he was provided worked in his favor by significantly reducing his suspension.”

The school board also said in the filing that threats “made in jest” disrupt students’ learning and strike fear into parents, staff and other students, especially in the aftermath of recent school shootings. “While both threats may not have been serious,” the board wrote, “they nevertheless warranted punishment.”

The board also argued in the filing that school officials had to punish the students to the full extent of the law, noting that its policy “required that Plaintiffs be punished as zero-tolerance offenders regardless of the threat level because they made threats of mass violence.”

The school district did not respond to questions or to requests for its total number of suspensions or expulsions for threats of mass violence.

Tennessee has put in place a safeguard to prevent students from receiving overly harsh punishments for inconsequential threats.

Threat assessments — which bring together school officials and police officers to determine whether students pose a real danger to others — provide context before school officials finalize discipline. They also can help determine whether students need other resources, such as mental health services. Some Tennessee districts have been carrying out threat assessments for more than a decade, but the state only required all school districts to use them starting in 2023. A new state law that went into effect in May clarified that a threat assessment had to be complete and determine a threat was valid before school officials can proceed with expulsion.

But according to parents and juvenile defense lawyers who spoke with ProPublica, school officials often carry out threat assessments inconsistently, with districts using varying definitions for what makes a threat valid or credible. And some officials allow law enforcement to take the lead in incidents that would otherwise be handled at the school level.

“It just essentially delegates all of what should be handled as a relatively minor matter in the school,” said Larry Crain, the lawyer representing the families in the lawsuit against Williamson County’s school board. (A third family recently joined the lawsuit, which also now names the local district attorney as a defendant.) “There’s an almost automatic reaction to anything of this nature that’s referred to law enforcement, which is horrible for the child.”

The lawsuit states that school officials let law enforcement take charge of investigating the 14-year-old’s comments during the threat assessment process. After police arrested the teenager and took him into custody, the principal told parents there was nothing he could do, the lawsuit says.

In its legal response, Williamson County’s school board said state law “compelled” school administrators to report the “threat-related speech” to law enforcement and does not allow any discretion on that matter.

The district attorney for the 21st Judicial District did not respond to a request for comment.

The tenor of a disciplinary investigation or threat assessment often becomes more serious once law enforcement gets involved, lawyers and advocates told ProPublica. A recent analysis by the Government Accountability Office found that arrest rates more than doubled in schools with police compared to those without and that arrests were more common when police were involved in student discipline.

Cashauna Lattimore, an assistant public defender in East Tennessee, has represented several students in cases involving threats of mass violence over the last few years. All of them, she said, were expelled, and most were arrested.

Lattimore described the alleged details of one incident from last school year: In the Jefferson County School District, a high school student who was known as a class clown made an offhand joke about committing an act of violence. Rumors spread among the students about his comment, warping it in the process. He was called to the principal’s office, where a waiting police officer asked whether he had a gun in his backpack. He showed them that he didn’t and insisted that he had just been making a joke, encouraging them to search his house if they didn’t believe him. Law enforcement did not send anyone to his home. School officials initiated a threat assessment and gathered statements from the students who heard the joke, which were then used as evidence against him. He was expelled for a year.

The school’s investigation was not intended to protect the student from unfair discipline, Lattimore said. “That was to make their case against this young man. It was not to determine whether or not the threat was real.”

According to data that the Jefferson County School District provided to ProPublica, just two students were expelled for making threats last school year, even though in both cases the threats were labeled as “transient,” which the district describes as having “no sustained intent to harm.” In both cases, according to the district’s data, the students were also charged in juvenile court. Conversely, several students made what the district considered to be “substantive” threats, but none were charged or expelled.

School officials declined to answer questions from ProPublica about the disparities that the data revealed or the case Lattimore described.

Lattimore said schools should help keep students who don’t pose a threat from being arrested instead of referring the incidents to law enforcement. “They’re taking the easy way out so that they as the educational entity don’t have to deal with it,” she said. “Because once law enforcement gets involved, they can just expel the kid and wash their hands of it.”

After a student is disciplined for making a threat of mass violence, no matter the specifics of the incident, the punishment can function like a scarlet letter.

The 14-year-old boy whose family sued Williamson County Schools has transformed from a top student into a disengaged one, according to the lawsuit. He has struggled to make up assignments he missed during the weekslong appeals process. Once he returned, he noticed classmates gossipping behind his back, saying they were scared of him and falsely calling him a drug dealer. “He suffered a severe and serious emotional injury and was unable to adequately cope with the mental stress engendered by the circumstances of his case,” the lawsuit says.

Lee, who turned 11 during his expulsion, also struggled to adjust. Instead of sitting in a classroom in front of his teacher, he spent the rest of the school year and summer with his mother in her small home office, using an online program to finish fifth grade. He complained to Belle when her phone calls to her boss and colleagues distracted him from his lessons.

In some ways, Belle has watched her son drift backward, becoming less able to emotionally regulate without the structure of a school day or the opportunity to regularly socialize with kids his own age. Just before the expulsion, he had finally caught up to grade level in math after falling behind during pandemic remote learning. But while learning from home, he howled in frustration when he couldn’t understand a math problem. Belle took time to help him with his lessons, which sometimes meant relearning the subject herself — and falling behind on her own work. She sent him up to his room to play video games to give him a mental break between assignments. “It is pulling teeth every single day,” Belle said.

In late July, after school administrators declined to comment to ProPublica on Lee’s case, Belle emailed the director of schools and asked her to shorten the expulsion. Belle hoped he could start his first year of middle school on day one rather than weeks later. The director of schools responded that he could start middle school immediately. “Before any expulsion was put into place,” the email stated, “you chose to remove him … and homeschool him. Therefore, the expulsion was never activated.” (The original letter Belle received was clear about Lee’s expulsion, and a follow-up two days later explained that Lee was barred from re-enrolling regardless of whether he was withdrawn to be homeschooled. District officials did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the expulsion not being activated.)

Belle was overwhelmed by a mix of confusion, relief and apprehension at the news that her son would be returning to school. She wrote a long email to all of Lee’s teachers introducing herself and explaining that he might need a bit of extra help filling gaps in his knowledge after months of homeschooling. “I will do what I can to get him in a good place,” she wrote.

But Belle still worries that her son will struggle in school or make another mistake. She wonders if she should quit her job so she can homeschool him full time. It’s not an easy choice, but she wants to protect him from what might happen at school.