Georgia’s top GOP lawmaker seeks tougher action against students who make threats. But it may not make schools safer

Caption

Apalachee High School students and people from the broader Barrow County community gathered for a prayer vigil in a city park after the shooting deaths of four at the school Sept. 4, 2024.

Credit: Grant Blankenship/GPB News

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A year ago, sheriff’s deputies in Georgia showed up on the doorstep of middle school student Colt Gray. They were there to question him about an online threat to shoot up his school. Last week, the 14-year-old was charged with shooting and killing four people at Apalachee High School.

As details continue to emerge, the question now in front of Georgia legislators is: How should officials respond to these kinds of warning signs in the future?

Lawmakers are already indicating that they intend to take tougher action against students who make threats. In a Sept. 12 letter to members of the state House Republican Caucus, House Speaker Jon Burns wrote that one of his objectives in the next legislative session will be to “increase penalties for making terroristic threats in our schools — and make it clear that here in Georgia, threats of violence against our students will not be tolerated and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” (Burns did not respond to a request for comment.)

But, as ProPublica has reported this year, there can be consequences to increasing penalties: trampling the rights of children who don’t pose a threat to anyone.

Two weeks before the Apalachee shooting, we published a story about a 10-year-old in Tennessee who was expelled from school for a year after he angrily pointed his finger in the shape of a gun. The article explored how a state law, passed in response to last year’s Covenant School shooting in Nashville that left six people dead, requires schools to kick students out for making threats of mass violence.

Another Tennessee law went into effect in July that increases the charge for making a threat of mass violence from a misdemeanor to a felony — without requiring officials to take actual intent into account. Many experts and some officials consider both laws an overreach.

There is no indication that the Tennessee 10-year-old whose case we examined posed a danger to his school or his community. The fifth grader had no access to a firearm, according to his mother. She said school officials described him as a good kid and expressed regret at having to expel him. (The assistant director of his school district declined to comment, even after his mother signed a form permitting school officials to do so.)

Meanwhile, Georgia law enforcement officials were warned a year ago that Gray was making threats, and they heard directly from his father that the teenager had access to guns. (School officials said the warnings were never passed on to them.)

As Georgia lawmakers consider what they can do to keep students safer, experts say they should consider the implications their decisions may have for a broad spectrum of children — from the 14-year-old with access to assault rifles to the 10-year-old pointing a finger gun. People who study the warning signs of and legislative reactions to school shootings have long warned that zero-tolerance policies, such as the ones Tennessee adopted, are not proven to make schools safer — and in fact can harm students.

To deter violence, experts maintain, the research suggests that the most effective strategy is not mandatory expulsions and felony charges but a different kind of tactic, one that federal officials have touted based on decades of interviews with mass shooters, political assassins and people who survived attacks. Threat assessments, when done effectively, bring together mental health professionals, law enforcement and others in the community to help school officials sort out the credible threats from the simply disruptive acts and provide students with needed help.

“It is the best option available for us to prevent these kinds of shootings,” said Dewey Cornell, a psychologist and a leading expert on the use of threat assessments in schools. A threat assessment team is supposed to interview anyone involved with a threat to assess whether the student poses an imminent risk to others. And it is supposed to warn any intended victims of major threats, take precautions to protect them and seek ways to resolve conflict.

Cornell said law enforcement involvement and harsh discipline should be reserved for the most serious cases — the exact opposite of zero-tolerance policies. Tennessee, along with 20 other states, requires threat assessments in schools. But because the state also mandates expulsions and felony charges, many students end up ostracized and isolated rather than getting the ongoing help that experts consider to be one of the greatest strengths of the threat assessment process.

The suggestion that schools and authorities should closely monitor and assist students who make threats may feel counterintuitive, especially with fear and frustration soaring, said Mark Follman, a journalist with Mother Jones and author of the 2022 book “Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America.”

It’s also easy to understand why people want a punitive response to threats, Follman said, but it can make the problem worse. Expelling a student who is potentially dangerous means school officials and others have little ability to monitor them. And, crucially, “you’re also potentially exacerbating their sense of crisis, their grievance, especially if it involves the school,” he said, moving them toward a point of attack instead of away from it.

For his book, Follman interviewed leading experts on threat assessments and embedded with a team at a school district in Oregon. He points out that for the threat assessment process to work, it has to be carried out correctly. “Most, if not all, examples I have seen of stories about threat assessment having negative impact on students and families are cases in which it’s not being done right,” Follman said.

Tennessee school officials carry out threat assessments inconsistently, our story last month found. Some allow police to take the lead in minor incidents, resulting in criminal charges for kids who made threats that school officials themselves did not consider credible.

At least one Tennessee lawmaker is responding to the shooting in Georgia by saying it validates the harsh penalties for students who make threats. Tennessee state Sen. Jon Lundberg, who co-sponsored both punitive Tennessee laws, told the Chattanooga Times Free Press this week, “The legislature is constantly looking at, What else can we do?”

This story comes to GPB through a reporting partnership with ProPublica