Five new Hamilton County school board members elected in August attend their first school board meeting Thursday. From left are Larry Grohn, Steve Slater, Jackie Thomas, Vice Chair Karitsa Jones, Ben Daugherty, Chair Joe Smith, Gary Kuehn, Jodi Schaffer, Felice M. Hadden, Jill Black and Ben Connor.
photo by Hannah Campbell
The Hamilton County school board meeting room Thursday night was full of scared parents concerned about school safety.
Almost every day since school began in mid-August, local public middle and high schools have been plagued by threats of violence, student arrests and weapons confiscated on campus.
Hamilton County Sheriff Austin Garrett on Wednesday morning told members of the County Commission, "Our schools are the safest they've ever been."
Superintendent Dr. Justin Robertson said Thursday he agrees with Sherrif Garrett.
“I believe that that is true,” he said, and pointed out that county schools had received more threats two years ago.
“This is not something that is new to us,” he said.
Dr. Robertson asked the board to establish a safety committee, which extracts school safety from the school facilities umbrella. One parent asked the board to hire professionals to develop safety plans and take the job out of the hands of school administrators.
Speakers had an array of suggestions and complaints, from ditching impotent restorative justice practices, adding metal detectors at every school and even a pitch for “AI-augmented” cameras that detect fights and track guilty students through the building as they scatter. This speaker offered a free pilot to East Hamilton Middle/High School.
Parents asked for better communication when a school has received a threat. One parent said there is state lottery money “sitting in a bank account” that will cover free metal detectors for every school, from shipping to installation.
The mood was heightened by school board member Ben Connor’s proposed resolution in support of a Tennessee law which allows schools to validate a threat of mass violence before turning a student over to law enforcement to be charged with a felony.
The Tennessee School Boards Association is asking the state to unify state code language in two places to specify that a mass threat by a student must first be judged “valid” by school officials for the student to be punished outside of the school system.
Mr. Connor withdrew his resolution for further study after a parent asked board members to vote no on the resolution. She said inconsistent, school-by-school punishments will water down the seriousness of a threat. She said any threat, though dubbed invalid, may lead to a shooting, pointing out that the shooter at Apalachee High School Sept. 4 had made a documented threat last year.
Dr. Robertson said that many of Hamilton County’s recent threats have been made by middle school boys “that are obviously inappropriate,” but that school officials must “use discretion” when deciding to charge that student with a felony.
Dr. Robertson’s comments align with Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp’s statements at the Friends of Hixson meeting Wednesday when advocating for a downtown career and technical school at the Gateway building.
“I’m particularly worried about boys today,” Mayor Wamp had said. “I get the sense that a bunch of them are bored.”
The school board re-elected Joe Smith as chairman and named Karitsa Jones as vice chair.