"Don’t Come to School Tomorrow"

The names of all the students involved in this story are being withheld, since they are minors

By: Matt Valentine

The tragic shooting last month at Covenant School in Nashville reignited several familiar debates about how such attacks might be deterred. While prominent Democrats, including President Biden, called for new gun regulations, conservative media pundits wondered whether schools have too many doors, or whether armed school staff might be a solution. (Hint: staff at Covenant School were routinely armed prior to the attack.) The talking points on opposite ends of the political spectrum have little overlap, leaving scant room for compromise or stepwise progress.

If there’s one tiny sliver of agreement, though, it’s that threats of school violence should be reported and investigated. Now, even that commonsense prevention strategy has become contentious – a school district in Texas has punished a student for expressing fears about a school shooting, after she overheard something ominous in gym class.

“Don’t come to school tomorrow.”

At first, the eighth-grader tried to ignore what she’d heard. The words themselves didn’t constitute an explicit threat, but they did raise unsettling connotations. Literally the same warning has been issued preceding armed incidents on several school campuses, such as at a Florida middle school last year and an elementary school one year prior. Following the arrest of yet another Florida middle school student in December for what he called a “terroristic threat,” Washington County Sheriff Kevin Crews told local media outlets the refrain was a familiar one: “You know, ‘don’t come to school tomorrow,’ the same old.”

Going all the way back to the Columbine shooting in 1999, investigations have found that school shooters usually communicate their plans to others before bringing a gun to campus.

So it should be no surprise that these words echoed in the mind of that Texas student who overheard them, and that she became increasingly worried throughout the day. On the way home, she texted her friends and told them she was trying to muster the courage to tell her mother what she’d heard. Twenty minutes later, she did just that—interrupting her mom’s Zoom call because the matter was urgent.

Her mother, Lisa Youngblood, scrambled to find contact information for someone she could reach out to from the school after hours. But before she could place the call, her phone rang. It was the school. Word had spread; they’d determined that the student who’d made the comments “didn’t have access to a gun” (despite, you know, Texas), and that there was no danger.

The next day, the student who’d raised the alarm was called into a meeting with school administration and told that she’d be suspended, and would not be returning to campus for the remainder of the school year. Instead, they expected her to attend an alternative school for students with disciplinary problems – an arrangement that Youngblood characterized as part of the “prison pipeline.”

Following multiple appeals, the eighth grader is now back at her original campus, but only after missing a school dance and weeks of instruction. Her mother says she’s suffered lasting psychological harm from the whole ordeal.

The school and the Lewisville Independent School District maintain that the suspension wasn’t punishment for reporting concerns about a mass shooting, but rather for not reporting those concerns through proper channels, and instead spreading a “rumor” that panicked the community.

In a radio interview for the KCRW program Left, Right, and Center, Youngblood said that her 13-year-old daughter has taken away a different message from her experience. “The saddest part to me is, is that when we had a conversation and I said, ‘If you heard something concerning again, what would you do?’ And she says, ‘Mom, I wouldn’t say anything.’”

Meanwhile, other schools are wrestling with the right way to respond to vague threats of violence, some spurred by a recent viral TikTok challenge. Youngblood said that her daughter’s school’s response sets a dangerous precedent, “because in essence they silenced a person who was astute enough to hear something that might be a problem, and maybe she didn’t escalate it right, but she did escalate it.”

Matt Valentine is co-editor of Campus Carry: Confronting a Loaded Issue in Higher Education (Harvard Education Press, 2020)

Image by Saji Mohamed from Pixabay