CW: Arrests, Restraint, & Seclusion
13-year-old Ty attends school in Hamilton County, Tennessee. At the beginning of the school year, he wanted to show his friends his stuffed rabbit. He put it in his backpack while his mother wasn’t looking.
Bonnie the Rabbit is one of the stars of Five Nights at Freddy’s, his favorite video game franchise, which was celebrating its tenth anniversary. Bonnie is Ty’s greatest source of comfort when he becomes upset or depressed due to his autism. Ty is the only one allowed to touch Bonnie.
At Ooltewah Middle School, which is situated just east of Chattanooga, Ty was new. Ty and his mother say that he informed his teacher in class that morning that he didn’t want anyone to look in his backpack because he was afraid they would take away his toy. Ty and his mother remembered that when the teacher asked why, Ty said, “Because the whole school will blow up.”
Ty’s mother reported that school officials acted quickly: the teacher, who had only known Ty for one day, called a school administrator, who contacted the police. They took Ty to the counselor’s office and discovered Bonnie in his backpack. As Ty stood there, confused as to what he had done wrong, the police handcuffed and patted him down before putting him in the back of a police cruiser.
“I think they thought an actual bomb was in my backpack,” Ty told ProPublica and WPLN. But he did not have a bomb. “It was just this, right here,” he stated while clutching Bonnie. “And they still took me to jail.”
Ty’s arrest was the result of a new state law. It requires anyone who threatens mass violence at school to face felony charges. The law does not require the threat to be credible.
Following the Covenant School Shooting, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the law. Threatening mass violence against a school or on school grounds is a Class E felony under the law. The law went into effect on July 1, 2024.
Advocates warned Tennessee lawmakers during this year’s legislative session that the law would be especially harmful to students who are prone to frequent outbursts or disruptive behavior as a result of their disability.
An exemption for those with intellectual disability was allowed by lawmakers. Ty also has autism, according to his mother and a psychological report from the school district, and an intellectual disability as defined by Tennessee law. However, the family’s attorney stated that there is no proof that police considered that or even looked into Ty’s disability before handcuffing and arresting him.
How police should establish if children have intellectual disabilities before prosecuting them is not specified in the legislation. Republican co-sponsor of the bill and Tennessee House Speaker Rep. Cameron Sexton said Ty’s example indicates that “there may need to be more training and resources” for law enforcement and school officials.
The law’s co-sponsor, Nashville Democrat Rep. Bo Mitchell, expressed his belief that the exemption for children with intellectual disabilities would be sufficient to prevent arrests of children like Ty. According to him, “No one passed that law in order for a child with any type of disability to be charged.”
However, the law was still required to help stop hoaxes that threatened to interrupt class and frighten kids. “I don’t know whose level of trauma is going to be the greatest: the kids in the classroom wondering if there’s an active shooter roaming their halls or a kid that didn’t know better and says something like that and gets arrested,” Mitchell said. “It’s a no-win situation.”
Since the implementation of the law in July, the state has not gathered data on how Ty and other disabled children have been affected. Hamilton County data offers a limited picture. The school year began with 18 children arrested for threatening mass violence throughout the first six weeks. Of these, one-third are disabled, which is more than twice as many as the district’s overall percentage of disabled students.
Unfortunately, Hamilton County Schools is part of a national trend in recent years. According to Office for Civil Rights data, disabled students were overrepresented in school and out-of-school suspensions and expulsions relative to their enrollment. Despite making up 14% of overall enrollment, during the 2020–2021 school year, they represented 24% of out-of-school suspensions, 18% percent of in-school suspensions, and 17% of arrests.
The data also showed students who were served by The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) were considerably more likely than others to be restrained or secluded. Those students accounted for 32% of those mechanically restrained, 81% of students who were physically restrained, and 75% of those who were secluded.
There are racial disparities as well. During the 2017-2018 school year, 25% of Black disabled students were suspended, compared to 11% of their White disabled peers. Black middle and high school disabled students are more likely to be suspended than their non-Black peers by more than 40%. Black disabled students are also more likely to be reported to law enforcement.
In the United States, disabled students are entitled to an appropriate public education that is provided free of charge. However, these students are often subjected to unfair punishment and higher disciplinary rates. Laws in states like Tennessee will make the problem worse.
Sources:
Diament, Michelle. “Ed Department Finds Students with Disabilities Disproportionately Disciplined.” Disability Scoop, Disability Scoop, 16 Nov. 2023, http://www.disabilityscoop.com/2023/11/16/ed-department-finds-students-with-disabilities-disproportionately-disciplined/30638/. 
McCullough, Erin. “Lawsuit Challenges TN School Threat Laws.” WKRN, Nexstar Media Group, 4 Nov. 2024, http://www.wkrn.com/news/tn-school-threat-lawsuit/.
Poe, Cheryl. “Education a Civil Rights Issue for Black Students with Disabilities & Families.” The 74, The 74, 9 Aug. 2023, http://www.the74million.org/article/education-a-civil-rights-issue-for-black-students-with-disabilities-families/.
Rozalski, Michael, et al. ‘Free Appropriate Public Education, the U.S. Supreme Court, and Developing and Implementing Individualized Education Programs’. Laws, vol. 10, May 2021, p. 38, https://doi.org/10.3390/laws10020038.
Swaby, Aliyya, and Paige Pfleger. “A 13-Year-Old with Autism Was Arrested under Tennessee’s School Threats Law.” ProPublica, ProPublica, 13 Nov. 2024, http://www.propublica.org/article/tennessee-school-threats-arresting-kids-with-disabilities.