by Aliyya Swaby

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When a mother in Tennessee reached out to ProPublica last year to share that her 10-year-old had been kicked out of school for making a finger gun, she wondered how many other kids had experienced the same thing.

The state had recently passed laws heightening penalties for making threats of mass violence at school, including requiring yearlong expulsions. There was a lot of speculation among advocates and lawyers about how broadly schools and law enforcement would apply the law. As a longtime education reporter with experience reporting on student discipline, I assumed I would be able to get meaningful data to help me understand whether this 10-year-old’s experience was a fluke or a trend.

After several months of investigating, I found that the state laws had resulted in a wave of expulsions and arrests for children accused of making threats of mass violence, sometimes stemming from rumors and misunderstandings.

But in the course of publishing stories on that 10-year-old and other children ensnared by these laws, I realized that the process of determining just how many students were........

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