Giving Compass' Take:

• Mustafa Z. Mirza and Andrew R. Calderon discuss how school shootings in 2018 drove up reports of potentially dangerous students and why critics are worried that the criminalization of students may have adverse effects. 

• How can policymakers balance the need for security with the need to keep students in school?

• Read Everytown's analysis of schools shootings. 

After school shootings around the country, and two this year in particular — Parkland, Florida, (Feb. 14) and Santa Fe, Texas (May 18) — schools are taking an increasingly harder line against students who threaten violence, including criminal referrals that advocates say can harm students and do nothing to increase school safety.

Texas Juvenile Justice Department data analyzed by The Marshall Project show that more students were charged with making terroristic threats in 2018 than any year since 2013. Not including June, there have been 1,560 referrals for terroristic threat this school year, compared with an annual average of 843 referrals in the past five school years. Another surge year was 2012, after the Sandy Hook school shooting in December.

On May 30, just under two weeks after the Sante Fe shooting, Gov. Greg Abbott released 40 recommendations in his “School and Firearm Safety Action Plan,” meant to ensure that teachers and administrators are able to remove students who pose a violent threat. Among the governor's recommendations is a proposal to expand the list of offenses for which a student may be expelled or removed from their regular classes and placed into a “disciplinary alternative educational program.”

But some are worried about criminalizing vulnerable students. In a report, Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit justice center, said that while statewide reforms over the years have been adopted in the Texas Legislature aiming to push school districts to stop criminalizing student behavior, the uptick of juvenile arrests rolls back the clock on statewide reform. Texas Appleseed were the first to obtain the numbers from the Texas Juvenile Justice Department.

Morgan Craven, director of the School-to-Prison Pipeline Project at Texas Appleseed, will speak at a Senate committee meeting Wednesday to discuss how further criminalizing misbehavior in schools may needlessly push kids out of schools and into the criminal justice system.

Read the full article about school shooting panic by Mustafa Z. Mirza and Andrew R. Calderon at The Marshall Project.