DALLAS — The 13-year-old girl was in gym class when she said she heard a boy tell another classmate, “Don’t come to school tomorrow.”
She didn’t think much of it at first.
But by the end of the school day, the eighth grader couldn’t stop turning those words over in her head. After all, her childhood has been punctuated by shootings: Newtown when she was a toddler. Parkland when she was in elementary school. Uvalde, last year, when 19 children and two teachers were gunned down 384 miles from her school.
The sentence — “Don’t come to school tomorrow” — sounded scary, one of those warning signs people reconsider after something bad happens. It kept bouncing through her mind as she packed up her journals and climbed into her grandpa’s car for the drive home. She decided to tell her friends what she heard in gym class and what she thought it could mean.
“this is genuinely scaring the sh-- out of me,” she messaged half a dozen friends in her group chat at 4:42 p.m. Then, one minute later, “lets see if i can tell my mom without crying.”
The fallout from these messages would upend the next several weeks of the girl’s life, derailing her education and shaking her sense of self. The Dallas Morning News is not naming the girl because she is a minor.
Lisa Youngblood was on a Zoom meeting when her daughter got home on that late January day. The girl texted her that she really needed to tell her about something that happened at school.
It was important.
Youngblood muted her meeting. “Come here,” she texted back. “You can tell me now.” Together, they prepared to report their concern to Lewisville’s Lakeview Middle School.
Before they could dial the number, Youngblood’s phone rang. It was the assistant principal, who had already gotten wind of the situation. She listened to the girl’s story on the phone, and a school police officer started an investigation.
Police quickly determined the boy alleged to have made the comment did not have access to a gun, according to a Jan. 26 incident report. There was no threat to campus.
Relieved, Youngblood’s daughter felt OK when she went to school the next morning.
Then, as her first-period science class discussed the periodic table, she was called to the office.
The assistant principal determined the girl had made a false accusation about school safety. Her punishment would be three days of suspension followed by 73 days — the rest of eighth grade — in an alternative school.
At first, the girl couldn’t process what she was hearing. She felt like she couldn’t breathe. She took honors classes and had never been in trouble before, much less for something like this. As the administrator called her mom, she broke down in tears.
At a time when schools, and children, are told to stay vigilant to prevent the next shooting, Lewisville ISD’s response exposed the Black eighth grader to a level of harsh discipline that research shows has a disproportionate impact on children of color and potentially devastating effects as students navigate the beginning of their lives.
Lewisville school officials declined to speak specifically about the girl’s case, citing federal privacy laws and an ongoing grievance. But Director of Student Services Rebecca Clark said in a statement that it would be “grossly inaccurate to say the district has ever punished a student for reporting a safety concern.”
Administrators have “considered disciplinary consequences when students have spread rumors rather than following the appropriate steps to notify a trusted adult or using LISD’s anonymous reporting options to report concerning statements they may have heard,” Clark said.
‘See something, say something’
Youngblood refused to send her daughter to the alternative school while she appealed the administration’s decision. Instead, the girl completed as much work as she could at home.
“One thing I’m not going to do is send my child to the prison pipeline,” Youngblood said in an interview. An African American mother, Youngblood felt like she was watching long-documented racial disparities in school discipline come for her family.
Youngblood provided The News with copies of her daughter’s text messages, audio from recorded phone calls and appeals hearings with school administrators, and dozens of pages of district documents.
While her mom advocated for her, the girl was kept from her normal school for weeks. She had panic attacks where her palms grew sweaty and her breathing got shallow and she felt like she was melting. She had nightmares that she was back at school, but something didn’t feel right. She withdrew from her friends in the group chat.
“There’s no part of me that thinks this whole situation is rational,” the 13-year-old girl said in an interview.
She spent her days chipping away at online classwork, seeking comfort from her Yorkie-mix Bella and playing the video game Splatoon. Her mom, meanwhile, spent her nights researching education law and ways to get mental health support for her youngest daughter.
Education advocates see the Youngbloods’ case as a striking example of the way administrators can dole out severe discipline in response to school violence fears: Here, a barely teenage girl tried to report a comment that concerned her, then faced a lengthy punishment stemming from the way she went about it.
While an investigation centered around what middle schoolers said or did is inherently fraught, the impact of assigning harsh discipline to children can lead to painful, long-lasting emotional and academic consequences.
“Discipline that takes a girl out of her school has been shown to lead to poor outcomes,” said Rebecca Epstein, director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality’s Initiative on Gender Justice & Opportunity at Georgetown Law. “It distances her from her school and her peers. She no longer has the same strong connections or trust in authority figures.”
Epstein is the lead author of a study of “adultification” bias against Black girls. Adults view Black girls as less innocent and more adultlike than their white peers, the report found, especially in elementary and middle school. The report suggests this form of bias may be the reason Black girls are more likely to be disciplined for subjectively-defined violations.
Lewisville ISD spokeswoman Amanda Brim said the district “cannot treat a threat to a campus with anything less than the full weight of a police response and code of conduct consequences.”
Students should report a concerning comment as soon as it happens, she added, so administrators can act.
“It is not OK for students — intentionally or not — to cause a disruption to the educational environment of hundreds of their classmates by spreading rumors,” she said in a statement.
‘A great impact’
The girl’s mom sat at the head of the school’s conference table, her mouth dry. She felt full of passion, but prepared to stay professional and logical. She didn’t want to come off as the Angry Black Woman. Her daughter sat near her, practicing deep breaths. It had been more than a week since she attended school.
During the Feb. 8 appeals hearing, they listened as Lakeview Assistant Principal Sharla Samples laid out her reasoning for assigning the girl to alternative school.
Samples described fielding reports from students who heard what happened in gym class via the middle school grapevine. When the girl alerted her friends in two group chat messages, some of those friends told their parents and some of those parents called the police or the school.
Samples said the girl had several hours to report her concerns via the school’s tip line or the district’s anonymous threat reporting app, STOPit, which is promoted to students. By texting friends about it instead, Samples said, the girl had a “great impact.”
“Several people were scared about the safety of the school because her messages started spreading. Communication had to be sent out to the whole school community … which in itself worried some parents,” the administrator said, according to a recording of the hearing.
The boy’s family grew concerned for his well-being at the school, she said, and the campus increased police presence the day after the girl’s report.
Samples acknowledged in the hearing that the girl had no malicious intent, a clean disciplinary record and was “historically an upstanding student.” The 5′7″ girl with curls usually moved quietly through Lakeview’s halls with her white hoodie and platform Converse.
Youngblood pushed back: How would the school react if her daughter overheard a warning sign that traced back to an actual threat? She stressed that her daughter is 13 years old. To her, group chats with best friends are a safe place to work out feelings and fears.
“We are teaching kids: If you see something, you say something,” Youngblood said during the hearing. “Kids are kids. They may not always get it right. But she heard something that was concerning, and within a 21-minute span of mentioning to a friend, I was in the know and I was speaking with Ms. Samples.”
Youngblood’s daughter said she didn’t intend to spread a rumor. She asked her friends not to talk about it outside their group chat, telling them she didn’t want to cause a panic.
During the appeals hearing, Lakeview Principal Beri Deister questioned the girl. She asked why she messaged her friends in the group chats.
For six seconds, the girl paused. Then, slowly and quietly, she explained: “I just wanted to make sure all of my friends knew, and that they were safe.”
“How did it go from ‘Don’t come to school’ to guns?” Deister asked.
The girl replied: “Today, that’s what you think of.”
Zero tolerance
After every school shooting, one question looms: How do we stop this from happening again?
David Riedman, a researcher who created the K-12 School Shooting Database, tracks and studies campus violence. What can prevent a school shooting, he said, is someone speaking up about warning signs before something happens.
The situation at Lakeview Middle was an opportunity for school leaders to better educate students on the best ways to report potential threats, Riedman said.
“Any report has to be nonpunitive,” he said. “What you never want is for someone to keep a concerning behavior to themselves.”
School shootings often trigger discussions about school discipline among lawmakers. Some see cracking down as a way of identifying threats early.
Parkland sparked a national debate about harsher punishments for student misbehavior. After Uvalde, some Texas Republicans floated a return to zero-tolerance discipline policies.
Advocates worry this rhetoric could result in more children of color being suspended, expelled or assigned long stretches in alternative school.
The girl wasn’t the only one disciplined because of the incident.
The boy from gym class — whom The News is not naming because he is a minor — was assigned in-school suspension and a stint in alternative school, his mother said.
Lakeview administrators took written statements from several middle schoolers regarding the incident. Their statements were contradictory, including the ones from the boy who allegedly made the comment.
In one statement, he wrote: “I said don’t come to school tomorrow because I wanted to scare them. … I wanted to because I think that it was funny. I expected them to tell.”
He later denied saying “don’t come to school” at all. He wrote that he was uncomfortable with all the administrators’ questions without his parents there with him “so i lied to y’all to just get it over with so i could leave.”
The boy’s mother told The News she hasn’t been given enough information on how to appeal. She said it’s been like her son has a target on his back.
‘Deal with it’
Shortly after her first appeal, Youngblood opened her email to find a decision: Principal Deister reduced the punishment. She determined the girl should spend 30 days in the Disciplinary Alternative Education Program, Texas’ moniker for alternative schools.
That would not stand for Youngblood. She had hired a lawyer and spent hours researching schools’ disciplinary systems and the racial disparities within them.
She learned that Black students represent 12% of Lewisville’s student population, but nearly one-third of alternative school placements involved Black students last school year.
And she learned that school officials often have latitude in how they punish students. Some offenses — such as selling marijuana — get a mandatory placement. Other times, the decision is up to the administrator.
Last year, 557 Lewisville students were sent to alternative school; 245 of those placements were at the discretion of an administrator.
Fighting for her daughter made Youngblood question her assumptions about what triggers an alternative school assignment.
“I thought, I have a good kid. Kids that are going to DAEP, they must be bad kids,” she said. “How many other kids who are there have parents who are just so busy trying to keep the lights on and food on the table, that they just say, ‘Johnny, go, mom can’t take off to deal with this.’
“I could take off and deal with it.”
Because she didn’t send her daughter to alternative school, Lewisville ISD sent her a truancy warning letter. Excessive unexcused absences, it cautioned, can lead to court action — including fines.
No win
On a recent Saturday, Youngblood burst into her daughter’s room as the girl was waking up.
“We did it,” she told her.
Youngblood appealed her daughter’s punishment a second time, and the school district walked it back. The girl could return to eighth grade at Lakeview.
A district committee of non-Lakeview administrators determined “the student did not intend to cause the disruption that resulted,” according to a Feb. 17 letter.
“Restorative practices and further supportive instruction for the student on ways to report concerns to school officials are appropriate,” it read.
Clark, the LISD official, said in a statement to The News that “new facts can come to light” during the course of an investigation. As a result of additional conversations and further probing, “the initial consequences were significantly altered.
“The district’s process worked as intended.”
By that point — three weeks after the girl was first called into the school office — the teenager was reeling.
“I don’t feel better,” Youngblood’s daughter told her mom when she heard the committee’s decision. “I don’t feel happy.”
She had missed her middle school dance, her sunflower-dotted dress left unworn. She’d missed the annual cheer club breakfast. She’d missed hours of Spanish class and art lessons and math, her favorite subject. The girl who scored in the 98th percentile on her STAAR test worried about falling behind.
She’d lost trust in the adults at her school. She didn’t want to look at them.
The school’s response made her feel like a criminal, she said. A medical provider recently wrote a note saying the administration’s actions harmed the girl’s mental health.
What will happen next year, she wondered. She worked hard to get into the district’s early college program. She wanted to graduate high school armed with an associate’s degree, then maybe find a job working with animals.
Even after the decision, the girl felt anxious about facing her classmates. She didn’t want them to think she was a bad person.
On a recent Thursday, they decided it was time to try.
The night before returning to school, Youngblood fixed her daughter a grilled cheese. Then she slipped into her office to type out a formal complaint with the school district about how the principal and assistant principal handled the situation. She asked officials to consider: “Who among us could process the label of a liar unworthy of being in class with her peers?”
The girl visualized what it would be like to walk through Lakeview’s doors again. She decided she would try to avoid eye contact.
Back at the kitchen table, Youngblood and her daughter went back and forth about what she’d tell other kids. The girl figured she couldn’t just say she’s been sick the whole time.
“I know some people will ask me,” the girl said. “I know some people won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”
“I almost think it’s OK to say you were unjustly punished for something and, in the end, it was overturned,” her mom suggested.
Youngblood thinks the school administrators made Lakeview less safe by punishing her daughter the way they did.
“If I heard something else that could be a threat,” the girl told her mom, “honestly, I just wouldn’t tell anyone.”
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(The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, The Meadows Foundation, The Murrell Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Sydney Smith Hicks and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.)
