A brand new law in Tennessee requiring police to charge each children and adults who make threats of mass violence with crimes, whether the threats are credible or not, has resulted in an escalation in arrests of young college students, a few of whom have mental and mental disabilities.

Among them is “Ty,” a 13-year-old black boy with autism who was arrested on the second day of this school 12 months after he smuggled his favorite stuffed bunny into his backpack before heading to a Hamilton County middle school, where he told a teacher he didn’t he wants anyone to take a look at him.

When the teacher asked why, Ty (real name withheld) replied, “Because the whole school will explode” – him and his mother he told ProPublica and Nashville Public Radiowho co-authored a series of articles on Tennessee’s crackdown on student threats.

Ty’s teacher immediately called the school administrator, who then notified the police. In the counselor’s office, the backpack was opened and inside was only a harmless toy bunny. As Ty stood there confused about what he had done mistaken, the police handcuffed him, patted him down, after which put him in the back of a police automobile.

The sheriff’s office later issued a press release stating that “no explosive device was found in the backpack.”

Ty was taken to a juvenile penal complex and suspended from high school for several days. His case was soon dismissed by the juvenile court.

His mother couldn’t imagine the best way the school responded to the incident. Ty’s special education plan calls for him to be outgoing and friendly with other students, but he commonly has outbursts and meltdowns in class due to his disability.

Federal law prohibits schools from punishing students with disabilities too harshly for conduct attributable to or related to the incapacity. State law requires school officials to expel for a 12 months a student who makes threats of mass violence, but provided that an investigation shows the threat is substantiated.

But one other, competing state law, passed by Tennessee’s Republican-controlled Legislature after the March 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville that killed six people, now requires police to charge all people, children and adults, with crimes related to from threats of any sort of mass violence, whether or not they’re later found to be credible.

As a result, students across the state at the moment are being arrested for making statements that would not result in expulsion, ProPublica noted.

“When you looked at his backpack, if there was nothing in it that could hurt anyone, why did you handcuff my 13-year-old autistic son who didn’t understand what was happening and put him in juvie?” said Ty’s mother, who decided to transfer him from Ooltewah Middle School.

“Every time we walk past this school, Ty asks, ‘Am I going to go back to prison, Mom?’ … He was really traumatized,” she said. “I felt like no one at this school was really fighting for him. They were too busy justifying what they did.”

The state doesn’t collect data on how the criminal law, which went into effect in July, affects students with disabilities. But Data obtained by ProPublica in Hamilton County, which revealed that in the primary six weeks of the school 12 months, 18 students were arrested for making threats of mass violence, though school officials described a lot of the threats as “low level” and “without evidence of motive.”

Of the scholars arrested, 39 percent were black in comparison with 30 percent of scholars districtwide. And 33 percent had disabilities, greater than twice the proportion of scholars with disabilities in the district’s population.

Statewide, ProPublica found that not less than 519 students were charged with threats of mass violence last school 12 months, though it was a misdemeanor, up from 442 students the 12 months before. Many of the scholars were junior high school students, most of them boys.

This increase in juvenile arrests for school threats reflects a nationwide trend.

Within three weeks later two teachers and two students died According to the Apalachee High School report, throughout the deadliest school shooting in Georgia history, arrests were made and charged with threatening schools in not less than 45 states. New York Times review of press reports, law enforcement statements and court records. Nearly 10 percent were 12 years old or younger.

As the Los Angeles Times noted, the arrests got here at a time when police and schools faced threats of violence, shootings and bombings. The reports terrified students and their parents, caused attendance to drop and compelled the temporary closure of dozens of campuses.

In most cases, the warnings weren’t reliable. But police must investigate every threat, and the rising numbers are frustrating and exhausting law enforcement. After previous shootings, including the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, and the recent shooting in Georgia, law enforcement officials have been criticized for ignoring warning signs.

Disability rights advocates say students like Ty shouldn’t be arrested under current Tennessee law, which makes an exception for people with mental disabilities, which Ty suffers from in addition to autism.

They are also pushing lawmakers to vary state law to create broader exceptions for college kids with other sorts of disabilities, including those who make students susceptible to frequent outbursts or disruptive behavior.

Zoe Jamail, policy coordinator for Disability Rights Tennessee, met last 12 months with Rep. Bo Mitchell, the Nashville Democrat who co-authored the brand new Zero Tolerance for Threats Act, to implore him so as to add recent language to the bill, that would bring it into compliance with federal law, ProPublica reported.

“No student who makes a threat that is considered an indication of the student’s disability shall be held liable under this section,” reads one version of the amendment, which was not put to a vote in the state Legislature.

Mitchell said he was “devastated” to listen to that Ty was handcuffed and traumatized. But he added: “We’re trying to stop people who should know better from doing this, and if they do they deserve more than just a slap on the wrist.”

Still, Mitchell said he would be open to considering an exception in the law in the following legislative session for college kids with a broader range of disabilities.

The bill’s other co-sponsor, Rep. Cameron Sexton, the Republican House speaker, was less sympathetic.

He acknowledged that school officials and law enforcement might have more training and resources to raised implement the law. However, he firmly argued that disabled students were able to committing acts of mass violence and may be punished.

“I think you can make a lot of excuses for a lot of people,” he said.

If you bring your child to Hurley Children’s Center in downtown Flint, Michigan, Mona Hanna find you. The pediatrician, who gained national notoriety in 2015 for helping expose the town’s water crisis, walked through the waiting room in a white lab coat, her gaze laser-focused on the chubby baby within the lap of its unsuspecting parent.

“Hi! I’m Dr. Mona!” – she said warmly. – Any probability you reside in Flint? She came upon that the family is from neighboring Grand Blanc.

“It’s so sad!” – said Hanna. “You should move to Flint! And have another baby! You too can become part of the Rx Kids program!” The parents laughed politely. But the doctor wasn’t joking.

Billed because the first-ever citywide cash assistance program for pregnant moms and youngsters, Rx Children gives Flint residents $1,500 mid-pregnancy and $500 every month for the newborn’s first yr. There are no obligations. No income limits. And it’s universal; almost every baby born for the reason that program launched in January is enrolled.

Parents who bring their children to this clinic for tests speak about how the cash has helped – from buying cots, diapers, clothes and wipes to the way it “keeps them alive” during maternity leave or provides crucial income, when the spouse died.

But the actual purpose of Rx Kids goes far beyond Flint, as Hanna admitted as she grabbed one among the Rx Kids kids within the exam room. “Do you think we should do this for children everywhere? What do you think?” she asked, cooing. The baby gurgled happily and smiled. “It was a yes.”

Cash payments as a tool to cut back child poverty

Many other countriesincluding Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Swedenand United Kingdomthey already offer child cash profit. The U.S. essentially did just that through the coronavirus pandemic: The expanded 2021 Child Tax Credit provided low- and moderate-income families (including families previously excluded because of insufficient income) with tons of of dollars per child in direct monthly payments for six months .

The child poverty rate has dropped to approx historical minimum. But an prolonged program expired at the top of 2021 and Congress didn’t renew it. The child poverty rate has fallen backup.

For Łukasz Shaeferdirector of the Poverty Solutions initiative on the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy and a longtime advocate of cash advantages for children, it was “the most brutal day” of his profession.

Shortly thereafter, he received an email from Hanna asking if he desired to collaborate on the show that became Rx Kids. The program’s goals transcend providing cash assistance to Michigan families: It also goals to get donors, lawmakers and voters enthusiastic about how child support cash advantages may help their communities.

The list of recent converts features a Republican state Senator John Damoosewho he became an outspoken supporter to expand Rx Kids. Calling himself a “pro-life person,” Damoose said, “It’s certainly better to worry about making it easier for mothers to decide to have children.” He said the Republican Party must get serious about supporting programs like Rx Kids. “For years we have been accused of being pro-birth, not pro-life. And I think it’s not without merit. We need to put our money where our mouth is and support these children and their mothers.”

What once gave the impression of a moonshot is gaining traction: Shaefer and Hanna say their communications with Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign helped shape Harris “child voucher” proposal.. President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign also supported expanding the child tax credit.

Meanwhile, Michigan has budgeted roughly $20 million in state Temporary Assistance for Needy Families to partially fund the expansion of Rx Kids right into a shortlist of communities if those areas are in a position to raise local matching funds. These areas include rural communities reminiscent of Michigan’s distant eastern Upper Peninsula, a part of which is within the U.S. Damoose’s district. “We want the tent to be as big as possible,” Hanna said.

But some health officials within the Upper Peninsula were initially cautious. Each latest Rx Kids community might want to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in private donations to start out and proceed this system in their community. “It could be a good thing,” Leann Espinoza, Maternal and Child Health Program Manager for the Eastern Upper Peninsula, said in August. – But I do not get my hopes up. I comprehend it sounds terrible.

Upper Peninsula families ‘falling into wreck’

This summer, within the wood-paneled recreation room of the Clark Township Community Center, Espinoza delivered a message to her team: Rx Kids is just not a program the eastern Upper Peninsula will give you the option to fund on its own.

That’s about “$3 million we would have to raise,” she said, three other people LMAS District Health Department staff members.

Tonya Winberg, a public health nurse in Mackinac County, looked stunned. “Just where does that $3 million come from?” – he asked Winberg. Other potential expansion locations for Rx Kids, like Kalamazoothey’ve wealthy private foundations that may finance this system. The eastern Upper Peninsula doesn’t.

“And how do you maintain it?” Espinoza added. “We hate starting programs and then funding runs out and we have to tell people, ‘It’s gone; We can’t do this anymore.”

The starkly beautiful and densely forested Upper Peninsula is accustomed to feeling forgotten. There’s a running joke about how often this happens incorrectly labeled as Canada or Wisconsin on maps. He is approx one-third of Michigan’s land massbut only 3% of its inhabitants. The sheer scale and small population mean that options for food, housing and childcare are limited. Poverty rates are there higher than the state average in most of Espinoza’s territory, and the region has a few of them highest rates With newborns exposed to prenatal drug exposure in line with the state health department.

At the community center, Espinoza and her colleagues begin listing all of the ways Rx Kids could save the lives of Upper Peninsula families, a lot of whom have some income and resources but “don’t earn enough to make it,” Espinoza said. . “Families that have fallen. And those are the ones that I really, really, really think this program would benefit from, especially here.”

Espinoza’s next meeting was with one among these families. Jessica Kline and her 18-month-old daughter Aurora live in Munising, a tourist town on Lake Superior. “She has a strong personality and red hair, so she came with a warning sticker,” Kline said with fun about her daughter.

Aurora is a tiny creature rushing across the family’s apartment, unfazed by the nasal tube connecting her to an oxygen machine. She was born early, at just 24 weeks of gestation, weighing slightly below 2 kilos. No hospital within the Upper Peninsula was equipped to care for such a young premature baby. So Aurora and her parents spent seven months in a hospital in Ann Arbor, five hours south of their home. “We didn’t have a reliable vehicle,” Kline said. “We had no source of income.” The hospital’s social services provided food at the speed of $19 a day, which Kline saved to purchase supplies for Aurora.

When they finally brought Aurora to the Upper Peninsula, their house was vandalized and the copper pipes were removed. Espinoza’s team helped them find an apartment and took them grocery shopping. Every day is a series of little battles, from finding the medical supplies Aurora must determining learn how to get to the revolving door of specialists tons of of miles away. Still, Aurora’s dad has a job in the town. They have family nearby. They make it work, Kline said.

But having a program like Rx Kids could have made an enormous difference in her daughter’s first yr of life. “Five hundred dollars a month would be enough to get us back on our feet,” she said.

After Espinoza left Kline’s apartment, she drove south to her office in Manistique. It was late. Everyone else went home. Espinoza sat at her desk, attempting to be pragmatic. He knows that Rx Kids won’t magically solve the shortage of child care and housing and all the opposite things needed to interrupt the cycle of poverty. But that may fix Kline’s automobile. That would help.

Espinoza said there’ll undoubtedly be critics – individuals who think parents will simply use the cash to purchase drugs. “‘What did they do to deserve this?’” she imagined them saying. “You just give them free money and they didn’t do anything to get it?” Because they do not understand. They don’t understand the barriers. They don’t understand that sometimes the selection is not all the time yours. For example, I talked to moms who really need to go to work and wish to support their family, but there is no such thing as a childcare. So they don’t have any other selection.”

Espinoza recently received an update from Hanna at Rx Kids: Thanks largely to personal foundations outside the Upper Peninsula, this system has raised enough money to fund a “perinatal” version of Rx Kids for five counties within the eastern Upper Peninsula. The perinatal program would offer a payment of $1,500 mid-pregnancy plus $500 per 30 days for the newborn’s first three months, quite than for your entire yr. “But really, the goal is to do the full program, which is why we continue to raise money,” Hanna said by email.

“I think it would be fantastic if we even launched a perinatal version,” Espinoza said. “It’s more than we had before.”

Fox 26 reported that Erica Lee Carter, daughter of the late Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, has taken the official oath of office to take over her mother’s seat in Texas’ 18th Congressional District

Carter announced her candidacy for her mother’s seat in August 2024 after Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called for a special election to fill the seat following Lee’s death following a battle with pancreatic cancer. Her selection was not a surprise. After her mother’s death, Carter said in a press release, “I want to finish for my mom!”

After taking the oath of office in Washington on November 12, she turned to other members of Congress and said: she mentioned that she was excited to work with them.

“Thank you to the voters of Texas’ 18th Congressional District for trusting me to serve the rest of the 118th Congress.

“I am honored to conclude for you and in memory of my mother, the late great Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee,” Carter said, in line with .

“I’m ready to get up and work for you. I look forward to working with Speaker Mike Johnson, Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and all of my colleagues in Congress on the important issues facing the United States House of Representatives on behalf of the American people.”

Carter will serve in the role until January 3, 2025. After that, former Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner will serve in Texas’ 18th Congressional District after the outcomes are announced on Election Day.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee held this position from 1995 until her death. Carter documented her journey on X, formerly known as Twitter, by posting a photograph of herself sitting in her mother’s old office. “It is an indescribable honor and profound humiliation to be sworn in as the next Congresswoman of Texas’ 18th Congressional District,” she wrote on Twitter. “As I stand here today, I proudly take the place of my mother, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee.”

She also posted a touching comparison photo of herself delivering her first speech to Congress in the identical place where Jackson Lee delivered his first speech almost 30 years ago.

Local Texas leaders, including Republican Jasmine Crockett, delivered celebratory remarks. She prolonged “warm welcome” Carter, who resembles her mother, says she knows the previous congresswoman “looks down at the ground with pride.”