Williamson County Schools, law enforcement talk safety ahead of 2023-24 school year

Williamson County Schools and local and state law enforcement officials are keeping school safety a priority ahead of the 2023-24 school year as public anxieties continue following the March 27 Covenant School shooting in Green Hills. 

On Tuesday, multiple WCS officials were joined by members of the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office and other law enforcement officials at Nolensville High School for a press conference where they reiterated their focus on school safety ahead of the fall semester which begins on Friday for the approximately 43,000 students.

Much of the discussion centered around physical school safety and investigating and preventing threats of mass violence, while officials also touched on drugs in schools and what they said has been a rise in sextortion cases.

Schools across the county, region and country have seen an increase in unfounded threats, and in the 2022-23 school year, WCSO investigated approximately 250 incidents of threats of violence against WCS schools, which resulted in approximately 45 arrests.

“We will take all these cases and investigate them to the fullest. We do not take any threats as a joke,” WCSO Sheriff Dusty Rhoades said. “All threats are considered serious, and we will investigate them to the fullest.”

“We asked our families, our parents and our students to report them [threats] directly to us or the sheriff's department,” WCS Superintendent Jason Golden said. “Sometimes they will share it with someone else on social media based on a concern, and those messages can cycle and grow.”

And while most threats are deemed unfounded, the threat of real violence is a daily risk nationwide, as more than 20 school shootings have occurred from Jan. 1-Aug. 1, 2023 in the United States.

“Parents, take the responsibility and look at your child's phone, and if you see something on there, please reach out to us," Golden continued. "We would rather respond and find out there's nothing to the situation than to have a situation and not be notified that something happened.”

In July 2022 The News attended an active shooter training at Nolensville High School as new conversations about police response were sparked following the May 2022 Uvalde, Texas school shooting which resulted in the deaths of 19 students and two teachers and the injuring of 17 others.

This year’s Covenant School shooting killed three students and three staff members and injured one person at the private Christian school and has renewed the seemingly never-ending conversations about school safety in Nashville and beyond.

“We work to create an environment where our teachers can fulfill our mission of teaching, knowing that that basic level of student safety has to always be on our minds,” Golden said. 

“We have got to have our parents engaged, we've got to have our students engaged,” WCS Director of Safety and Security Michael Fletcher added. 

“It takes every single person to protect these schools, not one person or one single security measure is going to work, it's going to take a multitude of procedures, and it's going to take everyone's actions to keep our kids safe.”

During the press conference, WCSO also reported that they investigated more than 30 cases involving sexual images or videos throughout the county, not just in WCS, 12 of which were determined to be cases of sextortion.

117 students were also disciplined throughout the school year for “drug-related reasons,” which includes possession of drugs and drug paraphernalia and the distribution or selling of drugs.

WCSO has school resource officers at all WCS schools, but Rhoades said that his office is still looking to permanently fill two SRO positions.