Nashville School Where Teen Killed Classmate Had No Metal Detectors
Alex Oliveira, New York Post, January 26, 2025
The Nashville high school where a teen gunman killed a fellow student last week had no metal detectors — apparently because administrators think they could be racist.
A former board member told The Post that the misguided administrators are responsible for keeping them out even over many parents’ objections.
“I knew this day was gonna happen,” said Fran Bush, formerly a Metro Nashville Public Schools board member.
“I knew it was gonna happen just because it’s like a free open door, everybody coming in,” she said of the Tennessee district’s schools, including Antioch High, where 17-year-old shooter Solomon Henderson murdered a 16-year-old classmate Wednesday.
Bush, who served on the MNPS board from 2018 to 2022, said she pushed for metal detectors throughout her tenure but that district Director Adrienne Battle “didn’t want to hear it” — even as parents backed calls for metal detectors to keep their kids safe.
After Henderson killed fellow teen Josselin Corea Escalante and then fatally shot himself, Battle told reporters that the district didn’t have metal detectors because research has shown they can have “unintended consequences.”
Exactly what consequences Battle was referring to remain unclear, but MNPS shared two studies with The Post that suggest metal detectors instill a sense of fear among students and make them feel unsafe. The studies also questioned metal detectors’ effectiveness for keeping weapons out of places.
One of the studies shared by MNPS said metal detectors disproportionately target students of color, too — a detail that other studies over the years have focused on, with findings suggesting that instills a sense of fear for minority students.
But Bush characterized such “unintended consequences” as mere excuses — calling them “a bunch of bull.
“There’s no study [that] shows metal detectors don’t work,” she said. “If that was the case, then we won’t have them in our airports, sports games, we wouldn’t have them in all these places that require security,” Bush said.
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