By Olga Pierce, Jennifer Mascia and Mensah M. Dean, Chalkbeat
On Nov. 7, as school was getting out for the day, one teenager shot another across from Morristown-Hamblen West High School in Morristown, Tennessee, an Appalachian town of 31,000 people. As a precaution, the school was placed on lockdown, as were other schools and childcare facilities in the area.
Police said the 17-year-old suspected in the shooting allegedly stole a gun out of a parked car the day before. Both suspect and victim, also 17, were students in the county school system. But “the shooting did not take place on school property,” a local news report emphasized.
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The high school, and another high school across town, saw a combined half a dozen school-adjacent shootings between 2014 and 2023, according to a Trace analysis of a decade of data from the Gun Violence Archive. That means lockdowns, crime scene tape, pockmarked walls, and a pervasive sense of dread.
Morristown is not unique. In thousands of communities across America, children are traumatized in their classrooms — not from bullets fired within, but from violence happening outside school walls.
Read more at chalkbeat.org.
Chalkbeat Colorado is a nonprofit news organization covering education issues. For more, visit chalkbeat.org/co.
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