2024 News (Large Newsroom) Winners

About the Winners:

In the aftermath of the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, advocates warned that lawmakers’ new punitive laws criminalizing threats at schools would lead to unnecessary discipline and arrests for students. The reporters were determined to investigate the effect of the laws, but Tennessee did not make it easy to access data or reports about how many kids were punished or why. They filed nearly 100 records requests in dozens of counties to build a sample dataset and reached out to more than 100 judges, lawyers and advocates in Tennessee and around the country.

Their investigation found that Tennessee’s threats of mass violence laws have created a patchwork system of justice across the state, where school districts, law enforcement and courts are handling these cases very differently in each of the state’s 95 counties. Some school districts kicked students out of school more frequently for making threats, including for mildly disruptive behavior. And more students than ever before were being handcuffed, arrested and detained for allegedly making threats of mass violence — whether or not those threats were deemed credible.

Comments From the Judges:

“These articles are a masterclass in how to persist when official data and cooperation are scant to nonexistent. Swaby and Pfleger found incredible ways of documenting these families stories, which officialdom clearly went to pains to keep buried. Structuring the pieces topically — e.g. by arrests, expulsions and disproportionality — kept them easy to read.”

“Wonderful job. Always good to look at what legislators say a new piece of law will do and what it actually does. In this case, some pretty eye-opening and horrible examples of the misuse of power, prompting at least some attempts at amending the legislation. And have to say, full marks to the person who wrote this headline: ‘A 13-Year-Old With Autism Got Arrested After His Backpack Sparked Fear. Only His Stuffed Bunny Was Inside’.”

Photo credit: Lisa Larson-Walker/ProPublica; Andrea Morales for ProPublica