Imagine, if you will, a parent’s nightmare scenario. Your child was unfortunate enough to have earned the trust of another student who was planning a school shooting at their middle school. This would-be juvenile shooter had a hit list and a date all planned. Then your child and other classmates all had to testify against this thwarted school shooter. That is nightmare enough, correct? Hopefully, that’s the end of the story for your student’s brush with danger.

Well, for parents at Giles County High School in Tennessee, that was not the end of the nightmare. This August, that same student who was planning on taking a gun to the middle school and shooting anyone he could only 16 months prior was permitted to come back starting in high school. That disturbed teenager again shares classes with some of the kids who testified against him.

When horrified parents complained, the school district disingenuously blamed Republican lawmakers in Nashville who weren’t passing more restrictive gun legislation. One of the mothers, whose child was on the hit list, replied: “Gun laws are not going to affect kids who are not supposed to have guns anyway. It’s sad that our kids are being used as pawns.”

Parents were also directed to talk to the school system’s outside attorney, whose statements also reflected the school’s. In other words, he urged parents that if they don’t like it, take it up with the state capitol to lobby for gun restrictions. What do gun restrictions and left-wing anti-gun activism have to do with the dangerous student being allowed to return to school with people he intended to murder?

No parent could get a straight answer.

The school superintendent for Giles County, Vickie Beard, also continued to mislead parents, telling them: “Tennessee law does not authorize or allow expulsion of students from public schools. Tennessee law does allow suspension of students for a calendar year or up to 180 days for zero-tolerance offenses. Due to Constitutional and privacy rights, we cannot discuss specifics.”

Tennessee’s longstanding law actually states that school authorities have the right and the duty to expel students who have committed a “zero-tolerance” act. In fact, school authorities can choose the length of time that a student is expelled for such offenses, but at a very minimum it’s one calendar year.

This whole nightmare that these kids and their parents are suffering through is a thinly veiled attempt by the school system to force parents to lobby for red flag laws. Gun restrictions are more important to leftist administrators than the safety and well-being of students in their schools.

This is what parents are having to deal with in rural Tennessee; imagine that same scenario in a larger city where the major teachers unions hold sway. Teachers unions during COVID lockdowns were happy to hold our public school children’s education in suspense so that they could get their way on certain benefits and monies.

Our public school children are the innocent pawns of left-wing social experiments and culture war agendas. Leftists in the school district are so sure of their power that they aren’t even hiding it anymore.