Board Addresses Recent Student Protests

The Williamson County School Board held its February meetings recently.

Josh Brown was absent for the work session and Claire Reeves joined by phone, so Jay Galbreath was the acting Chair for that meeting. Every board member was present for the voting meeting.

• Work Session Agenda
• Work Session Live Stream - 2:15:25
• Voting Meeting Agenda
• Voting Meeting Live Stream - 1:31:09
• Voting Meeting Live Threads

The agendas were light again this month, so the meetings were a bit shorter than normal.

Most of the discussion centered around two topics. First, there was a lot said about recent student walkouts, protesting ICE. Here is a link to that story. Second, a few board members asked a lot of questions about the policies around students with IEPs.

Student Walkouts

Two members of the public, Steve Hickey and Elliott Franklin spoke about the recent student walkouts. Mr. Hickey stated that there needs to be a new policy about when kids skip class. Mr. Franklin cited the policy that talks about students interfering or disrupting school activities.

Jason Golden addressed these concerns, pointing to the InFocus article that was released yesterday. You can read it here. He reiterated that WCS does not condone or coordinate student walkouts. In fact, the opposite. Administrators proactively reach out to students who plan to walkout and try to encourage them to find an alternative way to demonstrate.

He clarified that policy 6.300 addresses when students skip class. And this policy was followed in these recent cases.

Jay Galbreath added that he thought they might need a new policy, particularly when a student is encouraging another student to skip class. He will be bringing that to a future policy meeting. He also asked for aggregated data around skipping class and the punishments that are given for the past 3 semesters.

IEPs and Classroom Disruptions

Dan Cash and Dennis Driggers both brought up recent situations where an elementary student severely disrupted a class. According to this student's IEP, the school is not allowed to remove them from the classroom. This has led to repeated disruptions, causing problems for the other students in the class.

Tony Bostic asked if students with an IEP can be assigned to the Alternative Learning Center (ALC). Mr. Golden said that it depends. If the IEP states that the student should not be removed from a general education classroom, then by law, the student must stay in the classroom. The law requires daily services for the student, allowing for no more than 10 missed days. So the student could go to the ALC for up to 10 days. If the behavior is egregious (drug possession, causing severe bodily harm, etc.) that limit can be extended to 45 days.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be Monday, March 23, 2026 at 6:30pm. They will be voting on the budget, so it could prove to be quite long. See you there and bring your popcorn!