Tennessee school safety

Shelby County ranks safer than 95% of ranked US districts. That rank is built from 49 schools — the ones in its scored set whose records were complete enough to grade. Williamson County ranks safer than 100% of ranked US districts, and its rank is built from 42 of the 51 schools in its scored set. Both figures are honest. They are not the same kind of figure, and it is worth knowing which one you are looking at.

What you can learn here

Every school on this page is compared to roughly 1,500 American schools closest to it in enrollment that teach the same grade levels. Among the peers that reported something, we take the 25th percentile of their incident rate — a deliberately low bar. A school reporting less than a quarter of what that implies for its size has not given us evidence of safety.

Grades A and B mean records we believe, and those are the only schools that get a published safety score. C means a school reported almost nothing but is small enough that a true zero is ordinary. D and E mean schools of that size normally report several incidents, or ten or more, and this one reported almost none. A doubtful grade is a statement about paperwork we cannot verify. It is not a statement that children were hurt.

Tennessee had 1,931 schools in the 2021-22 Civil Rights Data Collection. We publish a score for 1,081 of them. We grade the reporting doubtful at 240 schools, or 12.4% of the state, slightly above the national share of 11.3%. Read that as a modest difference in how records were filed, not as a difference in how safe Tennessee children are. The comparison is national and is not adjusted for state, on purpose — the state-to-state gaps in this data are reporting behavior.

Of the state's 149 school districts, 67 have enough scoreable schools to rank. The other districts are not missing from the page by accident. A district with only a handful of gradeable schools cannot be placed against districts nationally without saying more than the data supports, so we do not place it. The blank spaces here are the method working.

Safest ranked cities in Tennessee

Percentile is against all ranked U.S. cities (higher = safer). Only cities with ≥5 trustworthy-data schools are ranked. Home value is Zillow's ZHVI.

Safest ranked districts

Every Tennessee city with schools

Every Tennessee school district