This was probably in the top ten worst high schools in the country. It was the worst high school in my state, which I attended a semester after attending the best public high school in my state, so I really got to see the wide gamut of education available in my state. And my state floats between the 1st-3rd worst ranked in the US for education, so it was truly a bottom-of-the-barrel experience.

Each time you'd walk into class, it was a dice roll if another piece of equipment had been stolen. We stopped buying and using projectors because any new ones got stolen within days. Sometimes I'd walk into class and every single piece of furniture had been completely turned upside down. Students would play on their phones, yell, throw things at the teachers, and the teachers would just ignore them.

It was also an extremely racially charged situation which had a big impact. I think there were less than ten white people in the school, the rest of the school was black, and a handful of hispanic folk.

The white people were almost all racist, and so apart from my neighbor, I only hung around black people. As the only white person there who hung out with non-white people, my nickname across the entire high school somehow became Tarzan, in part due to my long hair. When I'd walk down the halls each day, people would beat their chests and make ape noises and give me dap.

I'll never forget being at an award ceremony and walking up for a few awards, each time the entire student body would start stomping in the bleachers and making jungle noises and shouting my nickname. The visibly perplexed administration had no idea what was going on.

Because my credits would not cleanly transfer to their curriculum, I had two free periods each day and used this time to help out the administration and teaching staff, running errands, organizing, doing paperwork, etc. This allowed me to interface often with the school board, who was... entirely comprised of white, racist, old men. Men who fundamentally refused to understand the predicament facing the student body, and who were too eager to escalate instead of finding a way to bridge communication between the student body and faculty. Instead of empowering students, they saw them all as future bodies for the prison and service industry, and it was obvious. Students learned nothing, but would get straight A's. They would of course absolutely fail state and national standardized tests. They were shoved through the meat grinder with nothing to show for it.

Edit: the threat of violence is obviously not acceptable in an age of horrifying events like school shootings. I think that goes without saying, but wanted to add to my above comment. As I unfortunately didn't make it super clear.

However, there should be a way to address the risk and prevent acts of terrorism without turning into a police state. A more reasonable response might have been to have the parents come by for a long meeting with the principal, school counselor, and school resource officer to talk about the severity of making such statements - even if she did make it sarcastically as tone/intent is difficult to judge. Then suspend the student for a day or so and have the school resource officer periodically check to ensure she didn't bring any weapons.

To play devil's advocate though, I can't imagine the stress from parents who have children of Mexican descent in such a situation.

I don’t understand your point. It seems like you are saying, “this punishment is so severe we shouldn’t be correcting the behavior at all.”