What This Story Is About
- A Carter Middle School seventh-grader and her mother describe a chaotic evacuation where students were denied water, forbidden from seeking shade and had their phones confiscated while classmates passed out around them.
Why It Matters
- This account directly contradicts claims by Knox County Schools Superintendent Jon Rysewyk that students were provided with water, shade and nurses on the field.
- Several parents are demanding a full investigation into both the handling of the heat emergency and the severe communication breakdown that left families in the dark for hours.
For Context
- Temperatures reached 96 degrees with a 107 heat index.
Catch Up
- During a bomb threat evacuation at Carter Middle School on Sept. 4, 21 students were hospitalized at Dolly Parton Children’s Hospital due to severe heat exhaustion.
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WVLT) – A Knox County business owner and mother is accusing school administrators of “covering up their failure” and hiding behind a “business as usual” facade after her daughter came home shaking, dehydrated, and unable to eat following Friday’s bomb threat evacuation.
Evacuated Into the Scorching Heat
For Paisley Williams, a seventh-grader at Carter Middle, Friday started normally. She was working in her third-period computer science class when an emergency announcement crackled over the intercom.
“We just like kind of got up and went,” Paisley recalled, noting that students weren’t told to grab water bottles or personal items.
The student body was marched across the street to the adjacent Carter High School turf football field. After about 15 minutes on the blistering turf, she said administrators moved them to the metal bleachers. There, hundreds of children sat in 96-degree heat —and a 107-degree heat index…