AUSTIN, Texas -- Arrests of Texas students threatening violence have spiked since the deadly school shootings in Texas and Florida.

A new report was released Tuesday by four advocacy groups.

The report used state data from the Juvenile Justice Department on arrests for terroristic threat and exhibition of firearms.

It found there were more than 1200 arrests this year from January through May for terroristic threat -- compared to 473 arrests in that same period last year.

Exhibition of firearms arrests were 259 this year, compared to 37 last year. The offense doesn't require possessing a firearm, and the report says most of the students accused didn't have one.

“What we see is a lot of the behavior that doesn’t actually rise to the level of being a substantive threat,” said Morgan Craven, a co-author of the report and the director of the school-to-prison pipeline project at Texas Appleseed. “It’s instead a dumb joke a student might make or a way a student’s disability is manifesting. Those types of behaviors should be handled differently.”

Click the video link above to watch Craven’s full interview including recommendations her group is suggesting to better distinguish between safety threats and ordinary child behavior.