2 middle-school students killed in bus crash in Tennessee; others injured

A school bus carrying 25 middle‑school students and five adults on a field trip crashed with a dump truck and an SUV in Tennessee on March 27, 2026, killing two students and injuring several others.

A school bus full of middle-school students on a field trip collided with a dump truck and an SUV in Tennessee, killing at least two children on Friday, March 27.

The Tennessee Highway Patrol confirmed the deaths of the two Clarksville-Montgomery County students, reported the Clarksville Leaf Chronicle, part of the USA TODAY Network. Several others were injured, with multiple people airlifted to trauma centers in Nashville and Memphis.

"I want to speak directly to the families of the students that we lost today: There are no adequate words we can use to ease the pain that you're feeling right now," Major Travis Plotzer with the highway patrol said at a news conferenceabout the tragic deaths. "This is a parent's worst nightmare."

The Clarksville-Montgomery County's Kenwood Middle School students were headed to Jackson, Tennessee, for a field trip when their school bus was involved with a crash with a Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) dump truck and a Chevrolet Trailblazer, authorities said.

While Plotzer said the investigation is ongoing, "it doesn't appear that TDOT had any contributing factors to the crash."

The two students were pronounced dead at the scene, Plotzer said. The Tennessee Highway Patrol said in a post on Facebook that several others were injured in the crash, "with multiples airlifted to trauma centers in Nashville and Memphis."

At the news conference, a spokesman for an ambulance company said that they requested nine air ambulance helicopters to the scene and that seven of them were used to transport patients. He said he could not share patient information.

Plotzer said there were 25 students and five adults on the bus, two passengers in the dump truck and two in the Chevrolet.

Families of everyone on the bus were contacted, and the district was directing them to the reunification point at a church in Huntingdon, Tennessee.