When Wendy Watts heard that a van from The Academy, a school for students on juvenile court probation, had been shot at last week, she instantly thought back to Feb. 9, 2005.

An Academy van was dropping off her grandson, Keith, at Ms. Watts' Knoxville home that day when several gunmen opened fire. No one was injured, but the incident was another in a string of retaliations by youths from rival neighborhoods that resulted in Keith Watts' killing in March 2005.

No arrests have been made in Thursday's shooting in St. Clair Village, in which the driver of the van and a 17-year-old passenger suffered minor wounds.

An Academy van also was shot at in April 2005 in the North Side, with the driver suffering cuts from shattered glass.

"While there have been occurrences of shootings over the past several years that have been confined to a small number of neighborhoods where students are picked up and dropped off, they are random acts of violence that are beyond the control of the staff at The Academy," spokesman Dick Roberts said in an e-mail.

The Academy, founded in 1982, takes in about 200 juveniles at its Baldwin Borough facility from 3 to 9 p.m. -- times when unsupervised youths are most likely to commit crimes.

They are often targets for crimes as well.

"You've got a lot of kids from different factions, many different neighborhoods, riding in the vans," Ms. Watts said. "If one neighborhood is warring with another neighborhood, they're going to shoot at each other."

City homicide Detective Steven Hitchings, who grew up in Knoxville, said that Academy students are often connected to the cycle of violence in the Hilltop communities, where the Watts shooting and last week's incident happened.

"They aren't going up there for stealing candy," he said.

Ms. Watts said she thought there should be more security measures taken with the vans, which pick students up at school and drop them off at their homes when the program is over.

The Academy would not give details of its procedures for picking up and dropping off students, but Mr. Roberts did say that drivers try not to follow the same patterns of routes, in order to throw off possible ambushes.

Also, in extreme cases, The Academy will release a student it believes is making the program unsafe.

That's what happened with Keith Watts. The day after he was shot at in 2005, The Academy decided that it couldn't protect him and worried that he put other students and staff in danger, so he was released. He was killed sitting in a parked vehicle behind Carrick High School a little more than a month later.

Transporting these juveniles can be a dangerous job, but Mr. Roberts noted that the 17-year-old injured in last week's shooting was the first student to be hit in a long time.

"This kid would have been a target no matter where he was," he said.

"[The Academy has] a history of doing good work, and sometimes things do happen that are beyond their control."