TECHNOLOGY, PROTOCOLS, COMMUNICATION
School safety adjustments made since Parkland
In the months following the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland that left 17 dead and 17 more injured, legislators, school district representatives and parents pushed for immediate and sweeping changes to school safety.
Within weeks, lawmakers agreed that armed security should be on every campus. Later, thenGov. Rick Scott signed a bill into law that raised the minimum age from 18 to 21 for buying a long gun, such as an AR-15-style rifle; established a red flag law, which allowed law enforcement officers to remove weapons from anyone who was deemed a threat, and increased
An outside view of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. funding for security at schools.
In 2020, the Legislature passed “Alyssa’s Alert,” a law requiring all public schools, including charters, to be equipped with mobile panic alert systems directly linked to law enforcement. The law, implemented in the 2021-22 school year, was named after Alyssa Alhadeff, the 14-year-old daughter of Broward School Board Chair Lori Alhadeff, one of the 17 students and educators killed in what was Florida’s deadliest school shooting.
And in the years since, South Florida school districts have enacted policies and procedures — some required by law, others put forward by their own accord — to harden or secure schools in hopes of preventing something similar from ever happening again.
Ahead of Tuesday’s fifth anniversary of the Valentine’s Day massacre — the first observance since the confessed shooter, Nikolas Cruz, was sentenced to
life in prison in November — the Herald spoke with Broward County and Miami-Dade County Public Schools to understand those efforts and what changes are ongoing.
In total, Miami-Dade schools has spent more than $152 million on school safety initiatives and improvements including single points of entry at all K-12 schools, routine training for staff and security, increased
resources to address the mental health needs and new reporting applications and tools used to report suspicious activity.
In Broward County, it’s upwards of $70 million.
“Florida’s really a model for the rest of the country on school safety. We’re doing a lot of things that no other state is doing,” said Max Schachter, whose 14-year-old son, Alex, who loved playing trombone in the school’s band, died in the massacre.
“Schools are safer because of what we’ve done, but with that said it’s going to be five years since the tragedy and you have to constantly work to prevent complacency even in Florida, even in Broward County,” noted Schachter, who created an organization to advocate for more security, Safe Schools for Alex.
NEW COMMAND CENTERS, SAFETY MECHANISMS
In Miami-Dade, the district established a command center composed of sworn and civilian officers who monitor the more than 18,000 cameras placed throughout public school campuses, according to a district spokesperson.
The center, located at the school district’s police department headquarters, oversees bus traffic, several anonymous tip reporting systems, the visitor