Officials: Reduce number of active shooter drills in schools
Florida students would be subjected to fewer active shooter drills, under a recommendation by a commission investigating school safety in the wake of the Parkland tragedy.
In response to complaints from students and teachers that emergency drills — now required monthly — are traumatizing students, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Public Safety Commission agreed to recommend they be reduced to six a year.
The change is one of a number of recommendations the commission plans to submit to Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state Legislature in its second annual report.
Commission members started finalizing the report Tuesday at a meeting at the Omni Orlando Resort in Champions Gate and plan to conclude Wednesday.
Pinellas Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, who is chairman of the commission, said the recommendation in no way suggests the Legislature erred by requiring monthly drills starting in 2018.
He said many school districts were reluctant to conduct active shooter drills on a regular basis until the law passed. He said they are crucial to make sure schools are prepared and to avoid the chaos at Stoneman Douglas, where school staff were unprepared.
“I firmly believe what we have done was the right thing and was effective in getting us to a certain place,” Gualtieri said. “Now that we’re at a certain place, like anything, there’s room to back off some.’
The commission recommended that drills vary in
student killed 17 staff and students and wounded 17 more. Greenleaf also was accused of failing to properly supervise campus security monitors or ensure they received training.
During the summer of 2018, security monitors Andrew Medina and David Taylor, two security monitors thought to be under Greenleaf, lost their jobs after police statements revealed they failed to do anything to protect the campus during the massacre on Feb. 14, 2018. But there were no formal investigations. Instead, Superintendent Robert Runcie chose not to renew their annual contracts.
The campus monitors were actually supervised by Porter, the investigation determined.
“Mr. Porter confirmed that ‘security specialists don’t supervise anyone,’ ” wrote lawyer Jennifer Ruiz of Cole, Scott & Kissane, who conducted the review.
There was no policy or general understanding that Greenleaf was responsible for ensuring anyone was trained, or even to share information he received in training with others, the report said. School officials said the district’s Special Investigative Unit, a small police department, was responsible for training, Greenleaf and Stoneman Douglas administrators said.
Gualtieri said he thinks Greenleaf may have been cleared because the district failed to properly set expectations for security staff.
“There was no infrastructure, no policies, no training to say: ‘This is what you do,’ ” Gualtieri said. “You can’t hold someone accountable when there’s no bar, no standard to measure, no communication of expectations. It’s tough to say there was a failure.”
It’s unclear whether that lack of district policies and training will also save the other administrators from facing discipline.
As for who is responsible for those failures, Gualtieri said, “Ultimately, it’s the superintendent and the School Board. They’re the nature, using different scenarios and not just be a presentation that people passively watch. Law enforcement should be involved in every drill, the commission recommends.
School districts should include “all necessary aspects of the drill and emergency operations plan, including panic buttons, simulated communications with first responders, notification to parents of the drill, student/ faculty movement, turning lights off, covering windows, etc.,” the draft report says.
But the commission chose not to take a stance on one potentially controversial idea — teaching students and parents how to physically take down an attacker. Commission member Max Schachter, whose son Alex died at Stoneman Douglas, said he thinks such training is important.
ones tasked with ensuring the district has the right policies and procedures.”
School Board member Lori Alhadeff, whose daughter was killed at Stoneman Douglas, asked the School Board to fire Runcie in March, but the board voted 6 to 3 to retain the superintendent. All four School Board incumbents up for re-election in 2018 kept their seats.
Runcie announced the investigation of the administrators in November, following an initial report from the Stoneman Douglas Commission.
The investigation of Greenleaf was completed July 16 and sent to a professional standards committee Sept. 11. It’s unclear why district officials waited until this week to inform School Board members or the public.
The assistant principals are accused of allowing building exterior doors to be unlocked and bathrooms where students could hide to be locked. They’re also accused of failing to hold certain emergency drills, failing to call for an emergency lockdown, failing to ensure employees were trained and failing to supply employees with proper twoway communications, according to district records.
Reed and Morford are also accused of botching an assessment to determine whether the killer was a threat when he was a student at the school. Morford is also accused of failing to act on tips he received about the killer.
Thompson, who was not on campus at the time of the shooting, is accused of failing to ensure the campus was secure, staff was trained and threat assessments were conducted properly.
All four administrators were moved to new jobs over the summer. Morford resigned from his job at Coconut Creek HIgh last month. He will not face discipline since he’s no longer with the district, Myrick wrote.
The school district retained Cole, Scott & Kissane in January to conduct the investigations.
“Empowering students to defend themselves so they are not victims will save lives,” he said.
But Gualtieri said the idea “wouldn’t fly with parent and teacher groups” who would perceive it as teaching kids to fight.
Other recommendations from the draft report include:
■ Further research on how to manage students identified as threats. This includes what resources will be needed to manage them and how this management will be transferred when the student ages out of the school system.
■ Every law enforcement agency should have a mass casualty death notification and reunification policy, after complaints from Parkland victims that the Broward Sheriff ’s Office was slow to give them information and
■ In response to the slow progress in Broward at installing communication towers, those involved should “put aside their personal animosity and fulfill their obligations to the citizens of Broward County to provide effective, efficient and safe radio and 911 communications.”
■ The Legislature should change the law regarding armed guardians to “make it unequivocally clear that only Florida sheriffs may conduct the guardian training.” This comes in response to a botched effort by Palm Beach County schools to contract with a private company to train armed security in charter schools.
■ The state should standardize reporting of school crime and incident data to avoid the discretion that has provided no privacy. led to many schools underreporting incidents and some to over-report.
■ All pre-arrest diversion programs, including Broward schools’ Promise program, should follow the same rules as county civil citation programs run by the State Attorney’s Office. That includes entering incidents into a database for other law enforcement to access. The tentative recommendation, which could change Wednesday, stops short of calling for an end to Promise, as commission members discussed this summer.
■ The Legislature should increase mental health funding and but also require agencies receiving funds to provide data to prove the money is going to good use.