Runcie tries to answer criticism
Superintendent details school safety plans after Parkland shooting
Embattled Broward School Superintendent Robert Runcie on Thursday outlined the district’s progress in making the safety and security reforms recommended by the state commission that investigated the Parkland school massacre.
Runcie said the district had completed more than half of the recommendations put forth in the 458-page report, which listed failure after failure and short-coming after short-coming in the run up and response to the Valentine’s Day shooting that killed 17 people on the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School campus.
New Code Red and Safer Spaces policies and providing the Broward Sheriff’s Office with remote access to school surveillance cameras were among the district’s
accomplishments, Runcie said.
The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission, which issued its final report earlier this month after almost a year of investigating, has accused school districts statewide of lagging in their safety improvement actions.
Runcie defended the district’s pace, saying it has been aggressive, urgent, intense and thoughtful.
“Since Feb. 14, we’ve worked on nothing but security and safety, sometimes at the expense of our core mission [as an education institution],” Runcie said.
“There’s a lot that we have been doing and I’ll tell you this, we can’t do every single thing in a minute and sometimes we’ve got to prioritize the work that we’re doing and that’s what we’ve been doing.”
Money is an obstacle, Runcie said, but the district can’t wait for the state to come through. In August the district went into its reserves and took $30.2 million to spend on surveillance cameras, radios, and public address intercom systems.
Although school board members flanked Runcie at the podium, reporters were not allowed to ask them questions. Runcie did all the talking. And as soon as “last question” had been called by the district’s new spokeswoman, Runcie and the members promptly were shuttled behind a partition and through a back door. There was no hanging around to address follow-up questions.
Here are highlights of the recommendations made and where the district stands with them.
Recommendation: Classrooms should have established safety measures, such as hard corners — marked areas not visible from doorways — or other safe areas for students to hide, and teachers should be able to cover door windows quickly.
Status: With the hard corner, or hiding place, discussion coming up numerous times over the course of the commission’s meetings, many puzzle over why it took the district so long to tackle such a simple and inexpensive measure. Over the winter break, hard corners were designated in 60 classrooms at Stoneman Douglas. The same should be completed at the district’s remaining 20,000 classrooms by the end of February. The School Board reviewed a new “Safer Spaces Policy” in December that is expected to be adopted in February.
Recommendation: Every school should have a clear policy for declaring a Code Red, which is an emergency lockdown. All personnel should be empowered to call for a Code Red.
Status: A Code Red policy that authorizes any staff member to call for one was drafted in December and a final version will be presented to the School Board in February. Broward public schools have conducted 1,300 code red drills since the start of this school year.
Recommendation: All campus gates must remain locked, unless staffed, to prevent unauthorized access.
Status: All principals were given this directive at the beginning of the school year. Single-point of entry to control visitor access has been completed at 195 of 238 school sites. Twenty-six more schools should be added to the completion list by early April and the remaining 17 campuses will be done before the next school year begins.
Recommendation: Schools must accurately report crime and safety incidents. A South Florida Sun Sentinel investigation found that Stoneman Douglas failed to alert the state to numerous incidents and that districts throughout the state had not reported incidents such as rape, kidnapping, arson and murder.
Status: A new threat assessment policy, outlining details for this, will be presented to the School Board next month. It would be up to the state Legislature to authorize sanctions on school districts that don’t accurately report campus crime.
Recommendation: Student mental health and counseling records should be part of each student’s school records and follow them from school to school.
Status: Contingent upon legislative action or rule-making by the Florida Department of Health. The district would abide by any such legislation.
Recommendation: Schoolbased arrest diversion programs, such as Broward’s Promise program, should limit the number of referrals a student can receive, report all information to the Department of Juvenile Justice and provide law enforcement with the discretion to make an arrest.
Status: A state law passed last year excludes students who commit a second offense from re-entering the program. Other policy changes, such as eliminating the “reset” practice, which allows a student to begin each school year with a fresh start, will be recommended to the School Board next month.
Recommendation: All Florida public schools should immediately provide law enforcement with live and real-time access to all school camera systems. The school districts should provide law enforcement with adequate training to access and operate the cameras.
Status: An agreement between the school district and the Broward Sheriff’s Office was signed Wednesday. It gives the agency remote access to school cameras. The intention is to do the same with every other police department in the county. Camera system upgrades, $5 millionworth, were made at every school by June. In August, another $6.2 million was allocated for an additional 2,500 cameras.
Recommendation: The district should investigate how Stoneman Douglas Assistant Principal Jeff Morford acted on information provided to him about the future shooter to see if any district policies were violated. If Morford’s actions did not violate policies, then those policies should be changed.
Status: Morford has been transferred from Stoneman Douglas, while an investigation proceeds. A policy requiring staff to report and document all suspicious student behavior at least to the principal, if not a higher authority, will be outlined in the new threat assessment policy the School Board will review in February.
Recommendation: The district should investigate whether Principal Ty Thompson’s disengagement from the threat-assessment process and failure to become informed about threats on campus violated district policy. The commission said the principal should be aware of all threat reports and how they are handled.
Status: Runcie declined to comment on Thompson specifically, but said more investigations are to come. “We are moving forward with investigations,” he said. “We will expand the scope of investigations as appropriate.”
And in its above-and-beyond efforts, Runcie said, the district took it upon itself to establish a new Office of School Safety, Security and Emergency Preparedness with 30 positions and a budget of approximately $3.2 million. The district is in its final stages of interviewing candidates to head the office. A final choice should be made within a few weeks.
The office’s staff will be in charge of developing an audit program, conducting annual audits of the district’s schools, reviewing discipline and behavioral records and tightening up the threat assessment process. Staff also will pay surprise visits to schools to make sure schools are in compliance. Other directives for the office will be centralizing training across the district, developing new job descriptions and training for campus monitors and others.