Security money turned down
Broward schools fought against 2013 plan to boost spending
Broward schools turned down a proposal in 2013 to levy $55 million in tax dollars for school safety, money that might have made them better prepared for one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.
But Superintendent Robert Runcie insisted at the time that he already had a plan to address school safety, and School Board members hated the idea because control over the money would have gone to a separate taxing district board.
It was a few months after the Sandy Hook massacre in Connecticut, and most Broward legislators wanted to ask voters for a special tax that would be used to pay for police officers and mental health services for students.
Runcie said at the time that the district was close to having at least one police officer in every school, something that still hasn’t happened in 2019. He said the district had increased training for security officers, enacted emergency drills at schools and conducted more thorough reviews of each school’s physical security needs.
Those all were areas that were listed as failures by the commission that reviewed the Feb. 14 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
“A special taxing district, if ap-
proved by the voters, would not generate revenue until 2015,” Runcie wrote to thenstate Sen. Eleanor Sobel, the bill’s sponsor, in March 2013. “Although more funding is always welcome, the School Board cannot wait, and is not waiting, that long to address its safety concerns.”
Runcie’s letter is attracting new outrage after Stoneman Douglas parent Stephen Feuerman discovered it and read portions of it at a parent meeting last week with Runcie.
“To read they had a plan after Sandy Hook and didn’t do a thing with it was just mind-boggling to me,” Feuerman told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
He said he received no response from Runcie or any of his staff at the Feb. 5 meeting, which was closed to the media and public.
A district spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comments, despite attempts on Friday, Monday and Tuesday. Runcie also couldn’t be reached.
All but two of the current School Board members, Heather Brinkworth and Lori Alhadeff, were on the board at the time.
Nora Rupert was the only board member at the time who supported the idea for the tax.
The proposal for a Broward taxing district died in the Legislature, largely because of the school district’s opposition, said former state Rep. Jim Waldman, a Democrat from Coconut Creek who sponsored the House version of the bill. Although Republican legislators often oppose tax increases, they are usually fine with proposals that let an individual county decide to tax themselves.
The bill was later expanded to give the authority to all 67 school districts. It passed through several committees but died before it went before a full vote.
“I absolutely believe it would have made a difference,” Waldman said. “All public schools were put on notice after Sandy Hook. This could happen anywhere. It doesn’t have to be a big city. It’s a shame the school district wasn’t more proactive.”
In Runcie’s 2013 letter to Sobel, he said the district was taking actions to improve safety that later came up as problem areas in the report by the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Public Safety Commission, which investigated what went wrong during the tragedy.
Runcie said the district had “instituted additional training for school security specialists and campus security monitors.” However, the commission reported the staff at Stoneman Douglas received little to no training, and the district had no formal training program for these staff members.
Runcie said he had “instructed all of our schools to engage in mock emergency drills and practice lockdowns.” However, the district’s active shooter training hadn’t been started at most middle or high schools at the time of the massacre.
The superintendent said then that he had required each school to conduct a second school safety review on top of the normal reviews being done. But the commission found that the school district’s 2018 safety review on Stoneman Douglas included errors and incomplete information, even after the shooting.
Runcie said the district intended to expand its school resource officer program to include a police officer at each school. “We are currently exploring options for how this can be accomplished in the immediate future.” But in the summer of 2018, half of Broward County’s 234 district-run schools didn’t have a full-time police officer, which put them in danger of not complying with a new state law. They resolved the issue by creating a program of “armed guardians,” which are nonsworn security officers.
“The tragedy of this letter is perhaps if they had gone for a special taxing district strictly focused on school safety … perhaps we would have had all the systems in place” to protect schools from active shooters, said Lisa Maxwell, who heads the Broward Principals and Assistants Association.
Sobel said Tuesday she’s disappointed the school district focused on priorities other than security during the past six years. “In hindsight, I’m heartbroken. I want to cry,” Sobel said. “School safety is No. 1. People send their kids to school expecting them to come home.”
School Board members slammed the proposal at a meeting in March 2013. They said they’d rather ask voters for money to improve technology and renovate old schools, which they did in November 2014.
“We’re talking about a minor amount of money for [school security] versus a major amount of money we need to renovate our schools and for technology in our schools,” board member Laurie Rich Levinson said at the time. “If we’re going to ask for a referendum, that’s the kind of referendum you go to voters to ask them to consider supporting.”
The $800 million bond referendum passed, but the district has so far failed to get most of the renovation work done.
School Board members also disliked the idea of a special taxing district, with its own board, which would have overseen how the money was spent.
“We’re always ready to accept more money, but I’m not willing to give up any authority to anyone,” board member Ann Murray said at the time.
Board member Robin Bartleman was in the process of helping to create the Promise program, which started later that year to provide alternatives to arrests for students committing minor misdemeanor offenses. She worried the proposed taxing board could jeopardize that.
Rupert voted in favor of the proposal. “I was brought up to not look a gift horse in the mouth,” she said then. “There’s no plan right now to bring money into Broward County.”
The proposal came two years after a grand jury found corruption and mismanagement in the school district.
“My belief is we needed to get it away from the School Board so that money wouldn’t be used for something other than what we designated it for, which was security,” Waldman said. “I won’t say it was a distrust, but there was always a concern that the School Board wouldn’t do what we thought should be done with the money.”