Schools’ culture of leniency lets students avoid strict punishment

Broward Schools have grown so tolerant of misbehavior that students like Nikolas Cruz are able to slide by for years without strict punishment for conduct that could be criminal.

The culture of leniency allows children to engage in an endless loop of violations and second chances, creating a system where kids who commit the same offense for the 10th time may be treated like it’s the first, according to records and interviews with people familiar with the process.

Cruz was suspended at least 67 days over less than a year and a half at Westglades Middle School, and his problems continued at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, until he finally was forced to leave.

The South Florida Sun Sentinel obtained Cruz’s discipline records, reviewed discipline policies and found:

Students can be considered first-time offenders even if they commit the same of-

fenses year after year.

The district’s claim of reforming bad behavior is exaggerated.

Lenient discipline has an added PR benefit for the district: fewer suspensions, expulsions and arrests along with rising graduation rates.

The forgiving attitude goes beyond the schools’ controversial PROMISE program, the target of considerable public scrutiny for enabling students to avoid criminal charges for misdemeanor offenses.

The program, the pride of Superintendent Robert Runcie, was designed to use counseling and mentoring to help students avoid the school-to-prison pipeline. Under former zero-tolerance policies, black students ended up suspended, expelled and arrested at rates that were widely disproportionate to their peers.

Desmond Blackburn, then Broward’s chief school performance and accountability officer, specifically instructed teachers and staff in a video years ago to challenge and nurture students, while using suspensions, expulsions and arrests as “absolute last resorts.”

Now, many teachers and parents say Broward has created a culture in which teachers are expressly told or subtly pressured not to send students to the administration for punishment so a school’s image is not tarnished.

Mary Fitzgerald taught for 37 years in the district before retiring from Sunrise Middle in Fort Lauderdale in 2016. She said she retired a year early due to her concerns about student discipline.

“It was so many things. I had three students bring knives to my classroom. One was out of the classroom for one day. Another had so many things on his record, he was gone for five days. None were expelled.”

Safety concerns at Sunrise were brought up at faculty meetings. “The message out there is that the students are untouchable. Habitual negative behavior means nothing anymore,” state the minutes of a Faculty Council meeting on Feb. 2, 2015.

“My principal basically would tell me it was his job to market the school. He was adamant about not looking bad,” Fitzgerald said.

Runcie, in an interview with the Sun Sentinel, acknowledged there are complaints that discipline isn’t consistently enforced.

In a memo to principals Wednesday, Runcie said he reinforced that “we have to be vigilant in reporting every incident so that we can ensure our students who are victims, as well as offenders, get the appropriate intervention and support.

“We’re going to try to make sure, from the top, we’re sending the right message related to discipline and holding our schools accountable,” he said.

The superintendent said in the memo that he will propose the School Board create a Climate and Discipline Department to “better monitor and support school teams as they address students with major challenges and concerns.”

The PROMISE program

The Pine Ridge Education Center, just outside Fort Lauderdale, houses the PROMISE program, as well as secure classrooms for other children who have been expelled from their regular school but need supervision and guidance.

The principal describes it as a “school of promise and encouragement, not a school of punishment.”

Students call it the “Zap School,” as in you’ve been “zapped” and sent there as punishment.

Runcie claims the PROMISE program has a 90 percent success rate at keeping children from reoffending, but that statistic can be deceiving.

A student can commit a subsequent infraction without being considered a repeat offender, as long as it’s not the exact same violation, in the exact same year.

The following year, they start with a clean slate.

“It’s extremely problematic,” said Tim Sternberg, a former assistant principal at Pine Ridge Educational Center who administered the PROMISE program. “You can develop a psyche that it is OK to commit crime because you can refresh the clock every year.”

Sternberg says he doesn’t have confidence in the district’s data. “They aren’t tracking kids over time.”

Asked about kids starting each year anew, without marks against them from prior semesters, Runcie told the Sun Sentinel he will review it.

“We’ll make whatever adjustments we need to. We review the discipline policy every year and have made some adjustments and continue to take feedback.”

Inside the matrix

The district’s Student Code of Conduct, first created in 2004-05, includes a complicated discipline “matrix” that lists the prescribed punishment for a litany of offenses: skipping school, violating rules, being disruptive, having drugs, fighting, destroying property, committing a crime.

It was designed to help staff make fairer and more equitable decisions in handing out penalties. But potential punishments have become more lenient over the years.

More than five years ago, a high school student who used profanity toward a staff member would receive a 3- to 10-day suspension. That was reduced to one to two days after the discipline chart was revised.

The first violation for disruptive classroom behavior called for an inschool suspension of one to five days. Later, it was reduced to a suspension of under one day.

Since the 2012-13 school year, suspensions have declined 27 percent, according to the Florida Department of Education. Incidents reported to law enforcement have fallen 8 percent. The number of arrests per 1,000 students: down 64 percent.

The district’s menu of choices for dealing with rule-breaking students include detention, internal suspension, out-of-school suspension and expulsion, where children can be sent to an alternative education center.

Or another option: the PROMISE program.

Under attack

Runcie is proud and protective of the program, which was launched under his leadership in November 2013 when the Broward Sheriff’s Office, the Public Defender’s Office, the NAACP, the state Department of Juvenile Justice and the State Attorney signed an agreement to reduce school-based arrests.

But the program is under attack because of widespread allegations that Cruz, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooter, benefited from it.

Runcie had insisted that Cruz was not in the PROMISE program, but he did an abrupt shift this week and said Cruz had been referred to it in 2013 for vandalizing a bathroom. Cruz did not complete the threeday stint, the district said, but administrators haven’t said why.

A couple of months later, he was sent to a special school for children with severe emotional and behavioral disorders. As a tot, he was found to be developmentally delayed and had been considered a special needs child in school, entitled to certain services and protections under law.

Some parents and community leaders have criticized the superintendent for misleading the public about Cruz, and the school district appears not to be able to make sense of all of the records it has on him.

“To me, it’s an indication that the various discipline programs in place at the district are confusing, poorly implemented and executed, and clearly if we take the district at its statement, they’ve been difficult to track,” said Ryan Petty, whose daughter Alaina was one of 17 people shot to death in Cruz’s Feb. 14 massacre. “If the records are this difficult to find, clearly it would be difficult to know whether this is helping students or not.”

Despite Cruz’s history of discipline problems, neither the schools nor police ever steered him to the justice system.

A video on social media shows him with a bullet at school. Police reports have him batting his elderly mother with a vacuum hose, destroying property and pulling a gun on her and his brother.

On Feb. 5, 2016, the Broward Sheriff’s Office got an anonymous call that Cruz posted on Instagram that he “planned to shoot up the school.” He was never disciplined or charged, even though it’s a felony in Florida for someone to threaten to “discharge any destructive device” with the intent to harm someone.

Police complaints

Jeff Bell, president of the Broward Sheriff’s Office Deputies Association, said the district’s more-tolerant culture has taken much of the discretion away from deputies on whether to make an arrest.

“No officer wants to fill up jail cells with juvenile offenders, but they need that discretion to give warnings and second chances or if the child is completely out of control, you can arrest them.”

Runcie disputes that the discipline matrix is too soft on kids.

“In many ways, it’s tougher because it calls for mandatory types of interventions,” he said. For example, it used to be that a student suspended for vandalism would be sitting at home or wandering the streets, he said. Now they are assigned to an intense program through Promise to help correct their behavior

But Fitzgerald, the former Sunrise Middle school teacher, thinks discipline has become lax.

“A lot of principals are afraid,” she said. “You don’t report theft because reporting it makes your school look dangerous.

“There are a lot of things going on in the school that are being overlooked. Only when things are obvious and egregious will they arrest the child.”