Everyone at Fla. school during shooting eligible for part of fund

Everyone who was on the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School campus during the Feb. 14 mass shootings will be eligible to receive a share of the victims’ fund created by the Broward Education Foundation.

That decision is in a final plan for distribution of the Stoneman Douglas Victims’ Fund, which so far totals $8.2 million from more than 36,000 donors.

How much money each person will receive won’t be decided until after June 30, once the number of eligible recipients and the total amount of donations are known, said Jeff Dion, director of the National Compassion Fund, which will administer the distribution.

The money was raised through the crowdfunding website GoFundMe.com, as well as outside fundraising activities such as benefit concerts, employer campaigns, and pledges by retail establishments to donate shares of purchase prices.

About 3,200 students were on campus the day of the shootings, according to Broward County Public Schools records. Also eligible will be about 225 staff members who work at the school, including teachers, custodians, food service workers and administrators.

Those eligible must apply through the NationalCompassionFund.org website by May 31. Applicants will be verified through attendance records.

The finalized plan creates four categories of eligibility:

—Applicants for deceased victims (in most cases, next-of-kin such as parents, children or spouses)

—Victims grazed or shot by bullets (17 gunshot victims have been identified)

—Anyone who was inside the 1200 building, where the shootings took place (Dion said about 750 victims were in the building.)

—Anyone else who was on campus during the shootings.

Within each category, all eligible recipients will receive equal amounts of money, Dion said. But no decisions have been made about how much money will be allocated to each category beyond that “the highest category” of payment will go to the designated representative of the 17 people who died.

The money will be given as a gift with no strings attached, the steering committee has said.

In a written introduction to the final plan, steering committee chairman George LeMieux wrote: “This Fund does not exist in a vacuum; it is merely one part of an ongoing continuum of care in response to this atrocity.”

Immediate assistance was made available through Florida’s crime victim compensation program and “a myriad of crowdsourced funding sites,” while “longterm governmental and community assistance will likely be provided, though it may take up to 18-24 months for that assistance to become available. This Fund offers assistance in the medium term, to bridge the gap.”

The distribution formula is patterned after others developed by the National Compassion Fund after the Las Vegas concert shooting in October 2017, the Pulse nightclub shootings in Orlando in June 2016, and others.

Initially, Dion and the committee proposed requiring victims who were not inside the 1200 building to prove they had sought mental health treatment.

But at three town hall meetings held last month over the distribution plan, students, parents and teachers from the school urged the committee to open eligibility to victims who sought help from school counselors, clergy members or other non-traditional sources, even if they couldn’t prove it by producing an invoice.