Parkland policies led to massacre
Now they may be endangering your kids
As students settle in for the new school year, parents must ask: Do I really know what’s happening in my kids’ school? Do I really know whether they are safe? I didn’t know. But I want to be the last father in America who can honestly make that excuse.
After my daughter, Meadow, was murdered in the February 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, I wanted every answer. As I investigated, I realized that it was the most avoidable mass murder in American history. I also learned that the policies that made this massacre inevitable have spread to schools across America.
A few weeks after the massacre, I asked whether the Broward school district’s disciplinary leniency policies enabled the shooter to slip through the cracks. Broward Superintendent Robert Runcie called questions like mine “fake news” because the shooter had never been referred to the school district’s PROMISE program “while in high school.” The program allows students who commit certain misdemeanors to avoid the criminal justice system. Later, we learned he had been referred to PROMISE while in middle school.
The confessed shooter allegedly threatened to kill other students and threatened to rape. He threatened to shoot up the school. Classmates said he brought knives and bullets to school. He wrote hideous racial slurs on his backpack. He carved swastikas in the lunchroom tables. But officials at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School didn’t have him arrested. Rather, they simply banned him from bringing a backpack and frisked him every day.
Broward’s policies allowed juveniles convicted of crimes as serious as murder and rape to go back into normal classrooms. Broward’s “Policy 5006” said that referring serious felonies like sexual assault and arson to the police was optional. Principals were trained to not cooperate with law enforcement. Disorder and violence ran and seem to still run rampant. A 2019 poll of Broward teachers conducted by the Broward Teachers Union found that 50% feared for their personal safety in the past two years and 13% had been assaulted in the current school year.
Direct pressure on schools
Beyond the fact that my daughter was murdered, what keeps me up at night is that schools all over the country have adopted Broward’s anti-discipline policies. Runcie told Scholastic magazine in 2014, “Some of my staff joke that the Obama administration might have taken our policies and framework and developed them into national guidelines.” But it wasn’t a joke. And they weren’t guidelines. Earlier that year, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan — Runcie’s former boss from Chicago Public Schools — used a “Dear Colleague” letter to threaten and coerce school districts to follow Runcie’s lead on disciplinary leniency or lose their federal funding.
Hundreds of school districts serving millions of students were directly pressured, and many more adopted them for fear of investigation or just because fighting the “school-to-prison pipeline” by decreasing suspensions, expulsions and arrests was the new, politically correct thing to do. According to a recent national poll, more than 70% of teachers believe that the decrease in suspensions in their school was at least somewhat due to a higher tolerance for misbehavior, and almost half believe it was due to underreporting issues.
My mission is to educate parents
In middle school, the Parkland shooter held students and teachers in a state of constant terror until the school finally completed the complicated referral process to send him to a specialized school. He told a therapist there that he dreamed of killing people and being covered in blood. But after a few calm months, they decided not only to send him to school next to my beautiful daughter, they even let him join the school’s junior ROTC organization.
About a year before the shooting that took my daughter’s life, he was finally expelled from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High. But it was too late.
Our schools are funneling disturbed students into normal classrooms and covering up their misbehavior by design. I didn’t know that. Now you do. My mission in life is to educate parents. That’s why I wrote my new book about Meadow’s murder and what I discovered about school policies that put student safety at risk.
President Donald Trump repealed the Obama-era leniency policies at the federal level, but they aren’t going anywhere at the local level unless parents take action. If teachers tell you that these policies are causing problems, push for change. The only way to keep kids safe at school is for parents to get informed, get involved and fix it.