HIDE, DENY, SPIN, THREATEN
How the school district tried to mask failures that led to Parkland shooting
Immediately after 17 people were murdered inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the school district launched a persistent effort to keep people from finding out what went wrong.
For months, Broward schools delayed or withheld records, refused to publicly assess the role of employees, spread misinformation and even sought to jail reporters who published the truth.
New information gathered by the South Florida Sun Sentinel proves that the school district knew far more than it’s saying about a disturbed former student obsessed with death and guns who mowed down staff and students with an assault rifle on Valentine’s Day.
After promising an honest assessment of what led to the shooting, the district instead hired a consultant whose primary goal, according to school records, was preparing a legal
defense. Then the district kept most of those findings from the public.
School administrators insist that they have been as transparent as possible; that federal privacy laws prevent them from revealing the school record of gunman Nikolas Cruz; that discussing security in detail would make schools more dangerous; and that answers ultimately will come when a state commission releases its initial findings about the shooting around New Year’s.
Beyond that, though, the cloak of secrecy illustrates the steps a beleaguered public body will take to manage and hide information in a crisis when reputations, careers and legal liability are at stake.
It also highlights the shortcomings of federal education laws that protect even admitted killers like Cruz who are no longer students. Behind a shield of privacy laws and security secrets, schools can cover up errors and withhold information the public needs in order to heal and to evaluate the people entrusted with their children’s lives.
Nine months after the Parkland shooting, few people have been held accountable — or even identified — for mishandling security and failing to react to signs that the troubled Cruz could erupt. Only two lowlevel security monitors have been fired.
“Obviously it seems to me there were multiple failures in the system,” said longtime businessman John Daly Sr. of Coral Springs, who with a few others started the activist group Concerned Citizens of Broward County in response to what they considered security lapses. “And basically it looked, more or less, like a cover-up, because they weren’t forthcoming about how they handled the situation.”
Superintendent Robert Runcie stresses that the school district has made no attempt to conceal information except when lawyers said it could not be released.
“That can’t be characterized — and should not be characterized — as the district doesn’t want to provide more information,” he said. “We work to be as transparent as possible. … We have nothing to hide.”
“There’s no conversation anywhere in this district about withholding any information that we can readily provide. I haven’t had those conversations. I haven’t heard about them.”
Familiar promises
Runcie has professed openness from the beginning, but reporters and families of dead children have been denied information time and again.
In March, he said, “We cannot undo the heartbreak this attack has caused in the community, but we can try to understand the conditions that led to such acts in hopes of avoiding them in the future.”
That statement came as he announced what he called an “independent, comprehensive assessment“that would be done with “transparency and a sense of urgency.”
The review fell short of what he described.
Without taking bids or interviewing consultants, the district let its outside law firm hire Collaborative Educational Network of Tallahassee.
CEN’s contract, for $60,000, did not demand the thorough and transparent review that Runcie promised. Rather, it directed the consultant to analyze Cruz’s school records, interview educators and keep the details secret. The contract required the consultant to “further assist the client in ongoing litigation matters.”
CEN spent several months analyzing one issue: whether Broward schools satisfied the law in the education of Cruz, a onetime special education student, or whether “areas of concern” should be addressed. The review made no attempt to assess whether the district adequately protected students or failed to act on Cruz’s often-spoken plans for violence. Though Runcie said other agencies would be interviewed, none were.
The report, released in August after a court battle, concluded that the district generally treated Cruz properly. Exactly how, the public could not tell.
With a judge’s approval, the district obscured references to Cruz — nearly twothirds of the text — to protect his privacy under law. Only when the Sun Sentinel obtained and published an uncensored copy did the truth come out: Cruz was deeply troubled; the district improperly withdrew support he needed; he asked for additional services; and the district bungled his request, leaving him spinning without help.
What the report didn’t say
Startling as those details were, they pale in light of new information obtained by the Sun Sentinel, none of it included in the consultant’s report or shared publicly by the school district.
The district was well aware that Cruz, for years, was unstable and possibly murderous:
■ “I’m a bad kid. I want to kill,” Cruz, now 20 years old, ominously told a teacher in middle school.
■ “I strongly feel that Nikolas is a danger to the students and faculty at this school,” Cruz’s eighthgrade language arts teacher wrote in a behavioral evaluation. “I do not feel that he understands the difference between his violent video games and reality.”
■ In middle school, he “stated he felt nervous about one day going to jail and wondered what would happen to him if he did something bad.”
■ At the beginning of eighth grade, one girl’s mother called to have her transferred out of Cruz’s class because she was concerned for her child’s safety. The mother called Cruz a “menace to society,” according to a psychosocial assessment.
In short, the school district’s own records reveal Nikolas Cruz to be a tortured teen liable to explode at any time. Yet the analysis the district commissioned
to help the community “understand,” as Runcie promised, makes no mention of those episodes.
Said Ryan Petty, whose 14-year-old daughter, Alaina, was murdered at Stoneman Douglas: “I have absolutely no trust that the district has any interest in policing itself.”
Fighting public access
The school district began to lock down information right after the shooting, declaring that all Stoneman Douglas records were secret, even those the public had a legal right to see.
“At this time, any records pertaining to Stoneman Douglas High will not be released,” the district’s risk management department said in an email to reporters in February.
Even employees were subject to restraints. Some received letters of reprimand — not for mishandling Cruz, but for accessing his private records after the shooting.
Officials refused at times to respond to even simple questions from reporters, telling them to wait for the consultant’s report.
At one point, the district said it would cost $2,600 for reporters to see copies of letters that teachers and staff sent to School Board members after the shooting. The district said it would charge $2,700 for Principal Ty Thompson’s emails related to Cruz, the tragedy and security.
Journalists obtained some of the letters months later after negotiating a lower price. Other emails were released only after the parents of dead students sued the school district, saying they had been unable to obtain public records.
The Sun Sentinel has petitioned to join that suit, one of several cases that have led the district into court over secrecy.
Just two weeks after the attack, news companies sued the district to obtain surveillance video from outside Stoneman Douglas so the public could evaluate the response of police officers. The school district argued that the footage would give away security secrets. An appellate judge rejected that argument, calling the video “something that the parents of students should be able to evaluate to participate in future decisions concerning the safety of their children.”
The school district was back in court after its consultant’s report was completed. After first refusing to release the report, school lawyers suddenly sought a judge’s permission to do so, but only with vast sections blacked out to hide Cruz’s information.
When the Sun Sentinel published an uncensored version, the school district swiftly asked a judge to hold two reporters in contempt, which could result in their jailing.
School officials maintain that they did not attempt to sanction reporters, only to inform the court that the full report had been published. Yet their petition asked the judge to “initiate contempt proceedings … and impose proper sanctions as deemed appropriate.”
Backers in business
Aside from legal issues, the school system has considerable reason to be concerned about its reputation, finances and stability.
It is the sixth-largest school system in the country, with more than 270,000 students and a budget of more than $4 billion. Broward County’s largest public sector employer, its leadership wields tremendous power and influence, and the community’s top businesspeople have been among Runcie’s staunchest supporters.
“The business community has confidence in Bob Runcie 100 percent,” said Keith Koenig, president of City Furniture and chairman of the Broward Workshop, a nonprofit organization made up of the county’s major corporations, including school district vendors and contractors
Koenig credits Runcie with raising graduation rates, scaling down inefficiency, improving productivity, winning an $800 million bond issue in 2014, and passing a property tax increase this past August for teacher raises and school security — a campaign waged as questions about Parkland went unanswered.
School districts nationally have taken similar steps to protect information during crises, experts say.
In Madison, Ala., one ninth-grader fatally shot another in a hallway at Discovery Middle School in February 2010. Although students were texting the shooter’s name to one another, the school district could not confirm it because he was a minor, said communications consultant Barbara Nash, who was hired to help with public relations.
“I wanted to. We wanted to. But we couldn’t,” Nash said. “It would have been against the law to say so. It’s ridiculous.”
Mellissa Braham, associate director of the National School Public Relations Association, said: “Sometimes you might think that it seems as if the district is trying to hide something, when it might actually be that they’re trying to be thoughtful about the process or trying to provide a reasonable accommodation of the laws. And not get themselves in additional trouble.”
Even then, she said, most districts would do their own internal reviews to see what mistakes were made.
Broward schools never did. It was five months after the shooting when the school district announced it would launch a thorough investigation into school security and other issues that the consultant CEN was not considering.
By then, the state commission was investigating the shooting and asked the district to avoid another review, in order to not interfere with the commission’s work.
A ‘whitewash’?
David Frankel, one of Cruz’s attorneys, called the CEN report a “whitewash”
that underplayed or omitted evidence of Cruz’s psychological problems in order to help the school district evade responsibility.
Christy Noe, president and CEO of CEN, defends the report as “not a whitewash at all.”
The report, in part, explored why Cruz was transferred to Stoneman Douglas from a school that gives emotionally and behaviorally disabled students the extra support they need. Cruz’s behavior deteriorated quickly at Stoneman Douglas and he was forced to withdraw, but the report concluded that the school district did nothing wrong by sending him there.
If people understood the laws related to educating a special-needs child, Noe said, they’d understand that Cruz wasn’t meant to stay in the sheltered environment of a special school forever. Even with his history of aggression and threats to kill people, she said she stands by her report’s conclusion that he had improved enough to be sent to a regular school.
Cruz was just one of about 1,000 students in Broward public schools with emotional and behavioral disabilities, Noe said.
“If you were to review the full educational records of those students, you would find many, many instances in which they said or wrote disturbing or threatening statements,” Noe said. “… unfortunately, how we see things in hindsight is often very different than what we perceive in the moment.”
Still, plenty of people knew that Cruz was bent on violence, but their concerns appear nowhere in the consultant’s report.
In February 2016, just weeks after Cruz started full time at Stoneman Douglas, a neighbor reported to the sheriff’s office how unhinged he was. Cruz posted online that he planned to “shoot up a school,” the neighbor said.
The statement does not appear in the consultant’s report. Instead, the report portrayed the volatile Cruz as a success story at the time. He was “experiencing positive academic progress with only minor behavioral challenges,” the report said.
No help for Cruz
At Stoneman Douglas, Cruz disappeared on a giant campus with 3,300 students and no structure for emotionally troubled students like him. Some in the community wonder whether Cruz’s problems at Stoneman Douglas led him to target the school later.
The school district’s actions were “just total negligence — serious, not minor,” said Dottie Provenzano, a retired special education coordinator for Broward schools. “The way I look at it, we don’t have dead children if the school district had done what they needed to do.”
The district has tried to dispel that perception.
Public Information Officer Tracy Clark has repeatedly distributed “talking points,” or suggested comments, for administrators and school board members to make publicly, according to emails obtained by the Sun Sentinel.
Similarly, the district attempted to mitigate any public outcry about its consultant’s report. A news release proclaimed, “This report verifies that the district’s systems are appropriate and are in place.”
Clark then sent out talking points for board members, who were advised to say, “I have not yet seen the report.” Or: “It seems clear that the review was thorough.” And: “We must never forget that Nikolas Cruz is responsible for this tragedy.”