Violent children: A crisis we must no longer ignore

Florida has a dangerous crisis that may surprise and disturb you. It should.

Throughout our state, there are children suffering emotional torments like those that apparently led a 19-year-old former student to kill 17 students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland on Valentine’s Day 2018.

“I actually wanted to be a school shooter,” said the text of a 17-year-old Winter Haven boy. “I actually had the damn weapon in school.”

Too many violent children are in regular classrooms, causing frequent disruptions, rather than in special schools that would be far better equipped to help them.

When they act up, it denies other students — the majority — of the safe learning environment they need and deserve.

Teachers also fear for their safety. They say nothing can be done about a child who hits, if that’s the child’s disability. When they try to get the most violent children removed from their classrooms, they say their documentation is often deemed insufficient and they must start over. It sounds exhausting — and dangerous.

Laws enacted with the good intent of protecting special needs children from discrimination have gone too far the other way.

In response to the Parkland massacre, the Legislature acted in several ways to improve school security. The most effective was to pass the so-called “red flag” law, which has enabled the courts to take guns out of the reach of many troubled children.

But the underlying emotional issues remain barely acknowledged, let alone addressed. That is a tragedy for the children, their families, their schools and our state, even if there is never another school shooting.

These disturbing findings are the result of remarkable work by South Florida Sun Sentinel reporters Megan O’Matz and Brittany Wallman, who spent eight months answering harrowing questions posed by the Parkland tragedy.

The reporters combed the court records of 10 large Florida counties for risk protection orders – the “red flag” cases — and found evidence of more than 100 tormented youths, most of whom had threatened to murder teachers or fellow students.

The red flag law obviously works, although some judges appear indifferent to applying it.

Were it not for these case records, the public would have no window into the magnitude of desperation among Florida’s troubled teenagers. The red-flag files yielded student records otherwise kept secret by needlessly overbroad federal and state privacy legislation about which Congress apparently intends to do nothing.

One such record, obtained from other sources, revealed that Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year old who had been banned from Stoneman Douglas before he returned with a military-style rifle, had scored nearly off the scale for violence on a confidential school threat assessment.

Cruz had been succeeding at a special school where teachers and staff knew how to manage his outbursts, but he wanted to graduate from Stoneman Douglas. To remain at MSD, he agreed to give up his special education rights. Later, he was forced to withdraw for failing grades and directed to attend a drop-out prevention school, without mental health services.

We, the citizens of Florida, should be afraid. Better, though, we should be angry, angry enough to demand that federal and state politicians make good on their promises to fully fund special care for special needs students. Despite having 128 U.S. House of Representatives sponsors, including 14 Republicans, this year’s version has attracted nothing but dust since being filed in March.

Troublesome kids used to be sent off to reform schools, like the murderous and since-closed Dozier Training School for boys at Marianna. That was never the right answer.

But Florida still needs a special system to deal with disabilities that can’t be accommodated in the classrooms of teachers untrained to deal with them or to defend themselves when attacked. Moreover, the laws should be changed to allow schools to relocate an extremely disruptive student despite a parent’s objection.

Federal and state laws require students with disabilities to be accommodated in regular classrooms unless their parents agree to reassignments, under an individual education plan, to special schools such as Broward County’s Cross Creek.

These laws had a good intent. Most children with learning disabilities or mild personality disorders belong in regular classrooms. But the pendulum has swung too far.

At a regular Oakland Park school, for example, a student who punched his teacher in the face until she was dazed and crying was back in his special ed classroom three days later.

Some teachers have had to file lawsuits to protect themselves — and other students — from the dangerous ones.

Now, a statewide grand jury has sharply criticized school officials for persistently failing to report, as the law requires, 26 types of “crime, violence and disruptive behavior” that occur on school grounds. Without full and accurate data, the Legislature and law enforcement are blind to the ever-present crisis in Florida’s schools.

So is the public.

“The incentives are aligned for school officials to underreport,” the grand jury said. The report cited a Broward Teacher’s Union survey this year that described disruptive students being returned to class without discipline.

“Even more troubling,” the jury said, “are the instances where teachers claim to have referred students for discipline, only to be told by administrators to modify their own conduct … or worse, to be told that the student cannot be disciplined because of a disability.”

The grand jury essentially confirmed what the Sun Sentinel reported a year ago: Florida’s school districts are hiding countless crimes, “leaving parents with the false impression that children are safer than they are.”

We would encourage the grand jury to continue its post-Parkland work by investigating the massive shortfall in special education funding.

A Broward School Board workshop last year heard that it would take the hiring of 2,665 additional guidance counselors, psychologists, family therapists, school social workers and nurses to staff county schools at the ratios national standards suggest. The additional cost: $202.3 million. Presently, there is only one psychologist for every 1,630 children, rather than the recommended one to 500.

Yes, safe schools will require more taxes than most legislators have the courage to raise. But consider the alternative.