Fund to benefit all on campus
$8.2M donated for thousands at Stoneman Douglas day of shooting
Everyone who was on the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School campus during the Feb. 14 mass shooting 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, nextof-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.
The decision to include everyone on campus during the shooting stemmed from “the fact everyone on that campus had some degree of mental anguish,” LeMieux said by phone on Tuesday.
Also, unlike victims of the Orlando and Las Vegas shootings, Stoneman Douglas victims had to return to the scene of the crime, LeMieux said.
“We were particularly influenced by the observation that in other mass-shootings, victims are not asked to regularly return to the scene of such a traumatic experience,” LeMieux wrote in an introduction to the final plan. “Yet in this instance, unless a teacher or student is willing to separate themselves from their friends, community, and support system, we are asking them to return to this school for periods ranging from a few months to several years.
“We recognize that everyone has been severely impacted regardless of whether they found themselves in a position to actively seek or obtain mental health treatment.”
The committee considered numerous proposals submitted during the comment period, LeMieux wrote, including using the funds to demolish the 1200 building, build a memorial, or enhance school security. But they were dismissed as “being beyond the stated scope and purpose of this fund.”
“Other suggestions to gauge trauma based upon the proximity to the gunman and the violence to which the individual was exposed, were insightful, but ultimately impractical as this committee cannot obtain from law enforcement an objective, verifiable listing of the location of each person at the time of the shooting.”
Asked whether eligibility extended to former Broward Sheriff’s Deputy Scot Peterson, the school resource officer who resigned after video footage showed he did not enter the 1200 building during the shootings, Dion said the committee hadn’t considered Peterson. But “that one would definitely get flagged,” if Peterson applied, Dion said. “We’d have to throw that to the committee.”
The National Compassion Fund was created after victims and families from past mass casualty crimes, such as the attacks at Columbine High School in Colorado and Virginia Tech, complained about delays and unreasonable requirements imposed by stewards of money raised in their names.
Success of each distribution effort assisted by the compassion fund isn’t measured by how much money is created or distributed, but by “whether 100 percent of what’s collected goes to victims and it’s distributed in a fair and transparent way,” Dion said.