Victims’ fund: $10M about to be distributed.

A fund set up for victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting is approaching $10 million just days before fund stewards are scheduled to decide how to allocate the money.

The Broward Education Foundation said it will close the Stoneman Douglas Victims’ Fund’s GoFundMe page on Saturday.

A 17-member steering committee of civic and business leaders appointed by the foundation to make decisions about how to allocate the victims’ fund is scheduled to meet at 10 a.m. Monday at the Gunster law firm’s offices in Fort Lauderdale to make final decisions about the distribution, said Jeff Dion, director of the National Compassion Fund, which is administering the distribution and vetting applicants.

The meeting will be closed to the media and public “due to the sensitive and personal nature of the discussions,” Maria Pierson, a spokeswoman for the education foundation, said by email on Wednesday.

Asked if any members of the Stoneman Douglas community would be attending, Pierson said, “The Steering Committee meetings are for Steering Committee members ONLY.”

Dion said members of the Stoneman Douglas community have shared opinions about distribution protocols approved by the steering committee in April, but deferred questions about the opinions to the foundation.

Pierson declined to respond to a question asking what those opinions were, or whether she expected any of them to guide the steering committee’s decisions on Monday.

As of Wednesday, 1,644 people have applied and 1,508 have been verified as eligible to receive a portion of the fund, Dion said. Verified applicants include next of kin of the 17 who died, the 17 injured by gunshots, and 1,474 who were in the 1200

building or on the campus during the shooting.

The vetting process is still underway for another 14 applicants, Dion said. Checks are expected to begin going out in mid-July to verified members in the four victim categories.

Through Wednesday, $9.49 million has been collected from more than 36,600 donors, according to the fund’s GoFundMe page.

In April, the steering committee decided to make everyone who was on the campus during the Feb. 14 attack eligible for a share of the fund. That decision followed three town hall meetings in which members of the Stoneman Douglas community spoke of students who were still stressed and in need of counseling despite not having suffered a physical injury.

The committee created four categories of severity with the intention of awarding the largest amounts of money to the deceased’s next of kin, followed by victims injured by gunshots, then people who were inside the 1200 building where the shootings took place, and finally anyone who was on campus during the shootings.

The committee has not yet determined what percentages of the money will be allocated across the four groups.

Dion said he plans to attend Monday’s meeting and bring a couple of suggestions for the committee to consider. “They can pick one or start from scratch,” he said.

He said he would have a computer with a spreadsheet program to show how various allocation possibilities would affect individuals in all of the groups.

In a hypothetical example, if the donation period ended Wednesday with the fund at about $9.5 million, and $5 million were allocated to 17 survivors of the deceased, each would get $294,647, and $4 million would be left to divide among the three remaining groups.

If $2 million of the remaining $4 million were allocated to the 17 victims of gunshot injuries, each would get $117,647, and $2 million would be left for the people in the 1200 building and for those on campus.

If each of those two groups were allocated $1 million, then the 432 eligible recipients who were inside the 1200 building would receive $2,314 each and the 1,042 who were elsewhere on campus would receive $960 each.

Of the 1,644 who applied for eligibility in May, 122 were denied for various reasons, Dion said, including parents who could not locate birth certificates or documents establishing their legal guardianship, and an inability by the compassion fund to establish applicants’ on-campus presence through attendance records or other means.