Lockdown procedures neglected

Employees were unprepared, uncertain during Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting

FORT LAUDERDALE – On the day of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting, employees were tragically unprepared to protect children from a killer on campus, the result of inadequate training and unclear procedures in the school district.

Despite two decades of mass shootings in American schools, the employees were uncertain who could order that the campus be locked down when a former student with an AR-15 began shooting.

The gunman was halfway through his six-minute rampage before anyone issued a “Code Red,” signaling an immediate danger requiring children to hide behind locked doors. As a result, some children were caught in hallways and killed.

Just four months earlier, the confusion about Code Red procedures had become obvious as a school district work group tried to develop an active killer lesson plan for middle and high schools, according to emails obtained by the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

District officials were uncertain whether “Code Red” always means “active killer,” which it does not. And they clearly were not sure how staff and students should respond to an active killer, even though 20 years had passed since Columbine, the at-

tack on a Colorado high school that has inspired numerous copycats.

“At this time, we do not intentionally push the students possibly towards the threat, however active killer is a very different animal,” an email circulating among the group stated. “This is going to be a rather challenging issue with the expectations of staff, parents and the school board for the security, location and status of students before, during and after an incident or drill.”

The email discusses whether teachers should unlock doors for students caught in the hallway when a shooter is nearby or open the door, possibly letting the gunman enter.

The conclusion: “It is a judgement call.”

The email also weighed whether to instruct older students to fight back, a topic that “shall likely involve a significant amount of time with our general counsel and the school board if we recommend to fight or not.”

The lack of a coherent, uniform policy is one of the major failures identified by a state commission investigating the Feb. 14 massacre.

The school district had only vague procedures that were not well established and had not provided any practice drills for staff, said the commission chairman, Bob Gualtieri, who is also the Pinellas County sheriff.

It’s common in Florida for school districts not to have sound Code Red policies, Gualtieri said. They may have a document with different colors representing different types of emergencies, but they don’t have policies that are thoughtful, tested and repeatedly trained on.

Asked why, Gualtieri said: “Because it’s a culture problem. They haven’t taken school safety seriously. They viewed it as perfunctory: ‘This can’t happen here, why do we have to do this? Our job is to teach.’”

The Broward School Board is to review the issue at a workshop session on Tuesday.

The district is considering a general, one-page policy stating that any staff member can initiate a Code Red lockdown of the school if they “see, hear or smell anything that immediately impacts the safety and security of the staff, students or visitors on campus.” All staff would be required to attend mandatory emergency code training.

Broward Superintendent Robert Runcie told the Sun Sentinel the district will create a policy, but he expressed frustration that people were blaming the lack of a policy for the staff ’s failure to call a Code Red sooner on Feb. 14.

“Look, not every single thing that actually goes on in the district is a policy,” he said. “There’s guidelines. There’s expectations. And administrators receive training on the various code options that are there and what they should do.”

“So I don’t want to use that as some excuse: ‘Oh, there wasn’t an actual ‘technical policy,’ so hence I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.’”

Asked why the district had not developed a standard policy many years earlier, Runcie said: “That’s the way it has been before,” indicating that administrators at individuals schools “work out the logistics of how it works” and the information “cascades” down to teachers and then to students.

But Andrew Medina, a Stoneman Douglas watchman who did not call a Code Red on Feb. 14, said security staff had preached caution. Medina told detectives he was warned about calling a Code Red needlessly because it would widely disrupt a school and “you get a million — all those cops out there for nothing,” according to a transcript of his interview.

“I don’t want to be the guy who calls that, you know,” he said.

The district has seven emergency color codes, shown on employee ID cards and on flip charts in classrooms. The definitions can be perplexing.

Red, for example, means “imminent danger,” requiring that everyone stay in place. Yellow allows for limited movement, such as in a neighborhood threat. Brown could mean “shelter-in-place, lockdown or evacuation,” depending on the type of emergency, such as a propane tank leak on campus or the derailment of a train carrying hazardous material.

The district provided the Sun Sentinel with a threepage, partially blacked-out document from August 2017 titled “Teachers Lockdown Procedures,” which describes how teachers are to react after an emergency code is broadcast — but does not explain how to call one.

The state fact-finding commission, which has been meeting for months and gathering testimony, found that Stoneman Douglas had never had an active shooter drill and teachers had seen only a PowerPoint presentation in January 2017 on procedures for declaring Code Red.

A Code Red is to be called over a hand-held school radio, but few staff actually have the radios and those who do often don’t turn them on or keep the volume low, Gualtieri said.

When the shooting happened at Stoneman Douglas, an assistant principal first called for an evacuation over the school intercom, believing the fire alarms — set off by gun smoke — indicated a gas leak.

Later, two other assistant principals told the commission they called a Code Red over their radios, realizing it was a shooting.

But no Code Red was heard or verified until it was called on the radio at about 2:24 p.m. by campus watchman Elliot Bonner, who saw the slain body of one of the coaches. Cruz had started shooting at 2:21 and had left the building at about 2:27 p.m.

“That’s not fireworks. That’s gunfire. Code Red. Code Red. Code Red,” Bonner reportedly said, according to testimony to the commission.

At that point, an administrator broadcast it over a school intercom, but Gualtieri said that was ineffective because the public address system cannot be heard in hallways.

By the time Bonner’s lockdown was called, gunman Nikolas Cruz had been shooting for more than three minutes and had already shot or killed 24 people on the first floor, the commission found.