Not in Safety Panel Report: Parkland Parents' Anguished Accounts
Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was one of the victims of the Parkland school massacre in Florida, is convinced that Obama-era discipline policies “led to my daughter and 16 others being killed.”
Pollack is not alone, as is made clear by testimony gathered last year by the Federal Commission on School Safety, which collected evidence in Broward County as part of its post-massacre national investigation.
In panel discussions and written testimony reviewed by RealClearInvestigations, witnesses offered countless examples of unsuspended students bullying and assaulting other classmates and teachers. They explained in private briefings that the Obama guidance left schools afraid to punish violent students like the confessed shooter, Nikolas Cruz.
Nevertheless, virtually none of that material made it into the commission’s final report on school safety, issued in December. It contains no hint that the Obama discipline policy played a role in the Parkland shooting. The section titled “The Obama Administration’s ‘Rethink School Discipline’ Guidance” does not mention Parkland or Broward County or Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where Cruz was a student, anywhere in its eight pages, including footnotes.
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A policy expert who worked with the commission said the testimony shows that the commission “knowingly and willfully refused to pursue key facts” linking discipline policies to the shooting.
Recently confirmed facts, first reported by RCI, made it hard to escape that conclusion.
For example, contrary to school district officials’ repeated claims that Cruz was never connected to Broward’s PROMISE program, the county’s alternative to the juvenile justice system, he was referred to it for vandalizing a school bathroom in 2013.
That was among dozens of other infractions, including felonies. In the months before the attack, Cruz made threats to shoot up the high school and was caught bringing bullets to school. Under Broward’s old disciplinary system, a repeat offender like Cruz would have been referred to local law enforcement. But Cruz was instead sent to different counseling programs or alternative schools and, along the way, acquired a high-powered weapon.
Law enforcement officials say they would have been able to better intervene with Cruz – and even stop him from buying the AR-15 rifle he allegedly used – if they had stricter disciplinary policies to work with under in the Broward school system.
“If I have a weapon or even ammunition on school grounds, and I have certain things in my past, I could be arrested for that, but Mr. Cruz just gets off scot-free,” said Jeff Bell, a deputy sheriff and president of the Broward Sheriff’s Office Deputies Association. “And that’s the thing: If he had gotten arrested just once for disorderly conduct or trespassing or something like that, that would have shown up on his criminal record, and could have sent up some red flags before he was ever allowed to buy a firearm.”
Parents submitted media articles documenting how the policies made schools less safe, including several investigative reports published early last spring by RealClearInvestigations, which since have been confirmed in part by local stories published in the Sun Sentinel, Miami Herald and Miami New Times.
They also submitted their own painful testimony. In a two-page letter to commission members, for instance, the father of Anthony Borges – theâ?¯ Stoneman Douglas student who survived the massacre despite being shot five times – asserted that the PROMISE program, in effect, left his son maimed.
Royer Borges said “these leniency policies," referring to PROMISE, “created an atmosphere that let dangerous kids go without punishment in school.”
He added that Broward County Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie did not want to turn Cruz’s and other students’ crimes over to the police, but chose instead to handle them internally “to â?¯keep their crime statistics down.” Broward Sheriff Scott Israel, a Democrat who was suspended earlier this month by Florida's newly seated Republican governor, eagerly partnered with Runcie on the arrest-diversion policy.
Borges said they knew Cruz “was dangerous and left him there exposing our children without any of the parents knowing.”
“I blame the school superintendent and the sheriff,” Borges told the federal commission. “It was their deliberate incompetence that allowed this tragedy to happen.”
