Florida professors, university faculty, and teaching assistants could soon be able to openly carry firearms on campus, thanks to a sweeping new measure filed by a Republican lawmaker.

Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Crestview, is sponsoring the legislation, entitled “School Safety,” to address security concerns in higher education. If passed, the bill would remove college campuses as gun-free zones — marking a significant shift in how Florida handles gun issues.

It would become one of the few Second Amendment expansion bills adopted in Florida since the Parkland massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, which prompted a higher gun-purchasing age and red flag laws.

In an interview with the Phoenix, Gaetz called his legislation “sadly timed,” adding that he “never wanted” to file a bill like this.

He referred to a slate of violent incidents in the past few months, including a shooting spree at Florida State University in April, the assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University in September, a shooting at Brown University over the weekend, and, most recently, an anti-Jewish shooting in Australia that left 15 dead.

“We’re living in a world where our institutions are being threatened,” Gaetz said, adding that he’s already filed another bill aimed at outside of churches, mosques, and synagogues. “I’m sorry that I’m having to do this, but it just seems as though places in our society that we thought were safe, even sacrosanct, are now becoming targets.”

Although he anticipates objections that teachers may abuse the ability to bring a gun to school, Gaetz pointed out that there have been no instances of a school shooting sprouting from an unwell volunteer in the guardian program. This school safety initiative allows trained and vetted school employees to carry concealed weapons on K-12 campuses.

“None of the parade of terribles have happened that the opponents to the guardian program tried to advance,” he said. “While none of that has happened, people have been killed.”

What else is in the bill?

Gaetz isn’t this first Florida lawmaker to try to promote campus carry. At the start of the 2025 legislative session, then-Sen. Randy Fine brought his all-encompassing to its first committee — unlike Gaetz’s, Fine’s bill would have allowed all students to carry — but it was voted down. Fine later left to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Gaetz said that the heart of his bill is hardening Florida’s state colleges and universities by requiring better threat assessments, better responses to threats, and better communications between first responders and faculty in emergencies.

would allow university employees, faculty, and students who are also working for a college to either openly carry or carry conceal weapons on campus. It also would expand the school guardian program to the university level and create an offense of discharging a firearm within 1,000 feet of school.

Gaetz said his measure also would require universities to ensure all classroom doors lock during an emergency — especially after FSU students during the April school shooting that their doors could not lock. He estimates that around $60 million will end up being appropriated for the effort, in line with what Gov. Ron DeSantis requested in his last week.

An identical bill has been filed in the House by Rep. Michelle Salzman.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

Winning a House seat representing Delaware, 34-year-old McBride became the first openly transgender person elected to Congress, just four years after the Democrat was elected as the nation’s first transgender state senator. Groundbreaking in any year and especially one in which conservatives regularly attacked the transgender community, McBride’s victory also marked a major win for a multimillion-dollar campaign — launched by school shooting survivor David Hogg — to elect young lawmakers to state and national office. 

“From the youngest-ever Senator to the first Trans member of Congress, Delaware knows what young leaders can accomplish when given a chance, just look at Joe Biden,” Hogg posted on X, commenting on how the 81-year-old president was first in 1972 just days before his 30th birthday. 

After Hogg survived the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 of his classmates and educators, he became a formidable up-and-comer in Democratic politics, turning his attention to helping elect Gen Z and millennial Democrats. His latest effort is , a political action committee formed in 2023 that raised nearly $8.5 million as of September to elevate the campaigns of McBride and a dozen other young candidates. 

“Leaders We Deserve is proud to say that Sarah will be our first endorsee elected to Congress,” Hogg wrote. 

Beyond McBride’s high-profile win, candidates endorsed by Hogg’s PAC saw mixed results — with more defeats than victories. Of a dozen candidates offered campaign cash and boots-on-the-ground voter outreach by Leaders We Deserve, five won their races and seven lost.

They include the successful campaign of a seventh-grade math teacher in Atlanta, the defeat of a former Miss Texas who campaigned for a state House seat on a gun control platform, and the setback encountered by a 28-year-old mother who launched her Tennessee House of Representatives campaign after the state denied her access to an abortion. 

Leaders We Deserve has pumped millions of dollars — and resources from Democratic power players — into the campaigns of young candidates who support progressive causes like gun control, reproductive rights and protecting public school funding. The PAC didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

Other Leaders We Deserve-endorsed candidates who beat their GOP opponents include Dante Pittman, to the North Carolina General Assembly helped Democrats break a Republican supermajority. In Hogg’s home state of Florida, U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost — who at 27 became the first member of Gen Z to serve in Congress — bid with nearly of the vote.

In Georgia, middle school math teacher Bryce Berry who switched from Democrat to Republican last year after breaking from party ranks to support private school vouchers. In Ohio, Democrat Christine Cockley easily Republican rival Hussein Jabiri. 

The seven candidates who did not prevail include Kristian Carranza, whose campaign for in the Texas House of Representatives in Leaders We Deserve support before losing in a tight race to Republican rival and incumbent state Rep. John Lujan. In another competitive race in Texas, Republican Rep. Angie Chen Button won her to the Texas Legislature, defeating Democrat Averie Bishop. 

In Pennsylvania, former teacher and longtime Republican state Rep. Joe Emrick , defeating Leaders We Deserve-endorsed Democrat Anna Thomas, whose campaign centered on bolstering school funding. Republican Mike Sparks, who has served in the Tennessee House of Representatives since 2010, Democrat Luis Mata.

In another Tennessee House race, Republican Jeff Burkhart in a closely watched contest against Democrat Allie Phillips, who said she was forced to go out of state to terminate a nonviable pregnancy because of Tennessee’s strict abortion laws. After defeating the Leaders We Deserve-endorsed Phillips, Burkhart said his campaign was about “fighting California, New York and everyone else.” 

Nate Douglas, a 23-year-old University of Florida graduate, failed in his bid to oust Republican Florida Rep. Susan Plasencia. The Douglas campaign on get-out-the-vote efforts among college students. 

In Georgia, Republican state Sen. Shawn Still was , defeating Democrat Ashwin Ramaswami by 7 percentage points. Ramaswami, 25, was still in law school when he decided to campaign against Still, who in 2023 who were indicted alongside President-elect Donald Trump on allegations of conspiring to overturn Trump’s 2020 presidential election defeat in the state. 

After Trump regained control of the White House and Republicans swept into elected office in races across the country, Hogg turned to X to reiterate his argument that new, young voices are more critical than ever. 

“Time for some big changes to the Democratic Party,” he wrote.

In a video posted to YouTube, 24-year-old school shooting survivor David Hogg points to a whiteboard and outlines a five-step plan to reshape America. 

Ever since Hogg survived the 2018 Valentine’s Day shooting at his Parkland, Florida, high school, which killed 17 of his classmates and educators, he’s become a national leader in the push for gun control and a formidable up-and-comer in Democratic politics. His latest effort is , a political action committee formed in 2023 that has raised nearly $8.5 million in the past year to elect Gen Z and millennial progressives to state and national office. 

The PAC aims to find young Democrats running for office, flood their campaigns with cash, offer strategic advice, provide a team of volunteers and work with the candidates to build a winning platform.

The strategy, Hogg explains in the YouTube advertisement designed to attract donors, has already met with success in Texas: “We just did this, electing the youngest person to the Texas state Senate, Molly Cook,” the state’s first openly LGBTQ+ senator. Leading up to the May election, Hogg’s PAC bolstered Cook’s campaign with $300,000 in financial backing, money used to blanket her district with mailings and digital ads.  

“With Molly, we found in our poll that she was behind by 2%, so we came in and we found that she was ahead by 5 after we informed voters about her background,” Hogg says, adding that his team knocked on the doors of more than 1,000 potential voters. “We got her on MSNBC as well and worked with her on her messaging and the result is that she ended up winning by 62 votes.” 

As Hogg works to “elect a ton more Mollys around the country,” an analysis by ����Ӱ�� of Federal Election Commission filings and the PAC’s digital ads offers insight into how he has leveraged the trauma and lessons learned from surviving one of America’s deadliest school shootings to build out a well-connected, generously funded operation to influence elections. 

The urgency of his key issue remains unabated: were killed and at least nine others injured Wednesday in a shooting at a Georgia high school. During a presidential campaign stop Wednesday afternoon in New Hampshire, Vice President Kamala Harris called the shooting outside Atlanta “a senseless tragedy, on top of so many senseless tragedies.”

“It’s just outrageous that everyday in our country — in the United States of America — that parents have to send their children to school worried about whether or not their child will come home alive. It’s senseless,” Harris said. “We’ve got to stop it.”

Leaders We Deserve has pumped millions of dollars — and resources from Democratic power players — into the campaigns of young candidates who support progressive causes like gun control, reproductive rights and protecting public school funding. Its efforts going into November will almost certainly be strengthened by Harris’s presence atop the ticket, an event that has .

Joining forces with Hogg, a recent Harvard graduate, is Kevin Lata, the former campaign manager of U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost, a Democrat from Florida who, at 27, is the first member of Gen Z to serve in Congress. Hogg and Lata didn’t respond to interview requests.

“As a generation, we’ve collectively been told to run, hide and fight over and over during active shooting drills, and our generation has learned that along with our ABCs,” Hogg says in one ad. “I think it’s time that we repurpose the meaning of that. We need to start running for office. We need to stop hiding from the responsibility that we have to protect future generations.”

Cook has received the largest share of direct campaign cash from Leaders We Deserve, according to the PAC’s most recent federal financial disclosures, which cover the period from June 2023 to the end of July 2024. In that time, the group has helped finance the campaigns of 16 candidates, primarily at the state level, including in Pennsylvania, Alabama, Florida and Ohio. 

Funding has gone to the Georgia House race of a seventh-grade math teacher in Atlanta, a former Miss Texas vying for a state House seat on a gun control platform, a 28-year-old in Pennsylvania whose run for the state House is centered on , and a 28-year-old mother running for a House seat in Tennessee after the state .

‘Pain into purpose’

Though young candidates are underrepresented in public office across the country, and they tend to face steeper financial barriers than those from older generations, FEC data — and Hogg’s five-step plan — show the PAC offers more than money to its endorsed candidates. It has ties to some of the major players in Democratic campaign operations. 

Its 59-person advisory board encompasses education leaders, gun control proponents, youth activists and two former law enforcement officers — — who defended the U.S. Capitol during the January 6, 2021, attack by a mob of Donald Trump supporters. Democratic politicians, half of them 35 or younger, make up the largest share of advisors. 

Among the more seasoned advisors is Arne Duncan, the former education secretary for President Barack Obama. Duncan now has his own group — Chicago CRED — which provides job training and other resources in a bid to stem gun violence in his hometown. 

Duncan told ����Ӱ�� that he and Hogg communicate regularly to discuss their shared goal of thwarting gun violence. Duncan said that his “generation has failed” to confront the issue in a meaningful way, leaving young people — including the ones Hogg is working to elect — to devise solutions. 

“I hate the leadership that David has had to provide on this issue. I hate the trauma that he and his classmates and his school and his community have been through,” Duncan said. “But I so appreciate him turning that pain into purpose and really fighting to change things.” 

Hogg— who co-founded the gun control group in the Parkland shooting’s immediate aftermath and has campaigned in previous elections for candidates who support new gun laws— has garnered financial support for his political committee from marquee donors. The bulk of donations — more than $4.3 million — come from undisclosed individuals contributing less than $200, but the largest single contribution of $300,000 is from Ron Conway. The Silicon Valley venture capitalist and gun control proponent served on the advisory board of , which has sought to reduce campus gun violence in the wake of the 2012 mass shooting at the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school. 

Other prominent donors include reproductive rights activist Phoebe Gates, the daughter of Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates, who gave $75,000, and actress Kate Capshaw and her husband, the director Steven Spielberg, who donated a combined $25,000. 

That support, federal election data shows, has translated into significant spending, with nearly $3 million going to advertising via text messaging, digital ads and campaign mailers. Nearly $1 million — the PAC’s second-largest expense — was used to purchase lists with the contact information of potential voters. 

The PAC’s expenditures also reflect the web of influential players working behind the scenes. Leaders We Deserve paid nearly $130,000 in legal fees to the Elias Law Group, the firm of Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias, who and is now assisting with the party’s vote recount strategy for November. Other top payments were to prominent political fundraisers and strategists, including The Hooligans Agency, with using Hollywood tactics to make viral political ads.

PACs like Leaders We Deserve have faced criticism for injecting smaller races with big money from interest groups and out-of-state donors. Leaders We Deserve has found its greatest success raising money from donors in California, Maryland, Massachusetts and New York, federal data shows. The group hasn’t contributed to candidates in any of those states. 

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and a Leaders We Deserve advisory board member, said the PAC offers Hogg a strategic advantage.

“He did this in a way so that he wasn’t constrained by party,” Weingarten said. “He understands and knits together policy and politics.” 

‘A big barrier’

Even with its list of established connections, Leaders We Deserve faces headwinds in driving change. 

Young people are “vastly underrepresented on the ballot” and run for public office at much lower rates than older adults, according to from the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning Engagement, or CIRCLE,  a nonpartisan youth-focused research organization at Tufts University.

As of 2021, millennials — those born between 1981 and 1996 — made up a quarter of the voting population yet  of lawmakers in Congress. Researchers found that financial insecurity and structural inequities — not apathy — were behind the divide. 

While more than 20% of young adults 18 to 25 said they would consider seeking public office — and an increasing number of them have followed through in the past decade — the encouragement they receive varies widely by race and gender. Younger candidates are more diverse than those from older generations, but while Black and Latino youth are more likely than their white counterparts to consider an election bid, they are less likely to actually run. 

The data drives home why groups like Leaders We Deserve are critical to improving civic engagement among young people, said Sara Suzuki, a senior researcher at CIRCLE.

“That gap between interest and actually running can be filled by organizations like Leaders We Deserve and other organizations across the spectrum because financial support is a big barrier,” Suzuki said, adding that the PAC’s explicit encouragement of young candidates could lead more of them to enter politics. 

Getting the necessary votes is another story. Suzuki said it’s plausible that a candidate’s age is one of the factors that young people consider at the ballot box, but that they are primarily driven by specific issues rather than individual candidates or parties. 

“They really vote as a way to make change happen on issues that they care about,” she said, “and those issues tend to be economic issues like cost of living, climate change is a big youth issue, gun violence and abortion.” 

‘Leaders for 2050’

The PAC’s went to the congressional campaign of Sarah McBride, a Democratic state senator in Delaware since 2021 who has been on transgender rights. If elected, the 34-year-old would be the first openly transgender member of Congress. 

“Everyone deserves to feel safe in their community, whether you are walking alone at night or going to school during the day,” McBride notes on her campaign website. “The truth is, when it comes to guns, our country has lost its common sense.” 

The PAC’s  “first elected candidate,” according to Hogg, was Nadarius Clark, the youngest member of the Virginia House of Delegates. Clark got $100,000 in support and beat his Republican opponent by 800 votes in 2023. Leaders We Deserve and the ideologically aligned nonprofit were Clark’s top campaign contributors, show.

The PAC stands to see another victory, where Bryce Berry — the 22-year-old Atlanta middle school math teacher — faces an incumbent from Democrat to Republican last year in order to support private school vouchers. The heavily Democratic district has never elected a Republican to the state House. 

Leaders We Deserve has also been handed defeats, including its failure last fall to help elect a 26-year-old transgender woman to the Alabama House of Representatives. The PAC spent $124,325 on the race, one that Hogg acknowledged would be tough. 

But the group is looking well beyond 2024’s high-stakes election cycle, a strategy that Duncan, the former education secretary, said is critical to the Democratic Party’s future. The state lawmakers elected today, he said, are one step closer to becoming the national leaders of tomorrow. 

“That’s what David’s play is about,” Duncan said. “It’s not about, ‘We’re going to change the entire world tomorrow,’ but it’s, ‘Can we plant a whole bunch of amazing seeds, nurture them, develop them, support them and see what happens.’” 

It’s a political mindset that the group hopes will propel progressive leaders beyond their Republican rivals.

“While MAGA plans for 2025,” one of the PACs ads states in reference to Trump’s ties to the to remake the federal government, “we’re building leaders for 2050.”

Kamala Harris’ new running mate is an unabashedly progressive midwestern governor who appeals to veterans, hunters and football fans. If elected, he’d also be the first K-12 educator since Lyndon Johnson to be vice president, boasting the deepest connection to public schools of any candidate in recent memory.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is a former high school teacher and football coach who enacted a free college tuition program and expanded free school lunch statewide. But Walz, 60, a former congressional lawmaker who is in his second term as governor, may also carry left-of-center baggage that weighs down the ticket in a tight presidential race, observers said.

Walz rose to prominence earlier this year by informally leading Democrats’ turn to calling Republicans “weird,” suggesting in interviews that they’re out of touch and relying on culture-war fodder instead of issues Americans care about. 

Tim Walz first year as a high school football coach and geography teacher

— Andy Kaczynski (@KFILE)

“Who’s sitting in a bar in Racine, Wisconsin, saying, ‘You know what we really need? We need to ban “Animal Farm.”’ Nobody is!” Walz with MSNBC.

In a introducing himself released by the campaign Tuesday, Walz described the “small-town” values he learned growing up in Nebraska and later tried to instill in his students: “respect, compromise, service to country. And so when I went into government, that’s what I carried with me.”

Harris echoed those themes in a speech at Temple University in Philadelphia Tuesday evening, calling him “the kind of teacher and mentor that every child in America dreams of having and that every kid deserves.”

As governor, Walz put forward an education agenda that unions have cheered, signing a nearly state budget last year that significantly increased funding for the state’s public schools. He also signed into law a new $1,750-per-child tax credit that he said will help reduce childhood poverty.

Walz enacted for Minnesota families earning less than $80,000 per year. Analysts predict it’ll cost the state around $117 million in fiscal year 2025 and $49.5 million annually after that.

With a $17.5 billion budget surplus last year, Walz promised “to put it behind our teachers so we can educate our children.”

Despite the “historic” spending, school districts throughout Minnesota last spring were facing massive cuts, the one-two punch of the end of COVID recovery aid and enrollment losses. 

The state’s second-largest district, St. Paul Public Schools, projects a $150 million deficit for the 2024-25 academic year. Minneapolis Public Schools anticipates a $116 million shortfall. And even the most prosperous Twin Cities suburbs must explain the disconnect to families who moved there for their well-funded schools.

Free lunch for all

Walz enlisted in the Army National Guard after high school and attended Chadron State College. He earned a social science degree in 1989, and spent a year in one of the first government-sanctioned groups of American educators to teach in China.

Walz went on to serve full time in the Army National Guard, retiring in 2005 as a command sergeant major. 

He and his wife, Gwen, met while teaching in Nebraska. They worked together at Mankato, Minn., West High School, where he taught social studies and coached football. She taught English and later served as a district administrator. 

Former colleagues said the couple were powerhouse teachers who balanced out each other’s energy-levels. He was animated, they . She was more reserved.

“He came in very outgoing, very gregarious,” former social studies teacher Pat Griffiths told The Post. “If there were 100 people in a room and 99 loved him, he would work on the one who didn’t until they did too.”

Another colleague told of a prank that a group of teachers played on Walz during his first semester there: They printed out a fake gift certificate for a free turkey as a bogus “welcome gift,” to be collected at a local grocery store. 

Walz returned to school with the turkey. 

In 2006, he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, defeating a Republican incumbent in Minnesota’s rural First District, which typically leans Republican. He served six terms before being elected governor in 2018.

These days, Walz is widely known on the national stage for last year’s Minnesota Free School Meals law, which made school breakfast and lunch free for all students, regardless of income. It made Minnesota the fourth state to do so after California, Colorado and Maine. Currently, offer free meals to all students.

At the time, Walz said the measure “puts us one step closer to making Minnesota the best state for kids to grow up.”

During debate on the bill in March 2023, state Sen. Steve Drazkowski, a Republican, questioned whether food insecurity was even an issue in the state, saying, “I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that is hungry. I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that says they don’t have access to enough food to eat.”

A video of his speech went viral, garnering on X and plenty of criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike.

Recent coverage suggests that though the program is popular and the state’s surplus helps keep it afloat, the free-meals program than expected: an extra $81 million over the next two years and $95 million in the two years after that.

Walz has also criticized education savings accounts, saying they don’t help rural areas. Support for these accounts, championed by conservatives, may have hurt Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s prospects to become Harris’ running mate. 

A lifelong hunter, Walz shifted substantially on gun safety, moving from an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association in 2016 to endorsing an assault weapons ban after the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. At the time, Walz said his then-17-year-old daughter asked him to do more on gun safety. He donated his NRA contributions to charity.

The move turned his rating to “straight F’s,” . “And I sleep just fine.”

On Tuesday, after word leaked about Harris picking Walz, gun safety activist and Parkland survivor David Hogg on X, “I’m smiling a mile wide right now.” 

Extreme or Norman Rockwell?

Policies like these have earned Walz endorsements on the left — American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on Tuesday called him “an unabashed champion for public education, for educators and workers.” 

It also doesn’t hurt that Mary Cathryn Ricker, Walz’s first state education commissioner, was a former AFT vice president. Before that, she led the St. Paul Federation of Teachers.

At Temple University Tuesday evening, Walz spoke of his 20-year career as a teacher and his wife’s 29-year tenure, saying, “Don’t ever underestimate teachers.”

Walz’s career nearly derailed when he was pulled over in a drunk driving incident as a 31-year-old teacher in Nebraska. As the reported, he was stopped for driving 96 mph in a 55-mph zone. He failed a field sobriety test, but later pleaded guilty to reckless driving, a misdemeanor. He left the state in 1996, when he continued teaching and coaching football in Mankato.

Invoking his time as a coach there, Harris said he was a role model — on and off the field. She recounted the story of one of the first openly gay students at Walz’s school, who sought to start a gay-straight alliance “at a time when acceptance was difficult to find.”

Harris said Walz “knew the signal that it would send to have a football coach get involved. So he signed up to be the group’s faculty advisor. And as students have said, he made the school a safe place for everybody.”

But in a tight race, Walz’s progressive credentials could spell trouble for Harris, said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative .

Hess called the Walz pick “an odd choice” in a race in which Harris already has teachers’ union backing but needs to shore up support among independents and conservatives. He suggested that Shapiro might have been a better match for those constituencies.

“You couldn’t get the NEA and AFT working any harder for Harris than they already are,” he said. “She’s already broken out ‘the full pander’ for them.”

Hess said Harris likely chose Walz as a “vibe pick” who suits midwesterners in style if not substance: “He looks like a big, burly high school football coach, assistant principal, kind of sensible guy from Middle America” who served in the military, “whereas Shapiro looks like an investment banker. Part of the calculation might be that that visual is worth plenty.”

Harris may also be trying to “buy herself a lot more leeway with the left so she can keep tacking back to the middle on issues — and the left will be happy because they feel like Walz is one of them.”

It’s possible centrists or moderates in battleground states will be swayed by Walz, Hess said, but his progressive policy solutions could stop them in their tracks. “The guy’s a high school teacher who has been in the National Guard for 20 years,” he said. “His politics are extreme, but his profile, his biography, is about as Norman Rockwell as you can get.”

That moment when you’re a union president, and find out that a teacher and union member is going to be the next vice-president.

We’re excited for former public school teacher & AFT member to join on the ballot this November!

— AFT (@AFTunion)

But Chris Stewart, CEO of and an education blogger based in Minneapolis, said framing Walz in traditional political terms is misleading. Minnesota may be progressive, but it’s “not wild and crazy. We’re not San Francisco. … I don’t think people know how purple Minnesota can be,” he said of . 

Despite the divide, Stewart said, Walz has succeeded with a “very slim majority” in the state legislature. 

But rather than judging Walz on a “left-right continuum,” he said, we should look at him as “just a better version of a great American Democrat. He is not left or right in the way that we traditionally think about things. He kind of breaks that binary.”

Last week, I set out to write a quick news hit on the  — a pilot program that will pump $200 million toward next-gen firewalls and other tools.

But that’s when things got weird. 

I came upon a new listing on a notorious dark web forum — the Amazon for stolen data, if you will — that offered millions of files purportedly stolen from the Los Angeles Unified School District for a thousand bucks.

LAUSD officials said they’re investigating the anonymous threat actor’s claims and a threat intelligence executive told me the district must carry out a full incident response to verify if the files are real.

Or new. 

It isn’t déjà vu: America’s second-largest school district fell victim to a massive ransomware attack in 2022. Thousands of students’ mental health records and other sensitive files found their way to the dark web. It’s possible that the LAUSD data got a facelift of its own, with the same data repackaged to make a quick buck. 

Read more about the latest LAUSD incident — and about the FCC’s new effort to thwart similar attacks nationally — here. 

In the news

Today in Florida, workers are set to demolish the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School building where a gunman killed 17 people in a 2018 rampage. |

Relatives of 17 children killed during the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, have sued state law enforcement officers who waited 77 minutes before confronting the gunman at Robb Elementary School. |

Special report: Through an unprecedented trove of dispatch call data for 852 California school addresses, reporters offer a rare look at “the vast presence of police in schools.” A third of calls “were about serious incidents that reasonably required a police presence.” |

New York lawmakers approved landmark rules that ban social media companies from using “addictive” algorithms to customize children’s feeds. Here’s a strong rundown on how the rules work. |

SWATted down: A Washington man has been sentenced to three years in prison for calling in hoax police reports in more than 20 states, including inciting false school shooting panic, leading to frantic lockdowns and massive police responses. |

First they came for the books. Next they came for the books about book bans. |

A new program in Illinois to help low-income families pay for the funeral costs of children killed by guns was designed to ease grief and financial burdens. After a year, just two families have been compensated. |

Prioritizing ‘profit over the wellbeing and safety of children’: Residential treatment companies that provide behavioral health services have put children at risk of sexual abuse and dangerous physical restraints, a new Senate committee report argues. |

First comes marriage, then comes homeroom: Missouri lawmakers failed to pass legislation that sought to prevent anyone under 18 years old from getting married, keeping in place the state’s minimum age of 16. |

A Tennessee school district where officials failed to prevent rampant racist bullying against a Black student will overhaul its anti-harassment procedures after reaching a settlement agreement with the Justice Department. Federal investigators found the student’s classmates passed around a drawing of a Ku Klux Klansmen, added him to a bigoted group chat and sold him to white peers in a mock “slave auction.” |

New York City school bathrooms could soon have “vape sensors” following a court settlement with tobacco company Juul that’ll direct $27 million to the city’s schools to combat youth vaping. |

Research & advocacy

‘New Jim Code’: Federal officials have failed to deter the civil rights harms that artificial intelligence in schools poses to students of color, a new report argues. |

DACA recipients are more likely than migrants without deportation safeguards to ask the police for help, suggesting the program increases engagement with police and reduces fear among crime victims. |

DACA recipients are more likely than migrants without deportation safeguards to ask the police for help, suggesting the program increases engagement with police and reduces fear among crime victims. |

ICYMI @The74

• Report: Higher Rates of Depression, Anxiety for LGBTQ Teens Forcibly Outed
  
• LA Schools Chief Carvalho Warns Student Homelessness Across City Worse Than Data Shows
  
• Psychologist Peter Gray Sounds the Alarm About Excessive Adult Oversight & What It’s Doing to Kids’ Mental Health

Emotional support

I promised you a new pup. I bring you a new pup. 

Sinead, editor Kathy Moore’s new emotional support companion, surveys her domain. 

For more school safety news, subscribe to Mark’s School (in)Security newsletter below.

There were a record 188 school shootings resulting in injuries or deaths in the 2021-22 school year, according to the latest available data included in . That’s twice as many shootings on campus than the previous record — set just one year earlier. 

The annual report, in its 25th iteration, leverages data from across federal agencies, including the Justice Department, to provide the public and policymakers with comprehensive insight into the safety conditions of the country’s school campuses, including cyberbullying and weapons possession. The new data offer fresh fodder in the ongoing political debate about how to thwart gun violence in schools. 

In some ways, the policy outcomes from such attacks are apparent in the data itself. As high-profile shootings and other campus safety incidents drive divisive discussions about gun control and policing, they’ve also led to a surge in — and near-universal adoption of — numerous physical security measures. By 2019-20, 97% of public schools controlled access to their campuses, 91% used surveillance cameras and 77% required district employees to wear badges. The number of campuses with security staff ballooned from 43% in 2010 to 65% by 2020. 

The spike in parental concerns over school safety seen in the aftermath of high-profile school shootings in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 and last year in Uvalde, Texas, dipped slightly this year, . Among surveyed parents, 38% reported that they fear for their child’s safety, down from 44% in 2022. Still, the percentage of people who fear for their children’s safety is still among the highest it’s been since Gallup began to poll parents on the topic in 1977. Gallup’s historical high, at 55%, was measured shortly after the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in suburban Denver. 

For the purpose of the federal report, “school shootings” include “all incidents in which a gun is brandished or fired or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims” and motive, including planned attacks, accidents and domestic violence. The methodology and collection methods used by the Education Department differ from those of other groups and media outlets that track school shootings. For example, the lists 250 school shootings in 2021 and 305 in 2022. , which only includes incidents where someone is struck by a bullet, counts 35 school shootings in 2021 and 51 in 2022. 

The federal report doesn’t include school-shooting data from the 2022-23 academic year. 

While the federal data on school gun violence incidents “is of course extremely striking,” it is just “one piece in the puzzle of our understanding of school shootings,” Véronique Irwin, an associate education research analyst with the National Center for Education Statistics, said on a press call Tuesday. “It’s important for us to examine other dimensions as well.” 

Despite the recent uptick in campus firearm incidents, the number of violent deaths of students in schools hasn’t followed a similar trendline and remains rare, the new federal report reveals. Nor have “active shootings,” a specific subset of campus gun violence, like the Parkland and Uvalde attacks, where an individual is “actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” Fourteen people were wounded or killed in active school shootings in 2021, the report revealed, compared to a high of 81 in 2018. 

Between 2000 and 2021, there were 46 active shooting incidents, resulting in 108 deaths and 168 injuries. Of the 47 people who carried out the active shootings, all but one was male. 

Beyond school shootings, the new federal report offers a mixed bag on various campus safety metrics, and at times that have sounded the alarm about an uptick in student misbehavior since the pandemic. 

Between the 2009-10 school year and 2019-20, the number of students who reported campus bullying decreased from 23% to 15% and reported gang activities dropped by more than half. School fights, weapons possession and alcohol use also declined. For some metrics, the most recent data are from 2019 and don’t capture the disruptive nature of COVID campus closures. Data captured after the pandemic began should be interpreted with these destabilizing forces in mind. 

Educators also experienced improved safety conditions in schools between 2011 and 2021, the report suggests. Six percent of teachers reported that a student had threatened to injure them in 2020-21, a decrease from 10 percent a decade earlier. Similar declines were observed in the number of teachers who fell victim to attacks. 

Still, the research revealed that educators have observed an uptick in disrespect from students, verbal abuse and overall classroom disorder. 

The Florida law led to unprecedented growth in school-based policing, though it’s part of a trend that’s played out again and again over the last several decades. In the immediate aftermath of tragic school massacres, which are statistically rare but growing more common, lawmakers have repeatedly bolstered funding for campus cops. Federal officials have spent since 1998. This spring, Texas became the following the May 2022 shooting in Uvalde, which led to the deaths of 19 elementary school children and two teachers.

Yet in Florida, former school-based officer Scot Peterson, who was stationed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School with a handgun and a bulletproof vest, was for failing to confront the teenage gunman armed with an AR-15 style assault rifle. Instead, he took cover outside as the sound of gunshots poured from the building for four minutes. In Uvalde, 375 officers from 23 law enforcement agencies responded to the elementary school but waited more than an hour to confront and kill the 18-year-old shooter. 

Police inaction in both cases has raised a similar question: Once a bad guy with a gun pops off his first shot inside a school, what level of responsibility do armed police officers have to stop them? 

In a first-of-its-kind trial to examine a school resource officer’s alleged criminal liability for failing to intervene, Peterson faced seven counts of child neglect, three counts of culpable negligence and one perjury charge. On June 29, , an outcome that experts predicted but said could in Uvalde, where officers’ inaction sparked outrage and is still under investigation. 

The Parkland verdict raises big questions about the role that police play in schools nationally — and challenges the very reason that so many were stationed at campuses in the first place. 

For Peterson, who claimed he waited outside the school because he couldn’t tell where the sounds of gunshots were coming from, the verdict reaffirmed his position that he had done nothing wrong and that the charges against him were politically motivated scapegoating. 

“We’ve got our life back after four and a half years,” Peterson while standing next to his wife. “It’s been an emotional roller coaster for so long.” 

The comment infuriated the parents of children who died while Peterson stood just 75 feet away from the building and who will never get their lives back. To them and others who have sought greater accountability from the since-fired officer, the verdict set a bad precedent. 

“For the first time in our nation’s history, prosecutors in this case have tried to hold an armed school resource officer responsible for not doing his job,” Broward State Attorney Harold Pryor said in a statement after the verdict. “We did so because we think it’s important not only to our community, but to the country as a whole.”

As head of the leading professional organization for school-based police officers, Mo Canady is the first person to defend the presence and value of having cops in schools. In an interview with ����Ӱ��, Canady gave a sharp critique of Peterson’s inaction. Peterson, and all officers, “have a duty to protect whether you think of it in terms of being charged criminally or not,” said Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers. 

“When we became police officers and you raised your right hand, you swore an oath to protect and serve,” Canady said. “Part of that is having to deal with violent situations and potential deadly conflict.”

‘Police are not the military’ 

“To protect and serve” has been a calling card for law enforcement , yet courts on multiple occasions have made clear the slogan isn’t legally binding. This precedent foreshadowed the uphill challenge for prosecutors in Florida. 

Police are routinely charged — and on occasion found guilty — for police misconduct including excessive use of force. Charges for failing to act, however, are far less common. And in the cases that do exist, courts have . 

In 1981, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals held that police have a general duty to provide public services but “no specific legal duty exists” to protect specific individuals. In , from 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court held that police in Colorado could not be sued for failing to protect a woman whose husband violated a protective order to kidnap and kill their three children. 

To justify child neglect charges in the Peterson trial, prosecutors argued that the school-based officer was a “caregiver” under Florida law responsible for the welfare of students at the school where he was assigned. Indeed, since their introduction in schools, police officers have been cast in the role of having close protective relationships with students in a way that’s different from how officers typically interact with people on the streets. That persona is often invoked to make officers’ presence in schools more palatable. In the Parkland case, jurors had to determine whether Peterson had caregiver status legally and if that created a duty to risk his own life. 

Eugene O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer and a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, called the charges against Peterson “preposterous,” arguing that officers should not be legally required to put themselves into situations where they could be killed. 

“The police really don’t sign up for that — they really don’t,” O’Donnell said. “Some will rise to the occasion, but the police are not the military, the police are civilians with guns who have very, very basic rudimentary peacekeeping skills.”

In an email, Mark Eiglarsh, Peterson’s criminal defense attorney, maintained that his client couldn’t identify the specific locations of gunshots, and that other responding officers believed the blasts were coming from a football field hundreds of yards away. Reverberations and echoes off the concrete buildings, he said, “made knowing where the shooter was virtually impossible.” 

“Hopefully, prosecutors will choose not to pursue baseless and meritless charges like this ever again,” he said. “They put this 32-year veteran deputy through hell, solely motivated by politics.” 

Eiglarsh refuted a “false narrative” that Peterson “chose to cower and ‘do nothing’ instead of confronting the killer,” noting that he called officers for backup and scanned the area to determine the shooter’s location. 

Samuel Walker, a national expert on police misconduct and professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, believes that Peterson should have been convicted, and not just because he was assigned to protect students.

“He failed to act — he failed to act in an emergency situation where his action could have helped save a bunch of lives,” said Walker, who added that officers should be held accountable for failing to keep people safe, even if it means risking their own lives. “That’s true of all officers who are just working a regular police department job. Yes, it’s a high-risk situation.” 

In civil court, officers are often shielded by qualified immunity, which protects officers from liability for mistakes made on the job. In 2020, a by 15 Marjory Stoneman students who survived the massacre and argued that Peterson’s failure to act violated their constitutional rights. But other civil suits remain and attorney David Brill, who represents shooting victims’ families, seeks to dispel Peterson’s claims that he couldn’t determine the direction of gunshots. Brill has asked a judge to approve a recorded sound test at the site of the shooting by firing blanks from an AR-15-style rifle. 

“We don’t want to leave anything to chance for Peterson to escape justice in our civil case like he escaped justice in the criminal case,” Brill told The Associated Press. 

Peterson’s civil defense attorney Michael Piper, who acknowledged some 50 civil suits against his client, declined to comment. 

Harold Jordan, the nationwide education equity coordinator at the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, said the real breakdown was in school and law enforcement officials’ failure to take preventative actions after multiple warnings suggested the gunman, now serving a life sentence, had weapons and could become violent. 

“I can’t think of any major studies that show that stationing police in schools prevents someone with high-capacity weaponry from causing carnage,” he said. “There’s definitely no evidence that adding more police to schools is going to prevent that from happening when you’re dealing with a school shooter who knows something about the school and is packing a doggone arsenal. That’s the situation that we’re in.”

Shootings bolster school policing 

Though officers have been stationed in schools , their presence has grown significantly in the last 25 years in response to mass school shootings. Since then, heated debates have explored the officers’ roles, responsibilities and efficacy.

Emerging research has begun to offer insight into officers’ ability to keep kids safe. A found that the introduction of school-based officers has led to a reduction in reported incidents of certain kinds of violence like fights. Yet they led to an increase in reported incidents of gun-related violence, a finding the authors conclude suggests that campus police “do not prevent gun-related incidents.” However, report co-author Shawn Bushway acknowledged that campus police could improve the reporting and detection of campus gun violence. 

Ultimately, officials’ decisions to place police in schools after mass shootings may not be driven by evidence, said Bushway, an adjunct policy researcher at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the University at Albany – State University of New York

“The evidence is that cops in schools make people feel safer and, you know, that’s part of the battle, right?” Bushway said. “We show that there’s an increase in firearm offenses but we don’t know whether that’s because they’re more likely to ferret them out or because somehow kids are more likely to bring guns to school if there’s a cop involved.”

A similar report, by researchers with the nonprofit Violence Project, found that officers may be ineffective at preventing bloodshed during school shootings. Researchers analyzed 133 school shootings over four decades and found that fatalities were three times higher in attacks where an armed guard was present compared to those that unfolded without a security presence. Because the perpetrators of mass shootings are often suicidal, researchers believe shooters may be drawn to locations with armed security. 

“When that’s the case, having an armed person is not a deterrent — that person may actually be part of their plan,” said David Riedman, creator of the , which tracks firearm incidents in schools. “Really, all of this is just a Band-Aid to the bigger problem, which is access to firearms and people that are able to get them who are interested and willing to commit violence.”

Though Peterson escaped criminal liability, for the last several decades school-based police have been trained to confront shooters — even at the cost of their own lives. Such standards grew out of the 1999 Columbine mass school shooting in suburban Denver, with the realization that every second counts during a mass shooting, most of which are carried out in a matter of minutes. 

Though experts said the trial against Peterson may dissuade some people from pursuing jobs as school-based cops, Canady of the National Association of School Resource Officers said that most officers will rush to danger to keep students safe.

“I don’t think most officers are going to have it in their head that, ‘Hey, if I don’t respond, I may be criminally liable,’ ” he said. “I think what they’re going to have in their head is, ‘Somebody’s killing kids in my school and I’ve got to stop it.’ ” 

In the five years since a gunman walked into a Parkland, Florida, high school, killing 17 people and injuring 17 others, national attention has pivoted to more recent mass school shootings in Michigan, Tennessee and Texas.

Yet in Florida, the community is still grappling with fallout from its own deadly attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Just last week, a first-of-its-kind got underway for a former campus police officer who failed to confront the shooter. It wasn’t until November 2022 that the now 24-year-old gunman was and in April, a judge related to the shooting against the former Broward County schools superintendent. 

All these events force Parkland residents to revisit the fatal day. For Ty Thompson, who was the principal of Stoneman Douglas on Feb. 14, 2018, the most pressing issue now is the need for robust campus mental health services, particularly as mass shootings . 

“You shouldn’t have to wait for a tragedy to have a wellness center,” he told ����Ӱ��. “Every school should have a wellness center on their campus. That’s just the state that we’re in and we need to keep tabs on what’s happening with our youth to make sure that if there are problems, we can catch them early.” 

As a member of , Thompson and other school leaders who confronted mass shootings and their devastating aftermath visited lawmakers last week on Capitol Hill to advocate for additional help in long-term recovery efforts. Their appearance coincides with June being Gun Violence Prevention Month. 

Even after the national attention fizzles away and disaster relief funding dries up, Thompson told ����Ӱ��, trauma remains omnipresent. Founded in 2019 and supported by the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the Principal Recovery Network works to help guide education leaders immediately after campus shootings and to promote policies that help school communities regain stability. 

Thompson, who retains his principal title, worked for a time as the district’s assistant director of athletics and student activities and is now assigned to the IT department. He talked to ����Ӱ�� about a range of issues, from the practical advice he offers school leaders reeling from a shooting to his support for school-based police officers, so long as they aren’t monitoring hallways with AR-15s. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

It’s been five years since the Parkland shooting. In what ways is that tragedy present in your community today? 

One of the things we talked about in Washington, D.C., is that while we got a large influx of resources right away, after a year or so people started to disappear as far as the resources. And so that’s one of the things that we’ve been advocating for is the fact that it doesn’t go away. It just continues. 

Even though we’re five years out, there are still things that the school needs. Trauma after an event like this comes in different forms, it hits people at different times over the course of their trauma. For some, it’s right away;  for some, it’s a few years later. For some, it’s many years later. We continue to battle that with the recovery pieces in making sure we’re providing the resources needed, not only to former students and to the staff who are still there, but also our community members as well. 

Can you provide any specific examples of how that trauma from an event five years ago manifests in your community today?

Unfortunately, we see it almost daily on the news. With new shootings, whether it’s at schools or in communities, that brings everything back. So as those things continue to happen in our country and we are constantly reminded of some of the violence happening in our country, that just brings back that day and they think about what took place with their families, friends or community members around our incident. 

It just continues to regurgitate that back up as they go through trying to heal and they are moving toward healing, but as you continue to see this stuff in the news and the daily shootings, it slows down the process.

It’s almost like you take one step forward and two steps back just because of the current environment of things that are going on within our country. 

What tangible policy changes did you present to lawmakers in Washington? What do you think are the most critical steps that we need to take right now to combat this issue?

A lot of our stance with the Principal Recovery Network is exactly that: The recovery. While gun control and all of these things are very pressing factors that are going on right now, that is obviously not our expertise. 

When you’re a leader of a school and you face a tragedy —  it doesn’t have to be a shooting, it could be a tornado taking down a building or suicides and things like that — it’s up to the school leader to be able to help move that school forward. 

Our biggest part is the recovery effort, and a big part of that is wellness and mental health. We are really pushing that part because Congress is moving in that direction, with the importance of mental health. We wanted to advocate for some additional funds in that area because we also feel that’s important not only after a tragedy, but at any time for a school. 

At Stoneman Douglas, after our event, we instituted a wellness center at our school. We had two portables brought in and we had mental health experts who were staffed in those portables and they were able to serve students, staff and community members. Even to this day, five years later, that wellness center is still on campus and it’s still servicing our community. 

One of the things that I brought to Congress was the fact you shouldn’t have to wait for a tragedy to have a wellness center. Every school should have a wellness center on their campus. That’s just the state that we’re in and we need to keep tabs on what’s happening with our youth to make sure that if there are problems, we can catch them early. 

When we look at some of the past shooters, not necessarily mine in some cases but in others, there were red flags along the way. There’s got to be a way for us to get the proper help to students that we see early on that may need some help. I think that having wellness centers on campuses would help that scenario. I’m not saying that it’s going to be a cure-all, but it certainly couldn’t hurt to have that. 

The Parkland shooter did present prior to the attack. What lessons did you and your colleagues learn about threat assessments and early intervention efforts?

Hindsight is always 20/20. In the case of my school, he was only with me for less than a year, and so a lot of these things that we found out after the fact were prior to him being a student at Stoneman Douglas. I’m not passing the blame on anybody, I’m just saying that there are certain things that take place in a student’s educational record that we need to be sure is moving forward through their careers so that people are aware of what’s happening. 

And we’ve made strides in that since our tragedy. With behavioral threat assessments now becoming more digitized and there’s less chance of things falling through the cracks, we definitely have our lessons learned not only from our tragedy, but all of the different tragedies. 

The shooting divided the community. How did you navigate that?

That was probably the toughest part of my job for those 18 months after the tragedy was trying to make sure I put student and staff interests first. Right away, the community rallied behind everyone, they wanted to provide support. Then, after time went by, that’s when the fingers started to point. And that’s not uncommon in any situation like this, where they’re going to start to put blame and figure out who did what wrong. 

The politics are difficult, don’t get me wrong, but I also understand that’s just what happens. It can’t necessarily be avoided though I would like it to be avoided. With a tragedy like this, everyone has their emotions. Emotions get exponentially kind of out there. Someone that may have already been feeling negative about a situation, now they’re feeling that much more negative.

Following the Uvalde shooting, Texas politicians approved legislation to place armed guards at every K-12 school. Florida took a similar approach after Parkland. How do you think this move played out in your state, and how did it affect the overall safety of kids in your schools?

Look, any time you can have extra security on campus is always a good thing. In our case, in Florida, they want every school to have an armed guard or a school resource officer. 

I definitely think that it helps. It’s definitely a good thing, anytime we can increase security and having people feel safe about coming to school is definitely a positive. For the little ones in elementary, when they see people walking around with guns, I’m not quite sure how that could affect their psyche. I just know that when it came to the high school kids, when we got back to school after the tragedy, we had a mini-army on our campus walking around with the same weapon that took out some of our kids. That did not go over well. 

It’s a delicate balance between making sure you’re feeling safe versus feeling scared quite frankly. That’s something that we were able to circumvent after our tragedy, to still have this presence but not have to have people walking around with AR-15s because that really was not the best course of action. 

As far as legislation, SROs are important. It’s good to have someone on campus, at a minimum, to be able to call in resources in the event of a tragedy. There’s so much tension in the country right now when it comes to violence and how to protect kids without making them feel like they’re in jail. I mean, the school is supposed to be a school and not a prison and it’s definitely a delicate balance, but the more people you can have with eyes and ears out there, it definitely makes it a better situation for all of us.

The former school resource officer at your school was criminally charged and put on trial for failing to confront the gunman and stop the shooting. What lessons from Scot Peterson’s response can we learn about the roles and limitations of police in schools? 

Any time there’s an investigation into these kinds of things, they review all those types of policies. I remember after Columbine, they redid how they handle active shooters. Then something else took place and they readjusted policies. That’s the same scenario here. I’m not going to speculate on what he did or didn’t do wrong. I am by no means a law enforcement person, that’s not my expertise and I’m not going to pretend to know what they are supposed to do or not do. But they do review policies after things take place, whether it’s a shooting or it’s some other incident in the community, to determine what could have been done better. 

As a member of the Principal Recovery Network, have you had to make any calls with school leaders after they experienced shootings? What kind of advice do you offer? 

Unfortunately, I’ve had to make a few phone calls. First, I usually send them an email because trying to get ahold of someone on the phone is nearly impossible. So I usually send an email pretty quickly, within 24 hours of when we hear about it. I just let them know who I am and that I kind of know what you may be feeling right now and, ‘Please, give me a call when you can.’ 

Sometimes that call comes quickly. Sometimes the call never comes because I’ve reached out to a couple of principals and never heard back from them. 

And really, it’s just for me to be a listening ear to them to understand. ‘Look, these are some of the things that may start to come up that you may not be aware of.’ Something very logical like your mail is going to start to increase, so you might want to think about getting some extra staff in there just to handle mail. The phones are going to start ringing off the hook, you need to make sure you have some staff for that. You need to think about getting some additional substitutes because some teachers may not be able to come back right away, depending on the size of their school and the tragedy itself. Make sure you don’t try to get back to school before funerals have taken place.

We have a guide to recovery. It’s not like a playbook because not every tragedy is going to be the same exact scenario. But there are some commonalities across all of these things to just keep in mind. You know, you should be meeting with your staff before you bring students back so that you make sure that they’re ready to come back. You want to make sure you have mental health practitioners on campus and ready to go because there’s no way for you to predict how people are going to react.

The main goal is to let them know that I’m here to listen to them. They can call me at any time, no matter what time of day it is. We want them to feel like they’re not alone. 

In his reelection bid, President Joe Biden has made gun violence prevention efforts part of his appeal to young voters. Youth activists from Parkland became leading voices in the gun control movement. Beyond the most outspoken advocates, how do young people in your community view gun violence today and how has the shooting affected their worldviews? 

Our kids rallied very quickly and had the March for Our Lives happen in D.C. within six weeks after our tragedy. I really thought that was going to be a momentum changer, and there were a lot of people involved with that. I was hoping that was really going to make some change. 

I’m not saying that maybe there weren’t some thought processes changed in Washington, but obviously it remains a hot topic. I do know that many of my kids that were involved from Stoneman Douglas still have those thoughts in mind of changing the world, which is what we teach in high school is getting out there to debate the right way and present yourself in a positive light and try to move the country forward. 

A lot of these kids now, five years later, are out of college and some of them are just wrapping up their college careers. It’s going to be interesting to see if they are going to be able to keep the momentum and move it forward with gun control. I’m hoping that continues. 

Any time these things do come up in the news, hopefully it re-sparks them to want to try to do something, to move that legislation and those policies forward. 

What didn’t I ask that you’d like to discuss? 

It’s important that these conversations continue to stay at the forefront. That was the big thing we talked to legislators about because we know that after tragedies take place there’s a lot of attention and then it dies off. It’s like, why do we only talk about this when stuff happens? Why can’t we be a little more proactive on some of these things to make sure we’re moving forward and looking to the future versus being reactionary all the time?

That’s what I was most encouraged by in D.C. is the fact that they’re trying to move not only with the gun stuff, but also with mental health support.

Clarification: The Broward County Public Schools’s online directory identified Ty Thompson as its assistant director of athletics and student activities last month while the former Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School principal told ����Ӱ�� he was also involved in some IT activities for the district. A district spokeswoman in a July 12 email said Thompson retains his principal title and is now assigned to the IT division. The clarification came after with the district. 

“Ten years and two months ago, I survived the Sandy Hook shooting,” Matthews says. “When I was crouched in the corner in school in Newtown, Connecticut, on 12/14/12, I was hunched in the corner with my classmates for so long that I actually got a PTSD fracture in my L4 and L5 in my right lower back. I now have a full-blown PTSD fracture that flares up anytime I have a stressful situation.”

“The fact that this is a second mass shooting that I have now lived through is incomprehensible. My heart goes out to all the families and the friends of the victims of Michigan State shooting. But we can no longer just provide love and prayers … [there] needs to be legislation, needs to be action. 

“It’s not OK. We can no longer allow this to happen. We can no longer be complacent.”

Monday night’s shooting took the lives of at least three students, with five others still critically wounded Tuesday. 

Matthews’s video quickly went viral Tuesday morning; a tweet from Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, had already seen 42,000 likes and nearly 14,000 retweets by 1 p.m. 

The Michigan State shooting occurred mere hours before the fifth anniversary of the Valentine’s Day school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which resulted in 17 deaths. Some of our previous coverage of the fallout from Parkland: 

—With reporting from Meghan Gallagher

Five years since the Valentine’s Day school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which resulted in 17 deaths, the heinous attack is no longer the subject of televised prime-time town halls or congressional hearings. But the debates that came in its wake are far from settled. 

The school shooting, among the deadliest in U.S. history, continues to divide the suburban Fort Lauderdale community and drive intense arguments over missed warning signs, prevention measures — and guns. 

A new generation of activists: Overnight, high school student organizers of March for Our Lives became the face of the gun control movement, an overwhelming experience that . 

“I’m still trying to figure out what type of activism I want to engage in, since I don’t want to be passive for the rest of my life but I cannot exist in the way that I used to,” ​​X González wrote for New York magazine last month. “I don’t know how I’m alive after all that.”

Federal action: Their nationwide protests only after another mass school shooting, this time in Uvalde, Texas, with President Joe Biden last year signing the first gun control measures in nearly three decades. During his State of the Union Address last week, Biden cited the Uvalde massacre in repeating his plea to ban assault rifles. 

Armed guards, red flags: After state lawmakers mandated an armed security guard at every Florida campus post-Parkland, many police departments still , while the state’s red flag gun law — designed to remove weapons from people deemed dangerous — has experienced .  

No permits necessary: Just last month, the that prevents local governments from passing more restrictive gun laws than those dictated by the state. And in Florida where “more guns” has been a prevailing policy response to the shooting, Republican lawmakers have faced pushback for for concealed weapons just weeks before the tragedy’s five-year remembrance. 

In November, the shooter — a former Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student who is now 24 — was sentenced to life in prison after a jury could not unanimously agree on whether to impose the death penalty.

Prosecutors had sought the death penalty but, “under Florida law, a death sentence requires a unanimous vote on at least one count. While jurors found that the aggravating evidence was sufficient to warrant a possible death penalty for the gunman, at least one believed the mitigating factors outweighed aggravating ones.”

Watch the moment circuit judge Elizabeth Scherer read the recommendations to the packed courtroom: 

The verdict concluded a graphic and emotional three-month trial, during which the killings of all 17 victims were detailed and recreated. 

The jury’s recommendation is binding and Judge Scherer will pronounce the sentence at a Nov. 1 hearing. That day, survivors of the shooting will also be offered an opportunity to speak publicly on the verdict. 

Some of our past coverage of the Parkland shooting: 

—F���������������: Parkland school shooting suspect pleads guilty to murdering 17 (Read more) 

—F�������������: FBI to pay nearly $130 million to Parkland families in ‘unprecedented’ settlement (Read more) 

—T�����ܳ���: Research shows heavy toll on survivors of school shootings (Read more)��

—What Comes Next: Principals traumatized by school shootings release guide to recovery (Read more)

“He called me up and said, ‘Frank, you don’t even know what you need, but here’s my number,’” DeAngelis said during an event Monday at the Columbine Memorial in Littleton, Colorado. The road to recovery, DeAngelis would soon learn, isn’t a sprint but a marathon. Help from others who had lived through similar tragedies was instrumental.

DeAngelis hoped he’d never have to make a similar phone call, but in the decades since Columbine, the retired principal has reached out to traumatized educators across the country who similarly became part of “a club in which no one wants to be a member.” 

“Unfortunately, that membership continues to grow,” DeAngelis said. “But we can’t give up hope.”

On Monday, DeAngelis and nearly two dozen school leaders before their schools became crime scenes. While campus shootings remain statistically rare — and no two tragedies are identical — the guide aims to provide practical tips for principals as they begin to lead their communities to recovery. 

The guide was produced by the Principal Recovery Network, a group of current and former school leaders who have experienced school gun violence. “I wish, when that horrific event happened, that we had that recovery guide,” DeAngelis said. “When those events happen, your mind is spinning, and this guide, hopefully, will provide that strength.”

The recovery network was formed by the National Association of Secondary School Principals in 2019, a year after the mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, reignited a national conversation on the effects of gun violence. Though the guide was years in the making, its release took on new urgency after the May school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 elementary school students and two teachers were killed. 

Following such tragedies, network members reach out to the affected school leaders to offer advice and a place to vent. After all, nobody knows what’s needed in the aftermath of a campus shooting better than school leaders who’ve survived one, said Ronn Nozoe, the association’s CEO.

“This is something that nobody wants to go through, and there is no step-by-step manual on how to handle it,” said recovery network member Michelle Keford, principal of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. But, “Having their advice, having their input and having their shared experiences really helps me as a leader, and I hope to pass that along.”

The 16-page guide spells out things to consider before reopening a school, the importance of attending to students’ and staff mental health, how to include student input in district plans and practical advice on managing offers of help from outside groups. 

In the immediate aftermath of a tragedy, the guide recommends that school leaders meet with faculty at the school to explain what happened and assess their needs. Principals should quickly provide mental health supports, from trauma-informed counselors to therapy dogs. And they should consider keeping school closed until all funerals have taken place and all physical damage to the building is repaired. 

Among the network’s members is Michael Bennett, superintendent of Greenville Central School District in upstate New York, who was shot in 2004 as an assistant principal wrestled a gun-wielding 16-year-old student to the ground. Shotgun pellets remain lodged in Bennett’s calf. 

“That’s going to be a permanent part of who I am,” Bennett, who was a teacher at Columbia High School at the time, told ����Ӱ��. “One of the things you start to learn as you go through this process of recovery is that it’s an ongoing process. It will ebb and flow based on some of your own experiences and how you’re dealing with those.” 

Bennett said he recently offered support to a high school band director in Highland Park, Illinois, who reached out after seven died in a mass shooting at an Independence Day parade. The high school band had marched in the parade, and their teacher was concerned that students’ return to classrooms this fall and their performances at football games could be traumatizing. After getting shot, Bennett said, the sound of fireworks at a homecoming game was alarming. 

In his contributions to the guide, Bennett noted the importance of meeting with staff after a shooting to ensure that everyone is up to speed about what happened and has a chance to ask questions. This is a lesson he learned from personal experience: When Bennett returned to work weeks after the 2004 shooting, some colleagues approached him unsure about what had happened.

“The challenge there for me is that it was reliving the moment again,” he said. “It became a bit of a confusing time for me, and it slowed my process of healing down quite a bit.” 

Following the Uvalde shooting, President Joe Biden signed the most substantive gun-control law in decades. But if history tells us anything, the shootings will continue, the group warned. That’s why it’s so important, DeAngelis said, that educators have each others’ backs. 

“I’ve been doing this for 23 years, and sometimes my wife says, ‘Why do you continue?’ ” he said. “But I made a promise that I was going to do it in memory of our beloved 13.”

Uvalde school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo was placed on administrative leave Wednesday, schools Superintendent Hal Harrell announced in a . The move came after Steven McCraw, the director of the state Department of Public Safety, told state lawmakers Tuesday that Arredondo’s decision to wait more than an hour to confront the gunman during a May 24 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School “put the lives of officers ahead of the lives of children.” Two teachers and 19 students died in the attack, which is now under investigation by multiple agencies. Harrell said it was the district’s intention to wait until those investigations were complete before making any personnel decisions. But because of “the lack of clarity that remains and the unknown timing of when I will receive the results of the investigations,” the schools chief said he decided to place Arredondo on leave effective Wednesday. A lieutenant in the six-member department will take over. The Texas Tribune reported that a district spokeswoman if the leave was paid or unpaid.

Police and school security experts are questioning why the Uvalde, Texas, school police chief remains on the job nearly a month after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at the local elementary school.

While Chief Pete Arrendondo’s fiercest critics have following reports that officers under his command waited more than an hour before confronting the shooter, school safety and police accountability experts criticized education leaders for failing to remove him as head of the six-member school police force, even temporarily. 

Placing cops on “paid administrative leave or in a no-contact assignment” after an officer-involved shooting is , according to the world’s largest professional trade group for police chiefs. Those standards, experts told ����Ӱ��, are critical to the public’s confidence in the ensuing investigations, the school community’s safety and even the chief’s well-being. 

“It’s just baffling that you would have this conversation days after the incident, much less weeks or a month out,” said school safety consultant Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services. Trump said the standards for officer-involved shootings should apply to Arredondo, a nearly 30-year law enforcement veteran whose response to the Robb Elementary School mass shooting is the subject of investigations by the local district attorney’s office, state law enforcement and elected officials and the U.S. Department of Justice that will likely take months. 

Investigators will scrutinize why officers waited outside a classroom door for more than an hour despite from the children inside begging for police to save them and that there were others trapped with the gunman who were injured but still alive. Eventually, Border Patrol agents and other law enforcement stormed in and killed the shooter. Arredondo, who as the incident commander on the scene, reportedly made the call not to go in immediately.

Steven McCraw, the director of the state Department of Public Safety, on Tuesdayresponse an “abject failure,” and said the classroom door was apparently unlocked despite the cops’ decision to wait for a key before entering the room to confront the gunman. Just minutes after the first shots were fired, he said, the police had enough firepower and protection to act.

“The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering Room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander,” McCraw told Texas state lawmakers. Instead, Arredondo “decided to put the lives of officers ahead of the lives of children.”

Before those statements, Trump said that Arredondo should be taken out of his leadership role with the school district.

“If there indeed is something found where he made some fatal errors in his decision making, then you don’t want that person still there making decisions on that or other situations,” Trump said. Arredondo witnessed one of the deadliest mass school shootings in U.S. history, a traumatic event that Trump said could cloud the chief’s decisions. “Why would you put somebody under that duress — whether they’re consciously aware of it now or at a later point in time — in a position where they could encounter another stressful or life-threatening situation?”

Arredondo’s position at the police department’s helm remains uncertain as he avoids public appearances and Uvalde district officials . But evidence suggests he’s taken on additional responsibilities since the May 24 shooting, with his attorney that the chief has picked up extra shifts to cover for grieving officers. The Texas Rangers had asked Arredondo to participate in an interview for their investigation into the immediate police response, attorney George Hyde told the news outlet, but he was too busy filling in for his officers.

Arredondo also made time to go to City Hall and as a newly elected Uvalde city councilmember a week after the mass shooting. The New York Times reported that the Uvalde City Council voted Tuesday not to offer Arredondo a leave of absence. The chief has not attended meetings since his swearing-in, its story said, and could be forced to give up his seat after missing three meetings.

The Uvalde school board at its first meeting since the armed assault, whether to reassign or fire Arredondo, but after chose not to take immediate action. Board members and a district spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

The law firm representing Arredondo said he declined to comment for this article, but the 50-year-old police chief defended the police response in his extensive June 9 interview with The Texas Tribune. Arrendondo pushed back against statements that he was the incident commander, saying he did not consider himself to be in charge of the scene and did not give orders to other responding officers, including holding off cops who were impatient to breach the door.

“Not a single responding officer ever hesitated, even for a moment, to put themselves at risk to save the children,” Arredondo told the nonprofit news outlet, though his comments appear to obtained by The New York Times and later the Tribune itself. “We responded to the information that we had and had to adjust to whatever we faced. Our objective was to save as many lives as we could.” 

McCraw reiterated Tuesday that Arredondo had assumed the role of on-site commander by issuing orders and directing action.

‘He really failed’ 

Since the horrific shooting, Trump and other school security experts have been highly critical of officers’ decision to wait in the hallway. For decades, law enforcement has been trained to confront the gunman — even at the cost of their own lives. 

Such standards grew out of the 1999 mass school shooting at Columbine High School in suburban Denver, with a realization that every second counts during a mass shooting, most of which are carried out in a matter of minutes. A more aggressive response at Uvalde, experts argue, could have saved lives, perhaps including one teacher in an ambulance and three children who passed away at nearby hospitals.

Public information about Arredondo’s actions that day — and his own admissions that he ran into the school without his police radio or quick access to the key he said was necessary — raise significant questions about his ability to perform his job, said Samuel Walker, a national expert on police misconduct and professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Those questions, he said, necessitate action as investigators examine his conduct. 

“It appears that his actions were not appropriate and it’s entirely appropriate that he be on leave,” Walker said. “Unless some new evidence comes to light, it looks like he really failed in his responsibility and I think that disqualifies him from working any job in that school district.” 

Sheldon Greenberg, an education professor at Johns Hopkins University and a former police officer, said that disciplinary procedures for cops vary greatly across the country and officers often benefit from policies and labor contracts that protect them from facing repercussions for failures on the job. 

Several factors complicate this particular situation, Greenberg said. For one, as chief, Arredondo would typically make disciplinary decisions for officers in his department. In the case of the chief, that responsibility would fall to the district superintendent and the school board, who may have little to no experience in police disciplinary matters, Greenberg said. Additionally, he said it’s notably difficult to hold an officer accountable for failures to perform job duties. 

“There’s a difference between a police officer who commits an act,” like the Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd “where the officer had his knee on his neck and was forcing compression on his neck for nine minutes,” Greenberg said. With Arredondo, “what he did you might categorize as omission, which is very different.” 

Officers at the 4,100-student Uvalde school district, including Arredondo, had been trained as recently as last year on how to respond to an active shooting, and materials by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement urge cops to “Display uncommon acts of courage to save the innocent.” 

“As first responders we must recognize that innocent life must be defended,” according to the state training materials. “A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field.” 

Despite the hardline language in the training materials, Greenberg said an officer isn’t helpful during an emergency if they get killed. 

“You can’t do much if you’re dead or disabled,” he said. “You still go in with reasonable caution, just don’t go barging into a room unless you’re sure you have a genuine opportunity to stop the gunman.” 

Trump, the school safety consultant, said that placing Arredondo or any officer on administrative leave shouldn’t necessarily be framed as a disciplinary measure. While Arredondo’s continued role in the department could raise concerns about obstruction in the active investigations and about his capacity to keep the community safe, he said that any officer who responded to the elementary school should have a chance to go on leave to recover from the traumatic event. 

In many police departments, he said the move is routine procedure, yet it’s unclear what policies are in place for the school district’s six-person police force. A notes that the police chief  “shall be accountable to the superintendent,” but a review of the rules did not yield any insight on leave of absences. Arredondo and any other officers who are placed on leave should continue to receive a paycheck, Trump said. 

“They shouldn’t have to worry about income for their family, but they should have that paid leave for them to debrief, to decompress, to process, to not be exposed to continual trauma,” Trump said. While any police-involved shooting can cause distress for the officers involved, the Uvalde shooting resulted in the deaths of 19 children. “They’ve been exposed to major trauma and stress of the worst kind.” 

Trump was less sympathetic to Arredondo’s assertion that he’s been too busy to participate in interviews with investigators. Making himself available for questioning, he said, should be the chief’s number one priority. In fact, it’s another reason to put Arredondo on leave: To ensure he has the time and flexibility to cooperate. Meanwhile, officers from outside police departments across the state . 

“I can’t think of anything that anybody should or could be doing that would make them too busy to participate in an investigation into a major school shooting like this,” Trump said. “It’s among the biggest and the worst [mass shootings] that we’ve ever had. That answer certainly doesn’t carry water with most anybody, including the school community.”

‘Coward of Broward’

Arredondo is not the first school-based police officer to face scorn for his performance during a deadly crisis. School resource officer Scot Peterson was placed on administrative leave in 2018 for failing to confront the gunman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. 

Peterson ultimately chose to retire and was subsequently charged with seven criminal counts of child neglect. Prosecutors said he took cover behind a wall while the gunman killed 17 people. Those actions earned him the nickname the “Coward of Broward” by ardent critics in his Florida county. Even his boss, then-Sheriff Scott Israel, said at the time that Peterson’s actions made him “sick to my stomach.” 

But Peterson the steps taken against him as a “political lynching.” His attorney, Mark Eiglarsh, told ����Ӱ�� this week that with both his client and the Uvalde school police chief, “The court of public opinion is unfortunately so quick to condemn responding officers and the incident commander without knowing all the facts.” 

“Unfortunately, due to the unprecedented and irresponsible decision” by prosecutors to charge Peterson, he said in an email, he fears that other officers, including Arredondo, “may also be stripped of their liberty and face decades in prison solely because a finding is made after the fact that things could have been handled differently.”  

The case against Peterson is in September. 

Despite the numerous investigations into the Uvalde shooting, the accountability that many in this small Texas community are demanding , according to legal experts. Qualified immunity, which protects cops from liability for their mistakes on the job, could challenge civil lawsuits. Meanwhile, charges against police officers — like the ones against Peterson — are extremely rare. But Walker, the police misconduct expert, expects the federal investigation to uncover failures in Uvalde that could help districts nationwide respond to similar attacks moving forward. 

“It looks like he failed, and if you fail and cause the death of a number of children, then it’s pretty serious,” Walker said. Yet such shortcomings likely extend beyond Arredondo, he said, and it’s important that the chief doesn’t become the scapegoat. “Clearly there’s what we would call systemic failure, and the school board probably failed in some respects” if it lacked sufficient policies to respond to such a lethal event. 

Gun violence survivors and their families were left in terror Saturday at the March For Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C., after a man close to the stage reportedly began shouting that he was armed. 

The disruption came during a moment of silence for the 21 lives lost in the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting last month. To the shouts of ‘get down, get down,’ gun control activists and their supporters dropped to the ground as others began stampeding away from the stage.

The U.S. Park Police said an “individual was detained by officers” after the suspect’s screams pierced the silence, sending some of the tens of thousands of rally goers on the National Mall into a panic. “No weapons were involved and there is no risk to the public,” Park Police . 

For the families and survivors of mass shootings, the chaotic scene forced them to relive the most traumatic experiences of their lives. Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime was killed in the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, was visibly shaken just moments after the commotion, remarking that it “took me back to the worst day of my life.” 

“Thankfully, there was no threat but it got everybody really frightened,” Guttenberg told ����Ӱ��. “The reality is, no matter where we are in America today, people do have a fear that a gun could be in the vicinity and that was an unfortunately horrifying and scary experience.” 

The disturbing scene, he said, gave him a deeper understanding of the horror that his daughter experienced at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a former student gunned down 17 people. That event sparked the March For Our Lives movement, which mobilized again this weekend to call for gun control regulations after the killings in Uvalde and a racially motivated mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, 10 days earlier.

Saturday’s rally went on after frightened attendees were reassured that an active threat did not exist. But before that, there was intense fear among the crowd, including one Parkland woman who said she was immediately reminded of the 2017 mass shooting at a Las Vegas concert that . Others from Parkland, like Guttenberg, said it brought back the terror their children experienced at Marjory Stoneman. 

Homer Harvey, who identified himself as a friend and neighbor of Parkland survivor and March For Our Lives leader David Hogg, was backstage during the chaos. Hogg had just finished speaking and Harvey was walking over to congratulate him when he saw the suspect. He said a man, threatening that he was armed, hopped a fence into a secured backstage area. The fear of the moment, he said, “is not a video game.” 

“There are a lot of kids back there that are now crying and can’t get their heart rates down because this is what they have lived through,” Harvey said. “This is something that they have seen, and it just triggers everything in their brain saying that they are going to die.”

Hours earlier, Hogg that he knew there were supporters who would have liked to attend the march, but were afraid to “because of the state of violence in our country.”

Guttenberg said the experience reinforced the advocacy that brought him to the U.S. Capital. 

“All I can tell you is I’m not going to stop fighting until we have legislation that solves this problem,” he said. 

“Our elected officials have seen American after American drop from a bullet,” said Corin, a survivor of the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, then the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School junior class president. As a co-founder of March For Our Lives, her advocacy in 2018 galvanized a countrywide movement that brought hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to the National Mall to demand new firearms laws. “And instead of waking up to protect us, they have been hitting the snooze button. But we’re here to shake them awake.” 

Yet four years after youth activists chanted “never again,” some might argue that America is still sleepwalking through wave after wave of gun violence. The latest mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, are once again wreaking havoc on American communities and student advocates are once again preparing to hit the streets to force an end to the carnage. 

On Saturday, Corin and other advocates with the youth-led March For Our Lives, including David Hogg and X Gonzalez, will return to Washington for a second rally to press for new firearm restrictions and a slew of policy changes they believe could thwart a gun violence rate that’s . 

Their insistence that children should never again be allowed to die by gunfire in school was belied — again — by  the reality of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, where 19 children and two educators were shot and killed May 24.

“Four years ago we said ‘never again,’ there’s never going to be another Parkland, and unfortunately that has not reigned true,” Corin told ����Ӱ��. Since then, Corin has graduated high school and is now a rising senior at Harvard University, where she studies government and education. During those years, mass shootings have continued to grow more common, with the Uvalde assault  becoming the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. “A large reason for that is because barely anything has been done on a national level.”

Along with , organizers have planned hundreds of , all in a matter of weeks. Ahead of the event, March For Our Lives advocates are to promote their agenda. 

They hope for a different outcome this time, but acknowledge the obstacles that have blocked change in the past remain as challenging as ever. In , President Joe Biden questioned “how much more carnage are we willing to accept?” before calling on Congress to ban assault weapons — or to at least raise the age from 18 to 21 for those looking to buy one. He also pushed for a ban on high-capacity magazines, strengthening background checks and adopting a federal “red flag” law that would allow courts to temporarily remove weapons from people deemed an imminent threat to themselves or others. At the same time, he lamented that “a majority of Senate Republicans don’t want any of these proposals even to be debated.” 

After the Parkland shooting, the Trump administration , a device that uses the recoil of a semiautomatic gun to mimic an automatic rifle. Yet even though then-President Donald Trump embraced an effort to raise the age on rifle sales, efforts fell flat. 

Earlier this week, in negotiations with Republicans over gun proposals after the Uvalde shooting while pointing out that compromises would be crucial to progress. Instead of major firearm restrictions, a bipartisan deal could encourage states to adopt red flag laws and new funding for campus security upgrades — a reaction that for years has followed virtually every mass school shooting. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, “it will be embarrassing” if Democrats and Republicans in the Senate fail to reach a legislative response to Uvalde. 

​Meanwhile, a ruling this month from the U.S. Supreme Court a decades-old New York law that puts sharp limits on who can carry guns in public. 

For Corin, having a Democrat in the White House isn’t necessarily an encouraging sign. Biden has been president for a year and a half, yet “we haven’t seen anything done,” she said. While Biden has sought to pass the issue onto Congress, Corin said her group has called on the president to appoint a gun violence prevention director, to create a task force focused on the issue and to “declare gun violence a national emergency — but that hasn’t happened either.” 

“No one is exempt from doing work on this issue,” Corin said. “I know the executive office doesn’t have all of the power, but ultimately everyone has a role to play.” 

Corin is very aware that the post-Parkland focus on gun violence had a larger impact at the state level, where . In her native Florida, for example, lawmakers passed a red flag law, raised the age to buy rifles from 18 to 21, created a three-day waiting period on gun purchases and authorized certain educators to be armed at school. In New York, lawmakers responded swiftly to the Buffalo shooting and approved a new law on Monday to strengthen gun control measures, including a red flag law that was implemented after Parkland. 

“I can only hope that the same sadness and fury that the country is feeling now, as we all did back in 2018, will fuel the continuation of these changes on the state level and ultimately — hopefully — on a national level,” said Corin, who the former Marjory Stoneman student who pleaded guilty in October to opening fire on the school. 

In its policy platform, March For Our Lives blames American gun violence on a culture of “gun glorification,” political apathy, poverty and “armed supremacy” in which the threat of guns are used to “reinforce power structures, hierarchies, and status.” And while they recognize a national mental health crisis exists, they oppose “scapegoating” those with mental illnesses as being a threat to others when they’re actually more likely than those without such disorders to .

Solutions, according to the group, include a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines and a national firearm buy-back program that could reduce the number of firearms in circulation by some 30 percent. There are an estimated 393 million guns in circulation across the U.S. — that’s more guns than people. 

But the group’s platform extends far beyond firearm policies to prevent violence and encompasses a slew of policies generally associated with Democrats. Those include ending the “war on drugs,” combating the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and reducing the scope of policing. 

For RuQuan Brown, a D.C. native whose stepfather was killed in a 2018 shooting, the conversation, he said, needs to “focus more on love than legislation.” RuQuan, who is Black, said that urban gun violence has long failed to garner the same urgency as mass shootings like the ones that played out in Parkland and Uvalde despite . 

Through his work with March For Our Lives, Brown said he’s been able to help ensure that the experiences of all gun violence victims are reflected in reform efforts. 

“I’ve been able to work with March to make sure that when we talk about March For Our Lives, that all peoples’ lives are included in that,” said Brown, who also attends Harvard. For him, uplifting disenfranchised communities will be the key to gun violence prevention. “This country and its ancestors are extremely comfortable with the deaths of Black and brown people, it’s almost a part of the fabric of this country. America wouldn’t be what it is without the deaths of Black and brown people, the genocide, the rape and the forced labor.”

He said it’s critical that lawmakers develop compassion for, and a commitment to help, society’s most marginalized people. If they were “committed to furthering the well-being of all people,” he said, “We wouldn’t even be having this conversation about gun violence.” 

With the midterm elections approaching, Corin predicted the recent mass shootings, including at the Uvalde elementary school and a Buffalo supermarket, could once again make gun violence a top issue on the campaign trail. It’s more important than ever, she said, for candidates to let people know on which side of the issue they stand. 

“If people aren’t clear on their stances and if they don’t act with courage, they’re going to be voted out,” Corin said. “And you know what, we’re going to vote in someone that doesn’t believe that children should be shot in their seats in school.”

It’s a question that has been asked in Columbine, Newtown, Parkland, and elsewhere. And as the number of tragic episodes has climbed in recent decades, it has increasingly drawn the attention of experts studying the effects of trauma on students’ wellbeing. Spanning a variety of settings and drawing from the insights of diverse academic disciplines, their work points to substantial emotional damage trailing students who live through school shootings. The hopes of these children — measured in academic, professional, and psychological terms — are meaningfully diminished, along with the health of their families.

“A growing body of research finds that the costs of gun violence in American schools extend beyond the death toll,” said Maya Rossin-Slater, a professor of health policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine who has carefully observed the aftermath of previous Texas shootings. “The hundreds of thousands of children and educators who experience and survive these tragedies are likely to carry scars for years and decades to come.”

Rossin-Slater is the co-author of looking at the survivors of 33 school shootings in Texas between 1995 and 2016, including those with or without fatalities. Using administrative data from the Texas Education Agency, and measuring the academic participation of individual survivors against students from a control group of demographically similar schools, the research team detected obvious short-term consequences from shootings: Affected students were more likely to be absent and chronically absent, and over 100 percent more likely to repeat a grade (though this probability rose from a relatively low baseline).

The authors next examined college enrollment and workforce records of students at eight Texas high schools that saw shootings between 1998 and 2006, comparing the trends of students enrolled both before and during the shootings against same-age students at control schools. Tenth and eleventh graders who lived through shootings became 3.7 percent less likely to graduate, 9.5 percent less likely to enroll in college, and 15.3 percent less likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree. Freshmen, sophomores, and juniors who experienced shootings were more likely to be unemployed between ages 24 and 26; those working by that age earned, on average, $2,350 less in annual wages than their peers, which implies a $115,000 reduction in lifetime earnings.

Evidence of those long-term ramifications can also be found in other recent studies. A analyzed the impact of violence on a broader sample of individuals who were between the ages of 11 and 17 when a school shooting occurred in their home county. Tracking responses to the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System (a nationwide survey querying the health of Americans in their 20s and early 30s) the authors found that girls who lived in the vicinity of school shootings tended to report a host of risky behaviors in adulthood, from increased drinking to driving without a seatbelt.

Boys also demonstrated clear effects — including a substantial uptick in smoking and the number of days they described themselves as receiving insufficient rest — and were generally less likely to say they were in excellent or very good health. Similar to the findings of the Texas paper, the authors found that girls in counties where school shootings occurred were less likely to be employed in early adulthood, while boys later earned less than their peers from other counties. Both boys and girls were less likely to be obese in later life, and more likely to be underweight. 

More evidence emerges from a study of the 2011 terrorist attack at Utøya, Norway, the deadliest mass killing perpretrated by a single individual in modern history. at a summer camp, the majority under the age of 20; one poll showed that one in four of the country’s residents knew someone touched by the event.

The study, conducted by a team of mostly Norwegian researchers, used academic and medical records to pair children who lived through the attack with similarly aged peers who attended different schools, then divided their findings according to different age groupings. In all, they found that relatively young survivors (either 14 or 15 years old) scored vastly lower on standardized tests, while older survivors (between the ages of 15 and 18) were 20 percentage points less likely to complete high school. Relative to the average for the control group, exposed children of all ages made 60 percent more medical visits and received psychiatric diagnoses nearly five times more frequently in the period immediately following the killings.

Families of the survivors weren’t spared. Siblings also scored lower on state tests by roughly .2 standard deviations (a commonly used measurement illustrating the difference in any population from the statistical mean); a drop of that magnitude is much larger than most effects in education research. Parents were much more likely to visit a doctor, receive a mental health diagnosis, and take sick leave from work (28 percent more likely, in the case of mothers) after the Utøya attack.

Study co-author Prashant Bharadwaj — a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego — wrote in an email that the “big lesson” to be taken from the study was that direct exposure to mass killings can cause enormous ripples even in a Scandinavian setting, where social policy and access to free health care is more generous than in the United States. 

“Norway is a setting with incredible social safety nets: state-provided medical care, high-quality medical care, generous family leave policies, sickness leave, etc.,” Bharadwaj said. “Even within this context, the fact that we find large impacts on mental health for children and sickness absences from work for mothers suggests that in contexts like the U.S., where access to medical care and quality of social safety nets are weaker, the impacts can be much more severe.” 

The medical toll on American children is on display in another study conducted by Stanford’s Rossin-Slater, who measured the impact of 44 school shootings between January 2008 and April 2013. Using information from the IQVIA Xponent panel, which tracks practitioner-level data on medical prescriptions, Rossin-Slater and her colleagues discovered a startling phenomenon: The monthly number of antidepressant medications prescribed to people aged 20 and under increased by over one-fifth in counties that saw school shootings with at least one fatality. The effect continued even three years after the murders occurred. 

Some variety did exist in the effects, however — the spike in antidepressant use was somewhat smaller in areas with higher concentrations of psychologists and social workers, who can offer behavioral treatment outside pharmacological intervention. Rossin-Slater said that this caveat made a case for providing more mental health resources to communities that lack them.

“As we mourn the horrific losses of children and teachers in Uvalde and in many other towns across America, we must ensure that our society provides lasting support and resources to the many survivors who are likely to continue to suffer. This need is especially critical in rural and lower-income areas, such as Uvalde, Texas, which tend to have limited access to mental health professionals and other supports.”

By that point, the 18-year-old perpetrator had already killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers. The decision to wait, state law enforcement officials announced on Friday, was made by the head of the Uvalde school district’s small, six-person police department. Now, as the initial accounting has been retracted and a far more damning narrative has emerged about the officers’ response, they’ve come under fierce criticism for the delay in storming the classroom. 

Squarely in the middle of that is the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Department and its chief, Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, now into their handling of the deadly incident. School district police departments, in particular their training, capabilities and readiness to confront lethal threats, are being scrutinized like never before and a long-running debate about the harms and benefits of campus cops has reignited. 

Schools have bolstered the ranks of armed school officers in the last several decades — largely in response to mass school shootings like the one that unfolded in Uvalde. Police now have a presence in about 43 percent of public K-12 schools and the Texas massacre — despite what appears to be disastrous decision-making on their part — could further accelerate the trend. Just hours after the Uvalde gunman was neutralized, Sen. Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, argued that campus cops are best positioned to stop mass school shootings, stating that “we know from past experiences that the most effective tool for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on the campus.” 

Yet beyond the anecdotes of heroic cops who successfully saved students from being killed and of officers who failed to live up to their sworn duty to protect innocent lives, research on their efficacy remains mixed. Whether they’re helpful when someone shows up to campus with a gun remains elusive. 

As districts nationwide respond to the Uvalde shooting, they should be cautious when adding new officers to schools to prevent future attacks, said Lucy Sorensen, an assistant professor of public administration and policy at the University of Albany, SUNY, who studies school policing. While school shootings are tragic and politically galvanizing, they remain statistically rare. But officers’ daily presence in schools, she said, could carry negative implications for students — particularly Black youth, who are more likely to be thrust into the school-to-prison pipeline.

“We’ve seen this in response to prior shootings — Columbine, Sandy Hook — where there is this push to harden schools, to add more police officers, add more guns, and the efficacy of these investments is not well established at this point,” Sorensen said, adding that the costs of a full-time police presence in schools could outweigh the advantages. School leaders and lawmakers, she said, “need to think hard about whether this is the right investment or whether it’s a reactionary investment.” 

Last year, Sorensen concluded in a report that having an officer on campus “marginally increases the likelihood of a school shooting,” and suggested that officers failed to prevent school shootings and other gun-related incidents. Yet upon further review of the underlying federal data, she backtracked. In an interview Tuesday with ����Ӱ��, Sorensen said she has now reached a markedly different conclusion. While firearm-related incidents including weapons possession were more frequent in schools with police, the finding could be the result of officers successfully detecting and responding to campus gun incidents. 

“This could be an actual increase in gun violence, but we think it’s more being driven by an increase in the detection and reporting of guns that’s happening from police in schools,” she said. If school-based officers are able to identify and confiscate guns from students that would have otherwise remained in their possession, she said it’s “likely a good thing if it potentially prevents gun violence.” 

Still, a separate report offers caution. Once mass school shootings occur, researchers at the nonprofit Violence Project found that officers may be ineffective at preventing bloodshed. In an analysis of school shootings over four decades — a total 133 incidents —  researchers found that fatalities were three times higher in attacks where an armed guard was present compared to those that unfolded without a security presence. Because the perpetrators of mass shootings are often suicidal, researchers speculate that the perpetrators could even be drawn to places with armed security. 

George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 led some school districts to cut ties with the police before COVID-era student behavioral challenges prompted some to reverse course. Through it all, a , according to a recent Education Week survey. Among them is Jake Heibel, the principal of Great Mills High School in Maryland, which suffered a school shooting in 2018. In that incident, a 17-year-old student shot two classmates, one fatally, before taking his own life. The shooting ended when the gunman fatally shot himself as a school resource officer simultaneously shot him in the hand. 

The school officer’s actions “certainly saved lives that day and we’re eternally grateful,” Heibel said in an interview after the Uvalde shooting. “He did what he needed to do to protect others and he certainly did that day.” 

‘The wrong decision, period’

In the immediate aftermath of the Uvalde shooting, the responding officers as “heroic” and “courageous,” but the tenor shifted after more information became publicly known. Turns out a school-based cop did not engage the shooter before he entered the school, but one was there: He responded to the scene but drove past the gunman as he crouched down next to a car in the parking lot, officials said.

On Friday, that Chief Arredondo, of the Uvalde school district police department, was the incident commander who ordered officers to stand back instead of storming the Robb Elementary School classroom where fourth-graders and educators were locked inside with the gunman. Officials said that Arredondo believed erroneously that the shooter was barricaded inside the classroom and that students’ lives were no longer at risk. Ultimately a tactical team of Border Patrol agents , opened the classroom door using a janitor’s keys and fatally shot the gunman. 

“From the benefit of hindsight, where I’m sitting now, of course it was not the right decision,” Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said during a Friday press conference. “It was the wrong decision, period. There was no excuse for that.” 

Arredondo’s decision to wait has faced similar rebukes from proponents of school-based policing, including school security consultant Kenneth Trump, president of the Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services. Prior to the notorious 1999 school shooting at Columbine High School in suburban Denver, standard law enforcement procedures called on police to secure the scene’s perimeter and call in the SWAT team. But Columbine “completely changed that,” Trump said, and in recent decades officers are trained to respond to the threat immediately, even if they’re alone on the scene. 

After the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which resulted in 17 deaths, the school resource officer stationed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Scot Peterson, was charged with criminal negligence after he failed to engage the gunman. While Trump said that Peterson became Parkland’s “second-biggest villain,” after the shooter, he said the law enforcement response in Uvalde was far worse.

“Here you have numerous people who, it would appear, did not follow the best practice for the last two decades,” Trump said.  

For Blaine Gaskill, the school resource officer who rushed to stop the armed student at Maryland’s Great Mills High School in 2018, the fear of losing his own life didn’t even cross his mind. In fact, he told ����Ӱ��, “I didn’t feel anything.” 

“I had a job to do and I did it,” he said in an email Friday.  Though Gaskill declined to comment on the Texas shooting, he expressed support for campus police, saying they “play a big role in preventing any tragedy.” 

“Just our presence alone makes students, parents and staff feel safer,” he said. “We have the ability to respond to any incident very quickly, whether it’s an active threat or a fight in the school. We are seconds away from stopping or intervening in any incident.” 

In fact, instruction on a quick response had been provided to officers at the 4,100-student Uvalde school district, which despite its small size maintains its own police force and an , including “threat assessment” teams, a visitor management system that limits access to school buildings and a digital surveillance tool that sifts through social media posts in search of violent threats. In December, Arredondo completed an active-shooter training course that taught participants how to distinguish an active shooting from “a hostage or barricade crisis.” Just two months ago, on how to respond to an active shooting. The training was based on materials by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, according to The New York Times, which inform officers they may need to put themselves in harm’s way and “display uncommon acts of courage to save the innocent.” 

“As first responders we must recognize that innocent life must be defended,” according to the training materials. “A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field.”     

While Arredondo served as the incident commander, Trump questioned whether his small campus police department was equipped for an emergency of this scale. Many school district police departments lack tactical training, he said, and often defer to larger agencies following major incidents.

“When you form an incident command structure, there is nothing that says that the initial incident commander on scene cannot pass that torch to the representative of another agency, a tactical team that may have more expertise, experience and tactical knowledge,” Trump said. “It can be done. You can pass the torch.”

Why that didn’t happen, and which department was responsible for released right after the shooting, remains unclear. 

While Trump maintained support for campus cops, proponents of police-free schools said that police shortcomings in Uvalde speak to the policy arguments they’ve been making for years. Among them is Maria Fernandez, managing director of campaign strategy at the Advancement Project, a racial justice group. A national movement to remove police from schools landed major policy victories after Floyd’s murder, but the political tides shifted back in favor of policing as students returned to schools during the pandemic and educators reported an uptick in classroom disruptions. The Uvalde shooting is proof that the strategy doesn’t work, Fernandez said. 

“The narrative that is so entrenched in our communities is that police equals safety or that they can stop the evil that is moving outside of the school door — and that’s not what happened and they lied about it,” she said. The school district was served by its own police department, “hardened” security measures, a municipal police department that receives about and federal Border Patrol agents. It all failed to save 21 innocent lives. 

“This is our nightmare,” Fernandez said. “We know for a fact that police don’t actually generate safety in the face of incredible violence. It’s just so devastating that this had to happen.”

Shootings bolster school policing

The attack in Uvalde is the deadliest mass school shooting in nearly a decade. In 2012, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, resulted in the deaths of 20 children and six educators. If history tells us anything, the Uvalde shooting will precede a rash of local and federal spending on campus policing. 

In 2013, a noted a limited body of research on the effectiveness of school resource officers, stating flatly that existing reports did “not address whether their presence in schools has deterred mass shootings.” Yet the Sandy Hook tragedy — and the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida — led to an infusion of local and federal money for school-based policing. In the last several decades, the federal government has spent roughly $1 billion to station police in schools. Responding to shootings with school policing and beefed-up security reflects the country’s “neoliberal approach to solving social problems,” said Benjamin Fisher, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Florida State University whose research focuses on campus policing. 

“Rather than talking about the one thing that all school shootings have in common — which is the presence of a gun — we are instead focusing on how to make schools different in some way. We’re putting the problem on schools rather than on gun access and availability.”

Since Sandy Hook, researchers have scrutinized the role that police play in schools, and in some cases have found , including an increase in student discipline for low-level offenses and a drop in high school graduation and college enrollment rates. Research has found that the negative outcomes are particularly dire for Black students, who are disproportionately subjected to campus arrests.

In her more recent research, Sorensen of the University of Albany, SUNY, found that placing officers in schools leads to an increase in campus safety, but at a great cost to students — particularly those who are Black. The research, which relies on figures from , found that officers effectively combat some forms of campus violence including fights, but their presence also correlates with an increase in student suspensions, expulsions and arrests. Students, especially those who are disabled, are chronically absent more when campuses are staffed by cops, she found. 

The research isn’t yet peer-reviewed. In fact, it was during the peer-review process that researchers identified a problem, Sorensen said. The Civil Rights Data Collection relies on every school in the U.S. to self-report data on a range of student outcomes and has long been criticized for including inaccuracies. For example, districts have been accused of underreporting campus arrests and instances of sexual misconduct. 

When researchers triangulated the federal data on school shootings against news reports, they found that the rate of school shootings appeared to have been overreported, which Sorensen said could be the result of an administrative data error. As a result of unreliable data, she said it remains unclear whether campus cops have any effect on the likelihood of a school shooting. 

Still, Sorensen said that the negative outcomes of school policing, like the student suspensions, “aren’t costless.” 

“Every child who gets killed in a school shooting is too much, it’s too many kids,” she said, yet such tragedies remain statistically rare and most communities will never have to experience what Uvalde just endured. “I do think it’s important to weigh more heavily the day-to-day impacts of having police officers in schools and what those costs and benefits are.”

The risk of ‘cherry-picking’ anecdotes 

As the apparent police failures in Uvalde and officers’ delayed response are dissected, Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said in this situation, the officers may have simply been outgunned. 

School resource officers are generally equipped with handguns, while the gunman reportedly carried out the attack with an AR-15-style assault rifle. Campus police should have the same equipment as cops assigned to patrol the streets, Canady said, but added that his group is “not involved in politics around the gun debate.” 

“Here’s what I know: If gun sales stopped today, there are still millions of guns out in our society, that’s just a fact” he said. “So we have to continue to prepare to defend our communities, which for us is our schools, against the potential for these types of attacks and the potential for us to be outgunned.” 

Even as some districts have equipped campuses with rifles and gun safes, he questioned whether that was an effective solution. 

“Here’s the thing, unless you’re sitting in that office or right next to it, you’re not going to waste precious seconds to go get the long gun when there’s someone killing babies,” he said. “That is a dynamic that is very difficult to resolve.” 

To bolster his argument, Canady pointed to multiple tragedies where the responses by school-based police were credited with saving lives. In March, for example, administrators at a Kansas high school called an officer to help them search a . When the officer arrived, the student removed a gun from his bag and shot both the officer and a school administrator. The officer, who has since been described as a hero, returned fire and struck the student. All three survived. 

Meanwhile Trump, the school security expert, said it’s important to consider school shootings that may have been prevented due to a police presence on campus. Despite a lack of research, he pointed to anecdotes where officers identified students with weapons and uncovered concrete plans to kill. Yet anecdotes also exist of officers failing to uphold their duties. 

Fisher, the criminal justice researcher, said there’s reason to be cautious of anecdotal evidence in place of scientific research because it “risks cherry-picking.”

“Anecdotes allow us to craft a narrative because we don’t have to subject our beliefs to systematic and reproducible inquiry,” he said. “We can pick the pieces of evidence that we want — and that’s on both sides of the argument.”

Amid heightened national fear over mass school shootings, a teacher in pink earmuffs unloads a pistol’s clip into the chest of a human-shaped target. The scene in Bulletproof, Chandler’s latest documentary, highlights the lengths some teachers have gone to keep kids safe.

In a troubling juxtaposition, the film contrasts long-established traditions like homecoming parades and classroom lectures against newer realities inside American schools: lockdown drills, metal detectors and campus gun safes stocked with AR-15s.

Chandler, the film’s director/producer and a Brooklyn College professor, said the documentary started as a hard look at the booming school security industry, but morphed into an exploration of routines that often feel surreal.

“I started thinking more about this idea of rituals and how all of these rehearsals and preparations [for a mass shooting] play out across the country, seeing things almost like choreography,” he told ����Ӱ��. The film doesn’t aim to offer a complete picture of the debate around school security, he said, but instead offers viewers “fragments of daily life, of what has long been — and what is fast becoming — normal around the country.” 

Bulletproof, which makes its broadcast debut at 10 p.m. ET Monday on PBS, takes viewers to campuses across the country to highlight the fear that gun violence has instilled in America’s school communities while exploring the monetization of solutions that security companies promise will prevent more carnage. The 84-minute film, which will broadcast as part of the network’s documentary series will also be available to stream on the .

Each year, school leaders spend billions of dollars on security to bulletproof campuses. For the entrepreneurs who manufacture bulletproof backpacks and whiteboards, the race to stop the next school shooter has become big business. Whether that spending has helped, however, remains unclear. 

The documentary’s broadcast premiere falls on Valentine’s Day, the same date as the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which left 17 dead and prompted a national debate over gun control and student safety. The film, which was co-produced by Danielle Varga, isn’t a work of blatant advocacy and avoids feeding viewers a perspective on the merits of the high-tech surveillance cameras, active-shooter drills and campus police officers that have proliferated in schools nationwide since Parkland. Yet the film does offer a point of view — one that Chandler described as “dark absurdism.” 

“The hope is that the contrast and the juxtaposition will do their parts to highlight what I think is sad or problematic or a little bit absurd,” he said. “But in ways that are subtle enough that it remains watchable and an invitation to engage.” 

Mass school shootings are statistically rare and campuses have grown safer in recent years, yet a byproduct of high-profile attacks like the one in Parkland is a security industry that banks on an ever-present threat inside schools. Bulletproof features a Las Vegas trade show where salesmen hawk armored whiteboards, while a California-based entrepreneur designs bulletproof hoodies from a Silicon Valley bedroom. In one Texas school, leaders deploy a badge monitoring system that tracks students’ every move. A school leader explains how threats, including violent campus graffitti, necessitate the surveillance response. 

“Some people will say ‘that’s just some kid playing,’” the district security official says. “The problem is we can’t take that risk anymore.”

Many of the security strategies that have grown more prevalent in recent years remain contentious. Active shooter drills have become routine in schools nationwide, for example, but some critics argue they are ineffective and could have a negative effect on children who must weigh their own mortality. Bulletproof explores this tension on several occasions. In one scene, educators barricade a classroom door with chairs and desks during an active-shooter simulation. But one high school student explains how the drills could be counterproductive. 

“I feel as if having to do constant lockdown drills is almost as traumatizing as having an actual situation like that,” the student explains.

The film pivoted to a similar debate about whether should carry guns. The proposal was ultimately rejected. During a public meeting, the district police chief explains that without guns, unarmed officers lack the tools necessary to catch “bad guys.” 

But Harold Jordan, the nationwide education equity coordinator at the ACLU of Pennsylvania, says in the film that officials should focus on the harms that guns present to students inside the schools. Arming officers changes the school environment, he argues, and “sends a very strong and a negative message to students that somehow firearms are needed in terms of dealing with the kinds of everyday things that go on in schools.” 

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, Jordan called the documentary an “anthropological snapshot” that offers viewers an introduction to the “safe schools industrial complex” and the salesmen who “take advantage of peoples’ fears to make a buck.” 

Yet he said that he wished that Chandler had offered a deeper look at the efficacy of the school security solutions on display and offered a greater focus on the opinions of students who must attend schools alongside them. But ultimately, he hopes the film creates greater skepticism of companies that he sees as seeking to cash in on fears of mass violence. 

“The film is going to perhaps spark a conversation about these things,” he said, “but I think that people viewing the film should really take it further and ask deeper questions — and to ask young people about their perceptions of safety and violence.” 

Chandler said that was his precise goal. Rather than forcing a clear agenda, he hopes the film becomes a conversation starter for people who may not typically engage in debates about campus security and strategies to prevent school shootings. 

“A film that takes a direct position is going to be less successful in catalyzing dialogue because it’s immediately going to alienate a certain number of people and it’s going to unite another population of people,” Chandler said. “And then we’re sort of exactly where we were.”

The settlement follows an admission by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that it failed to properly investigate two tips warning federal law enforcement that a former Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student was planning an armed attack. Just 40 days before the Valentine’s Day massacre, a female caller to the FBI tip line reported that the former student had purchased guns and she feared he was “going to slip into a school and start shooting the place up.” She told the FBI, “I know he’s going to explode.” 

Another tip alerted officials to a comment on YouTube believed to be made by the suspected gunman, announcing plans to become “a professional school shooter.” Neither report was forwarded to the FBI’s South Florida office and the former student, who had  been expelled a year earlier, was never contacted. 

The court settlement’s details are confidential, but a person familiar with the agreement the government will pay $127.5 million to resolve a lawsuit from 40 families accusing the FBI of negligence. The tragedy resulted in the deaths of 14 students and three faculty members and left injured. The 23-year-old defendant pleaded guilty in October to 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder. A trial scheduled for early next year will decide whether he receives the death penalty or life imprisonment. 

Settlements from federal agencies have been exceedingly rare, said consultant Kenneth Trump, president of the Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services who provides expert witness testimony in school shooting litigation. 

“I cannot remember in my 30-plus years in the school safety field a time where I’ve ever seen a federal agency — in this case obviously the FBI — sued and settled, especially to this extent,” said Trump, who was hired as an expert witness by defense attorneys representing Broward County Public Schools following the Parkland shooting. He’s also worked on lawsuits following the 2012 mass school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, and the 2017 tragedy in San Bernardino, California. 

In a similar move last month, the an $88 million settlement with the survivors and families of those killed during a mass shooting at a South Carolina church in 2015. That lawsuit accused the FBI of failing to prevent the shooter — a self-proclaimed white supremacist who hoped to start a “race war” — from purchasing a gun to carry out the attack. 

Speaking about school safety litigation, Trump told ����Ӱ��, “It could be potentially unprecedented to see the FBI actually settle a case like that, which means it has to be clear internally that some significant balls were dropped to the point where they determined it’s not winnable. I’m sure that most federal agencies don’t want to set a precedent that they’re going to easily settle lawsuits unless there’s really something there.” 

Kristina Infante, an attorney representing the Parkland families, that her clients had devoted their lives “to making the world a safer place” despite having suffered “immeasurable grief.” 

“Although no resolution could ever restore what the Parkland families lost, this settlement marks an important step toward justice,” Infante said. 

Andrew Pollack whose 18-year-old daughter Meadow was killed in the shooting, commended the FBI for accepting wrongdoing and said that other agencies, including the local school district and sheriff’s office, have failed to acknowledge their mistakes. 

“The FBI has made changes to make sure this never happens again,” he told the Associated Press.

The Parkland victims’ families with the Broward County school district last month. 

Trump said that financial settlements following the Parkland shooting should serve as a wake-up call to districts across the country. Similar to the litigation against the FBI, campus safety lawsuits against school districts generally center on alleged failures by people or lapses in procedures and training. Such litigation doesn’t typically focus on faults in the districts’ physical campus security systems, he said. It’s important, he said, for school officials to compare their written policies against their real-world responses. 

“So many times there are gaps between policy and practice,” Trump said. “And when you have those gaps, those gaps create a greater safety risk and, in turn, a greater liability risk.”

The accused perpetrator of the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, pleaded guilty to all counts on Wednesday. The development unfolded in a Broward County courtroom, where the suspect was charged with 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder. Fourteen students and three faculty members were killed in the Valentine’s Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

During the hearing, which was attended by the families of those killed in the school, the suspect responded “guilty” 34 times as the judge read each charge along with the victims’ names. Judge Elizabeth Scherer asked the suspect if he understood that he faces “a minimum, as a best case scenario, of life in prison,” a reality the man acknowledged.

In a statement to the victims’ families, the suspect removed his face mask and offered an apology.

“I am very sorry for what I did and I have to live with it every day, and if I were to get a second chance I would do everything in my power to try to help others,” he said. “I have to live with this every day and it brings me nightmares and I can’t live with myself sometimes but I try to push through because I know that is what you guys would want me to do.”

While he went onto to say he thought it was the victims’ families who should decide “where I go, and whether I live or die,” the judge reminded him that would be left to a jury. Jury selection in the penalty phase of the trial is set to begin Jan. 4.

The man accused of carrying out the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, will plead guilty to killing 17 people, bringing the yearslong case a step closer to its resolution, one that could end with a jury sentencing him to death. 

The development, morning court hearing, comes more than three and a half years after the Valentine’s Day shooting unfolded at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that led to a massive uprising among young people over gun control and a national debate about school safety measures. The 23-year-old man, a former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, plans to plead guilty to 17 counts of premeditated murder and 17 counts of attempted murder during a court hearing Wednesday. 

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The suspect, who made a court appearance in plainclothes Friday, pleaded guilty to attempted aggravated battery in a separate incident after he was while being held inside a Fort Lauderdale jail nine months after the shooting. 

The tragedy, one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history, resulted in the deaths of 14 students and three faculty members. On Oct. 19, it was announced that the families of the 17 victims and nearly three dozen others who were wounded or traumatized with the Broward County school district. District officials had come under intense scrutiny for their handling of school security and disciplinary issues involving the accused gunman.

His guilty plea in the criminal case comes without an agreement with prosecutors and a jury will ultimately decide his fate. Prosecutors argue the suspect should receive the death penalty while his defense seeks 17 consecutive life sentences. The trial is expected to be held in January. 

����Ӱ�� is not naming the suspected gunman in accordance with , an effort to deprive perpetrators of media attention. A growing body of research suggests that perpetrators and that media coverage of mass shootings can inspire copycats. 

Hunter Pollack, whose 18-year-old sister Meadow was killed in the shooting, that it’s time for “this monster” to face sentencing. “Our families need justice to be served,” he wrote. “It’s 1,338 days overdue.” 

Manuel Oliver, whose 17-year-old son Joaquin was killed in the shooting, told that the announcement Friday wasn’t a revelation to the victims’ families.

“We all know he is guilty, and finally, he knows he is guilty and will share that,” Oliver said. “That is fine.” 

As people reacted to the news Friday, many survivors and victims’ families sought to move attention toward those who lost their lives in the shooting and away from the suspected perpetrator. 

In a tweet, shooting survivor and co-founder of the youth anti-gun violence group March for Our Lives Ryan Deitsch called on people to honor the lives lost in the attack — and “not their killer.” “Was already under intense ptsd all week, this verdict has worsened my state of being,” . “It was bound to happen but [after] so many years, that [high school] building still up while memorials were torn down, breaks my heart.”  

https://twitter.com/Ryan_Deitsch/status/1449034563515256835?s=20

Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jaime was killed in the shooting, offered a similar sentiment. His only comment on the guilty plea, he tweeted, is “to remember the victims.” 

Giffords, the gun control group co-founded by former Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords who was shot in a 2011 assassination attempt, of each of those killed: Carmen Schentrup, Aaron Feis, Martin Duque, Scott Beigel, Nicholas Dworet, Gina Montalto, Peter Wang, Alaina Petty, Alyssa Alhadeff, Jaime Guttenberg, Joaquin Oliver, Cara Loughran, Alex Schachter, Chris Hixon, Helena Ramsay, Luke Hoyer and Meadow Pollack. 

Forensic psychologist Jillian Peterson, a criminology professor at Hamline University in Minnesota who built what researchers believe is the largest database on mass shooters ever created, said she was grateful that the Parkland community didn’t have to go through a grueling trial to determine if the suspect was guilty of carrying out an attack that police say he already admitted to committing. Peterson, who previously worked as an investigator on death penalty cases, said that in such instances a guilty plea usually comes after prosecutors and defense attorneys agree on a sentence. 

That’s not the case here, and prosecutors have been unwilling to take the death penalty off the table. 

Among mass shooters who live through their attacks, 12 percent receive the death penalty and about 20 percent get life with or without parole. Ultimately, Peterson said that several factors could play into the suspect’s sentence including his impact on the school community, his past disciplinary record and his own mental health. The perpetrator had a lengthy disciplinary record and was expelled from the Parkland high school a year before the tragedy. Meanwhile, just three months before the shooting, his mother and sole parent died of pneumonia. 

She compared the case to the one against the shooter who killed 12 people at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater in 2012. In that case, prosecutors sought the death penalty but the gunman, 24 at the time of the shooting,  pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. He was ultimately sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. 

“If we have the death penalty and the jurors who are sitting on that jury are williing to implement the death penalty, it’s hard to imagine a crime that is more deserving, with this many victims,” said Peterson, co-founder of , a nonprofit think tank. “That being said, we also know this shooter has a really significant trauma history and mental health history so it’s just hard to know how those two things are going to weigh against each other.” 

Oliver that he is glad the death penalty remains on the table. 

“The death penalty that Joaquin received was four shots with an AR-15 in the middle of his school,” Oliver said. “With kids dropping on the floor and bleeding out, screaming. That’s how my son died.” 

We’ve tried hiding from the monsters. We’ve tried running from the monsters. We’ve tried barricading the doors so they can’t come in, and locking them up so they can’t get out. And yet, they keep creeping into our lives — more so than ever before.

The monsters are mass shooters, including those who unleash hell on schools. But metal detectors, active-shooter drills and school-based police are not a sufficient antidote, a duo of criminologists argue in their forthcoming book “.”

The first step in violence prevention, Jillian Peterson and James Densley write in the book released Sept. 7, is to recognize that mass shooters are far more complex than ghoulish caricatures. And stopping them will take more than one simple solution.

“We’ve been treating this all wrong,” said Densley, a sociologist and criminal justice professor at Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. “We are expecting these individuals to just be outsiders beyond the reach of help, beyond the scope of our control. And instead, they are our children, they are our neighbors, they are our work colleagues.”

The book’s conclusions were gleaned from a massive undertaking that’s been years in the making. Peterson and Densley, co-founders of The Violence Project, a nonprofit research center, built what they believe is that spans back to 1966, involving about 180 attacks with more than 1,200 fatalities. Backed by funding from the National Institute of Justice, the U.S. Department of Justice’s research arm, they compared mass shooters’ life experiences across more than 150 variables, like childhood trauma, to identify commonalities. Under the Violence Project’s definition, mass shootings include tragedies that unfold in public locations with four or more victims excluding the shooter and do not stem from domestic violence, gangs, drugs or organized crimes.

They also trekked across the country for interviews with incarcerated killers, their parents and survivors, offering a new window into the lives of shooters and the impulses that make them tick.

Among the book’s key takeaways, the researchers found that more than 80 percent of the youngest mass shooters leaked their plans before the killings and, among those who inflicted mayhem on schools, 70 percent had previously experienced childhood trauma. And perhaps counterintuitively, fatalities were higher in school shootings where armed security was present on campus.

Based on what they uncovered, the book offers a detailed policy roadmap that Densley and Peterson believe could save lives.

The data highlight the critical role of schools, said Peterson, a forensic psychologist and criminology professor at Hamline University in Saint Paul. In many instances, shooters faced significant childhood trauma, stemming from issues like physical or sexual abuse and neglect. Just three months before a suspected school shooter killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, his mother and sole parent died of pneumonia. Shooters often lacked supportive family connections, but their schools were often ill-equipped to confront those challenges.

“Schools aren’t necessarily resourced to be screening for trauma and providing in-depth mental health resources and working with families on coping mechanisms and teaching social-emotional learning,” she said. “Right now, so many schools are stretched so thin, but as we think about ‘How do we provide resources to prevent violence,’ I think that’s where they should be going.”

Though school shootings remain statistically rare and federal data suggest that in the last few decades, The Violence Project’s data reveal that mass shootings have become both more frequent and deadlier in recent years. More than half of the country’s mass shootings have occurred since 2000, the researchers found, and 16 of the 20 deadliest tragedies in modern history unfolded during that time. Of the country’s 20 deadliest mass shootings, three occurred in schools.

Though mass shootings happen elsewhere, the U.S. is a clear outlier. After controlling for population, researchers found the U.S. has six times more mass shootings compared to the rest of the world.

Yet as politicians offer “thoughts and prayers” to victims and stand their ground in a gun-control debate caught in a feedback loop, Peterson said that tangible steps can be taken right now to prevent more carnage. In fact, the pandemic offers lessons for prevention. When people stopped gathering en masse in public places like schools and offices, these rampages stopped as the opportunities for mass casualties dried up. Other mechanisms exist to limit opportunities outside a global pandemic. For example, 80 percent of school shooters obtained guns from family members, but no federal law and few state rules require parents to store weapons out of the reach of children. Such laws exist in six states including California, where parents can face arrest for keeping unlocked guns at home. Public information campaigns that promote safe storage could save lives, the book concludes.

“I want people to read this book and feel hopeful, which is not necessarily what you think when you pick up a book about mass shootings,” she said. “There are things that each of us can do.”

The voices of the perpetrators

To understand the motives of mass killers, Peterson and Densley approached the work with a strong dose of empathy. They didn’t lose sight of the reality that the perpetrators had committed horrendous crimes, but their harsh life experiences added context. Understanding the root causes of violent behaviors, they argued, is critical.

Peterson came to that realization on Rikers Island, the notorious jail complex in New York City where she worked early in her career. As a special investigator for the city’s public defender’s office working death penalty cases, she soon recognized: “The worse the crime, the worse the story.”

Densley had a similar experience inside New York City’s public school system, where he worked as a special education teacher before pivoting to researching youth gang violence. The system treated many disabled children as though they were disposable and could never succeed, he said. But Densley wasn’t buying it.

The duo applies a similar framing to mass shooting prevention and as they compared the shootings, clear patterns emerged.

For many, issues began with childhood trauma. Of the shooters where such data was available, 55 percent had experienced significant childhood trauma, compared to roughly 15 percent in the general population. The trend was even higher among school shooters, about 70 percent of whom had experienced adverse childhood experiences. To understand the role these traumas played, interviews with incarcerated gunmen were especially illuminating, Peterson said.

“They have so much knowledge in terms of how they got to this point,” she said. “We can build datasets and do all this data analysis but, at the end of the day, it’s the voices of these perpetrators saying ‘Here’s how I got here,’ that I think I learned the most from.”

The book intentionally excludes the shooters’ names as part of an effort to deprive them of notoriety, and Peterson declined to disclose their identities due to confidentiality agreements. One in 10 mass shooters sought fame from their attacks, they found, and often idolized other gunmen. For example, at least 20 school shootings have been inspired, at least in part, by the infamous 1999 attack on Columbine High School in suburban Denver. Among them is the 2012 mass school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 26 people, including 20 first-graders, were killed.

Among those interviewed for the book was “Perpetrator B,” a school shooter who recalled how his father would sometimes hit his mother, telling the researchers he developed depression in elementary school and became suicidal by 17. People knew he was struggling, he said, “but they never knew how bad it was.” A caring relationship between the perpetrator and an adult mentor could have put him on a different path, the book concludes. Instead, he became obsessed with studying other shooters, including a visit to Columbine High School. He attempted to die by suicide before attacking his former high school.

More than three-quarters of shooters were in a state of crisis before their attacks and left signs that could’ve been identified by those around them. In fact, 86 percent of mass shooters 20 years old and younger leaked their intentions, including in chat rooms and on social media.

The most profound discovery, both researchers agreed, was a significant connection to suicide. Though mass shooters made meticulous plans about their attacks, escape was never part of the equation. A third of mass shooters were actively suicidal prior to their attacks and 40 percent specifically planned to die in the act, they found. Those who were suicidal were more likely to telegraph their plot, suggesting that they may have been crying out for help. Both the shooters at Columbine and Sandy Hook died by suicide after the attacks.

Following the shooting in Newtown, the parents of two victims founded , which trains students and educators to recognize signs that someone could hurt themselves or others and offers a tip line that allows youth to intervene anonymously.

The reality that many shooters are suicidal “just opened up a whole different line of thinking” Peterson said. For decades, efforts to stop school shootings have centered largely on hardening schools with security. “But if some is actively suicidal, a lot of that stuff doesn’t work.”

The Violence Project’s conclusions are not universally accepted within the community of school-shooting researchers, and Jaclyn Schildkraut, an associate professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York at Oswego, is among the group’s critics. She argued that some of the Violence Project’s findings aren’t sufficiently backed up by research and some of their recommendations “are very dangerous,” including those that critique school security measures.

Schildkraut said that social-emotional learning is important, but the group’s focus on shooters’ traumatic experiences “comes across as, ‘Well, we’re not nice enough to these shooters,’ or ‘We’re not giving them the attention that they need in a more emotional way.’” The data also rely heavily on media reports rather than mental health records, which she said makes it impossible to reach definitive conclusions.

A roadmap to safety

The Violence Project adds a major wrinkle in a violence prevention strategy long employed in schools — an approach Densley called “security theater.” School-based police have grown exponentially in the last several decades, but in measuring their effects on mass school shootings, researchers reached a counterintuitive conclusion.

Of 133 mass school shootings in their data, armed guards were on the scene in 24 percent when the shooting began. In shootings where guards were present, fatalities were three times higher. Because gunmen are often suicidal, the authors speculate that perpetrators could even be drawn to places with armed security.

Schools spend nearly $3 billion on security each year, but the data suggest a softer approach that focuses on addressing the root causes, like adverse childhood experiences, Densley said. Specifically, the book calls for a heightened focus on trauma screenings in schools and doctor’s offices that identify people who are struggling and get them help while avoiding punitive consequences like arrests.

“Instead of spending billions of dollars on all of that unproven technology, let’s hire school counselors,” he said. “Violence prevention is not just building metal detectors. Violence prevention is also crisis intervention in our schools and mental health support in our schools.”

Civil rights groups have long called on schools to hire additional counselors in place of physical security measures like school-based police, a concept that gained momentum after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.

But Schildkraut isn’t convinced by the Violence Project’s takeaways on school-based police, arguing that a host of factors contribute to the number of fatalities during an attack. Similarly, while the Violence Project has highlighted the potential harms of lockdown drills, that they are key to “fostering a culture of preparedness in schools.” It’s important to explore the root causes that motivate people to become violent, she said, but prevention is only part of the solution and shouldn’t come at the expense of emergency response and preparation.

“My concern is that their claims are made from personal perspectives and not evidence-based perspectives because the evidence that’s out there on lockdown drills doesn’t say, ‘These are bad,’” she said. “I would love to live in a world where we don’t need active-shooter drills and contingency plans and everything, but that’s not the society we live in.”

Mental health services are just one part of a multi-pronged approach to violence prevention highlighted in the book, which calls for changes at the individual, cultural and political levels. Individually, for example, people must become more willing to speak up when they believe someone close to them is in crisis, including through anonymous tip lines, and gun owners should lock firearms out of young people’s reach. At a systems level, government programs could expand the social safety net to promote community health by addressing issues like educational inequality, hunger and homelessness.

The authors don’t shy away from what may be the hardest sell: gun control. Specifically, they call for universal background checks and wait times on firearm purchases that “are the functional equivalent of counting to 10 before doing something impulsive,” and “red flag” laws that remove weapons from people who pose a threat to themselves or others.

Densley is acutely aware that his book asks a lot from society. But if everybody plays a small role, the authors believe, we can beat back the ever-recurring “monsters.”

“We can’t just be helpless, we can’t just wait,” he said. “A lot of other books, the final chapter, the conclusion, is ‘Well, all we need is a mighty act of Congress to shut down the gun lobby and we’ll live happily ever after.’ It’s like, ‘Well OK, what do we do between now and never?’”

Lead video by Joe Raedle / Getty Images

For more than a decade after the 1999 school shooting at Columbine High School in suburban Denver, Frank DeAngelis held a simple promise: He’d stay on as principal until every student class enrolled in the district during the attack reached the graduation stage.

Despite the community upheaval and media frenzy that followed the notorious massacre, DeAngelis kept his word, remaining as principal until his retirement in 2014. But new research suggests that many families take an opposite approach after a shooting tears apart a school community.

Instead, they flee.

After districts suffer school shootings, student enrollment plummets over the long term as wealthy families move away, . The shift carries significant implications for schools and the communities they serve as districts become more socioeconomically segregated. The enrollment declines persisted even as districts shelled out millions of dollars on physical security and student supports like counselors and as educators assured families that the schools remained safe places to learn.

School shootings have a profound impact on the national political discourse and on the by gun violence at schools since Columbine. Previous studies have found that school shootings are detrimental to students’ mental health and academic performance. The negative effects of school shootings are particularly acute in less affluent schools that serve large numbers of students of color and those from low-income households, where such tragedies are also more prevalent.

Gun violence at schools remains statistically rare and campuses have actually over the last several decades. Yet they drive policy debates around campus security, student mental health and gun control.

As better-off families flee, their departures could have a detrimental effect on the lower-income community members who are left behind, said report co-author Lang (Kate) Yang, assistant professor of public policy and public administration at The George Washington University. In the short term, students who experienced the tragedies are “going to lose some peer support,” as their classmates move away which could contribute to “the psychological stress the shootings have already caused,” she said. Since student test scores are strongly tied to family income, districts’ loss of well-off students could also hurt their performance on standardized tests, the report noted.

The enrollment dips could also be felt over time as the areas’ median household income declines and the communities’ socioeconomic profiles are altered. The findings highlight a need for policymakers and administrators to focus on improving the perceptions of campus safety and quality “to avoid the pitfalls of yet another round of middle-class flight away from these schools.”

“It’s a stigma that needs to be countered,” Yang told ����Ӱ��. Even though districts increase spending on physical security and mental health care, she said those efforts aren’t enough to dispel the bad rap, “which suggests that either the resources are not enough or they’re not used correctly. Maybe there is not an effort, or a coordinated effort, to show people that the school is still safe,” despite the isolated shooting.

To conduct the study, researchers analyzed a database of 210 school shootings between 1999 and 2018, and compared them against district enrollment and Census data. In total, campuses that experienced shootings saw a 5 percent enrollment drop compared to those that weren’t victimized. Enrollment at nearby private schools also dipped, suggesting that shootings “reduce the desirability of the community and carry negative implications beyond the public schools where shootings occur.”

To understand the demographics of students moving elsewhere, researchers analyzed enrollment changes between students who were eligible for free and reduced-price lunch and those who were not. The enrollment declines were driven “almost entirely” by students who did not qualify for subsidized school meals, a common proxy for student poverty.

Researchers also analyzed educational spending in the wake of school shootings, finding that spending on security and student supports doesn’t crowd out instructional resources primarily due to an influx of federal money. That could also suggest that taxpayers nationwide may have a vested interest in prevention efforts, the report says.

On average, campus shootings are associated with a $129, or a 19 percent, increase in per-pupil federal funding. While per-pupil spending on student supports like counselors increased by $22 following shootings, such tragedies led to a $107 per-pupil spike in capital spending driven by construction costs to repair buildings and upgrade security. After shootings, districts increased spending by $248 per pupil, indicating that school systems took on debt to pay for the response measures.

Anecdotal evidence previously suggested that families fled their communities after school shootings, including an , where a 17-year-old is accused of killing 10 people at a high school there in 2018. Earlier that year, the mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, to new homes on the West Coast, away from the politics, trauma and fear that lingered after the attack that left 17 high school students and faculty members dead.

After the 1999 Columbine shooting, DeAngelis said his school became “probably one of the safest high schools in the world,” as officials ramped up security. Yet, some students chose to enroll in other nearby schools or left the district entirely. Part of the problem, he said, is that the school was thrust under the media microscope, which likely contributed to some families leaving.

Yet for some families that departed after the shooting, he said the decision may have been a mistake.

“All of a sudden, they return the following year because they didn’t have the support at the other schools that they went to,” including a network of peers who went through similar experiences, he said.

But the researchers found the decline in students wasn’t immediate but developed over time and wasn’t limited to those who were enrolled at the time of the tragedy.

For report co-author Maithreyi Gopalan, an assistant education professor at Pennsylvania State University, the results indicate that long-term efforts to combat the effects of campus shootings is paramount, especially as enrollment is depleted over several years.

Such shootings require more response than addressing the immediate effects and providing “counselors for one or two years and then it’s gone because the funding dries up,” she said. “We want to think about having a sustained impact” through policy so mitigation efforts aren’t short lived.

Embattled Broward County schools chief Robert Runcie is expected to step down after the school board voted Thursday to negotiate a separation agreement following his indictment on a charge he lied to a grand jury investigating the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland.

The decision came during an anticlimactic board meeting just two days after Runcie, who has served as superintendent of the country’s sixth-largest school district for nearly a decade, offered to resign during an emotional workshop where a majority of the board members said he should be placed on administrative leave or fired. Thursday’s vote allows board chair Rosalind Osgood to negotiate the terms of separation agreements with both Runcie and the school system’s longtime lawyer, Barbara Myrick, who was also arrested on a felony charge last week.

“I’m on a mission today to move this district forward, to move this county forward in peace and love,” Osgood said.

Runcie was arrested last week and charged with felony perjury for allegedly lying under oath to a statewide grand jury impaneled in 2019 by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School left 17 dead. Myrick was charged with felony unlawful disclosure of statewide grand jury proceedings. Runcie has pleaded not guilty and has asked a judge to dismiss the case.

When Runcie offered to step down Tuesday, he pointed to political infighting and the proliferation of “wildly inaccurate conspiracy theories” after the 2018 killings that rocked the nation rather than the felony charge against him.

“This cannot be the world that we want our children to inherit, it just can’t be,” he said. “It’s certainly not an environment that I can effectively lead this district for the long term unless there’s a real desire for reconciliation and to move forward — and it doesn’t seem like there is.”

He said he loved each of the nine board members and those in the community who came to his defense with full force. But for the board members at that point, it was clear that the love was no longer mutual.

The terms of the separation agreement, which the school board must approve before they’re finalized, could allow Runcie to stay in his post for up to 90 days. Runcie’s exit from the district could be delayed if he and the school board fail to reach an agreement. The board is expected to vote on it next week. Runcie, whose base salary is $335,000, has a 20 weeks of severance pay worth more than $135,000 and nearly $200,000 in accrued sick and vacation leave. The district is expected to pay Runcie’s and Myrick’s legal fees, but both would ultimately be required to reimburse the school system if they’re convicted.

After the 2018 school shooting — the worst in U.S. history — DeSantis created the grand jury to investigate school security issues at the district, for the tragedy. The grand jury, which is expected to drop its final report in the near future, has since taken a more expansive look into district practices. In fact, Runcie’s arrest doesn’t center on gun violence, but instead on flat-screen televisions.

In , prosecutors said that Runcie contacted witnesses in a pending criminal case to prepare for his grand jury testimony, held just days later, and then lied about connecting with them when questioned under oath. Myrick also contacted witnesses in the pending corruption case and discussed them with Runcie, prosecutors alleged. Though Runcie stated under oath that he had no contacts with the witnesses including via phone, email and even “smoke signals,” prosecutors said that telephone records tell a different story.

The pending criminal case involves former chief information officer Anthony Hunter, who was arrested in January after an investigation by the South Florida Sun Sentinel found he to a friend, who reportedly sold two cars and a house in Georgia to the school official at a discount. Hunter has pleaded not guilty. The purchases were part of an $800 million bond program approved in 2014 to update school buildings, including enhanced security.

“Others may be willing to simply overlook multiple barefaced falsehoods and obstructive statements under oath,” Richard Mantei, the designated assistant statewide prosecutor, wrote in a court filing Monday. But the grand jury “was not.”

Just hours before agreeing to step down, Runcie claiming he would be “fully vindicated” in the criminal case and had no intentions of resigning. “I look forward to due process being followed, where individuals are treated fairly through the normal judicial system,” he said. His attorneys, along with numerous business and religious leaders who rallied in his defense, held that Runcie’s indictment was politically motivated.

The Broward County schools community has been caught up in controversy and infighting since the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine’s Day more than three years ago. Several shooting survivors and victims’ families have become Runcie’s biggest critics. Among them is former Parkland student Kyle Kashuv who survived the shooting and became a conservative activist in support of gun rights. In a tweet following Runcie’s arrest, Kashuv blamed the shooting on “local officials’ corruption.”

In 2019, Runcie survived a school board motion to have him removed as superintendent by a 6-3 vote. His attempted ouster was led by Lori Alhadeff, who secured a school board seat after her 14-year-old daughter, Alyssa, was killed in the shooting.

Alhadeff again became a leading voice in favor of Runcie’s ouster during Tuesday’s board workshop, arguing that her efforts were not “of political nature,” but because Runcie’s incompetence and lack of leadership was the source of “a plethora of problems” in the district, including deteriorating campuses.

In announcing his willingness to resign Tuesday, Runcie spoke to Alhadeff directly, acknowledging that her daughter’s death caused “enormous amounts of pain that none of us can ever imagine,” and that he hoped his resignation would provide “the peace you’re looking for.”

“Ms. Alhadeff, I’m immensely sorry for your loss,” Runcie said. “I hope that your future is better. I can’t erase the past, but we’ll try to move forward.”

‘His day in court’

Runcie has led Broward County schools since 2011, after then-Superintendent Jim Notter retired early during a moment of intense scrutiny. Runcie’s hiring was portrayed as a fresh start after accused the board of being corrupted by contractors and lobbyists and two school board members were charged with bribery. Before heading south to Florida, he was chief of staff to then-CEO of Chicago Public Schools Arne Duncan, a of Runcie’s who would later go on to serve as U.S. education secretary during the Obama administration.

Runcie’s time with the district was for superintendents of major urban school systems, and he built a network of local and national allies who flocked to support him following his arrest. Some called the grand jury a witch hunt and others questioned whether the charges against Runcie, who is Black, were racially motivated.

Last Friday, several dozen business, government and religious leaders spoke out in Runcie’s defense, portraying his tenure as a boon for Broward schools, including an uptick in student achievement and graduation rates. Bishop C.E. Glover of Mount Bethel Ministries in Fort Lauderdale said that “an indictment is not proof of guilt.”

“I challenge the school board today not to attempt to take any punitive action against our superintendent without him having due process,” Glover said. “It has been said that a grand jury can indict a ham sandwich. Why? Because they only hear one side of the story. They only hear the prosecutor’s argument.”

Runcie also received public support from Mike Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change, a bipartisan national network of reform-minded education leaders. Runcie sits on its board of directors and members include district leaders from Chicago, Cleveland, New Orleans and Washington, D.C. In a statement, Magee said that Runcie “has always shown himself to be a person of the highest integrity” whose decisions at the helm of Broward County Schools were made “with students’ best interests at heart.”

In an interview on Thursday, Magee said he hasn’t spoken to Runcie since his arrest but that education leaders nationwide continue to think highly of his leadership. During his tenure, district efforts to bring “coherence to instruction and curriculum” were among “the best in the country,” Magee said, and that his work to address students’ mental health after the shooting was “first rate.”

“I hope he gets every opportunity to lead another system,” he said, “because he’s one of the best in the country at it and it’s his calling.”

Magee added that divisive politics is par for the course for the leaders of major school systems, including in Broward County. However, he couldn’t say whether politics played any role in Runcie’s arrest.

“There are times where the politics are overwhelming,” he said. “When you have a politically charged issue, like in the aftermath of something like Parkland, and a highly contentious community and statewide debate about gun control and school safety, there’s no avoiding the worst elements of politics.”

But as other backers maintain that divisive politics are to blame, board member Debra Hixon asserted that the grand jury process has been conducted fairly. In , she noted that the grand jury included community members who were “arbitrarily selected” from three Florida counties.

“When you look at who made up this grand jury and how they were selected, I’d like to believe that the process is going through the proper steps,” Hixon said. “Now he’ll have his day in court to decide whether he’s truly guilty.”

Runcie, 59, was arrested by Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents and charged with perjury. Also arrested was Broward County School Board General Counsel Barbara Myrick, 72, who was charged with felony unlawful disclosure of statewide grand jury proceedings. Both officials face felony charges related to a statewide grand jury that launched a probe into the country’s sixth-largest district after 17 people were killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis created the panel in 2019 to investigate possible failures by the district to follow state school-safety laws and to properly manage money earmarked for school safety initiatives.

Runcie’s indictment, provided to ����Ӱ�� by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, alleges that he gave false statements to the grand jury as it was investigating whether the district was following school safety laws, whether officials committed fraud by accepting state school funds while “knowingly failing to act,” whether officials committed fraud by mismanaging school safety funds and whether educators underreported “incidents of criminal activity to the Department of Education.” The indictment against Myrick, the district’s longtime lawyer, alleges that she disclosed confidential information related to the statewide grand jury proceedings. Information relating to the grand jury is sealed and officials didn’t release additional information about the charges.

Ryan Petty, whose 14-year-old daughter Alaina Petty was killed in the Parkland shooting, told ����Ӱ�� he felt relief at Runcie’s indictment, saying it reflects a “three-year process trying to drive towards some accountability” from district leadership.

In arguing that educators have failed in their obligations to keep students safe, Petty pointed to approved in 2014 to update school buildings including security upgrades. As of 2019, 97 percent of district schools were still waiting for repairs, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

“The promises had not been kept,” said Petty, who has served on the state Board of Education since last year. “The killer walked through an open gate which should have been locked, through an open door which should have been locked and then began to indiscriminately kill students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, all of which was preventable, all of which was avoidable.”

Runcie’s lawyers said their client will plead not guilty and called it a “sad day” when “politics become more important than the interests of our students,” and said that the superintendent has “fully cooperated with law enforcement throughout this statewide grand jury process.”

“This morning, we received a copy of an indictment that does not shed any light on what false statement is alleged to have been made,” according to the statement from the firm Dutko & Kroll, P.A. “We are confident that [Runcie] will be exonerated and he intends to continue to carry out his responsibilities with the highest level of integrity and moral standards, as he has done for nearly 10 years in his role as superintendent.”

School board chair Rosalind Osgood said in a statement that the nearly 261,000-student school system will “operate as normal under the District’s leadership team” as the legal proceedings unfold.

Runcie and Myrick aren’t the first public officials to face criminal charges in relation to the Parkland shooting. Scot Peterson, a school-based police officer assigned to the campus, was charged with neglect and perjury in 2019 after he failed to engage the gunman head-on as shots rang out.

The district’s school safety and security efforts have been highly scrutinized since Broward County schools were thrust into the national spotlight by the tragedy. Among the most controversial has been the PROMISE program, a diversion initiative that seeks to keep students out of the criminal justice system for committing certain offenses at school. Runcie repeatedly claimed that the suspected Parkland shooter had “no connection” to the program but WLRN, the local public radio station, to PROMISE for vandalism in 2013, though it’s unclear if he ever attended. Critics of the program argue it led officials to take a lax position on school discipline.

Runcie has also faced sharp criticism for his response to the shooting and has fended off efforts to oust him from his $335,000-a-year post. His contract, which expires in 2023, allows a majority on the school board to terminate his employment without cause, .

Petty is among Runcie’s toughest critics. Though specifics of the charges against the veteran superintendent and Myrick remain unclear, Petty said he felt optimistic about the grand jury investigation.

“I certainly take no pleasure in seeing somebody indicted, but I can’t help but feel that we’re moving in the right direction with regards to getting accountability,” he said. “Hopefully this will lead to change.”

Read the indictments: