“Something doesn’t smell quite right in Broward, and the school district is the epicenter,” announces the skinny kid at the microphone. He’s 19-year-old Kenneth Preston, and he is promising the school board of Broward County “It will be made clear: the failures of the school system, and particularly the superintendent, in protecting our schools.” The standing-room-only audience gathered in the school board building’s main hall—where the nine board members and the superintendent preside magisterially beneath the school district’s seal—whoops and applauds until the board president quells them with a note on decorum: “We don’t applaud.”
Nearly two months have passed since Nikolas Cruz shot and killed 14 students and 3 staffers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County, the sixth-largest public school district in the country. The satellite news trucks are gone from the palm-lined drive of the south Florida campus, leaving only the armed officers patrolling the points of entry and the “Stoneman Strong” signs that line the fenced perimeter in memory of the slain. Last month saw the “March for Our Lives,” led by Stoneman students whose eloquence earned them national fame before the school had even reopened. Counter-campaigns followed, led by another student who survived the shooting and a Trump-supporting father whose daughter died by Cruz’s gun. The latter stood beside Florida governor Rick Scott when he declared his Senate bid on April 9.
Students, parents, and teachers have descended on the school board here in the county seat to try to find out what went wrong at one of Florida’s biggest, best, and, by the numbers, safest public schools. In a day of plodding hearings and votes overshadowed by the shooting, they’ve debated a “clear backpacks” policy and rejected a proposal to arm district teachers. And they’ve heard concerns about the county’s disciplinary regulations, which were relaxed in 2013 to reflect a federal priority to “break the school-to-prison pipeline,” and in response to federal findings that Broward’s “zero-tolerance” policy disproportionately punished black students.
Kenneth Preston is here to present a report assigning fresh blame to the same old bureaucratic rot. In 2014, $104 million was set aside from an $800 million school-improvement bond issue to upgrade Broward County schools’ physical safety and security. According to public records Preston has unearthed, the vast majority of that money was never put to use. The planned upgrades—including a new alarm system for Stoneman that still hasn’t been installed—were named “year-one priorities” in the proposal four years ago.
Only someone with a lot of time on his hands and a keen distrust of authority would dig up the damning public records. Enter Preston, an obsessive citizen-journalist in the making. He’s a student in the district’s online education program—which is “sort of a joke,” he admits—since he dropped out of his charter high school with a debilitating bout of Lyme disease. The lackadaisical online curriculum has left him with a lot of free time: “The amount of documents that I’ve read—I wouldn’t have had that time otherwise.” Debate tournaments, his favorite activity back when he was a conventional student, prepared him for this foray into contentious county politics.
The Goliath to Preston’s David is Broward County superintendent Robert Runcie, who was Arne Duncan’s deputy in the Chicago school system. The “discipline matrix” Runcie wrote for Broward schools in 2013 closely reflected the philosophy of Duncan, and Duncan, Obama’s first education secretary, singled out Runcie’s reforms as a model of how to “keep kids in classrooms and out of courtrooms.” The effects of such policies, which more than 50 districts adopted nationally, have sparked a bitter debate in Broward since the Parkland shooting. Reports in the days following Cruz’s February 14 massacre revealed he’d been passed between six schools in his three years of high school and repeatedly disciplined for violent and disruptive behavior but, because of federal protections for special-needs students, never expelled for his offenses.
Preston’s project began, he tells me, when he saw Runcie on the news in the immediate aftermath of the shootings. “He was saying things that very day—that ‘There was no indication of this,’ ‘There was no indication of any threat by the student’—which turned out not to be true. Things I had a hard time believing.” He started researching the county’s discipline reforms for his online journalism class and quickly came upon a wealth of relevant material. Soon “it was about a lot more than writing an A paper.” He wrote a two-pronged 3,000-word report—on the school district’s behavior-intervention program, which took effect the year that Cruz started high school, and on the fate of the $800 million bond issue. “The number-one priority, as part of that bond program, was supposed to be safety,” Preston learned from the original proposals the county’s taxpayers had voted on. “There were things—music, technology—that all got moved on pretty quickly. Safety was put on the back burner.”
The press release he published to stoke public curiosity about his reporting landed him in an uneasy and combative meeting with Runcie the afternoon of April 9, the day before he was to present his research to the school board. High up in the glass-walled school board building, in a conference room with a view stretching north toward Parkland, we met Runcie—smooth-talking, rail thin, and impressively tall in brown and gold pinstripes and a gold-patterned tie. He towered over Preston and had brought 10 officials to hear and answer Preston’s findings. Three Stoneman Douglas parents were present too: all three had children killed by Cruz.
Runcie opened the meeting with a casual air—“I meet with students all the time”—but added a note of procedural criticism. If Preston fancied himself an investigative journalist, Runcie said, he should have requested the meeting himself, and sooner. “Typically, you’d want to contact the subject,” he added. Even so, he heard Preston’s 20-minute presentation, and of the slow-going safety upgrades, he conceded, “It is absolutely true that the SMART program had a delay in the first year.” He justified the delays, claiming that thereafter the preliminary work was technically always underway in some sense.
When Preston quoted the original plan, which names school safety a “year-one priority,” Runcie became more condescending: “There is a difference between when projects start, when they’re completed, and when the funds are made available.” Indeed, the safety projects for Broward schools, among them the alarm system that could have saved lives at Stoneman, have been stuck in a nebulous stage for years—somewhere between funding and execution. Omar Shim, the school district’s budget director, backed Runcie’s insistence that, in some form, “all the projects have been initiated” and added a description of the unwieldy path of progress that follows any issue of a bond. Or, as he tactlessly put it, after “that gun goes off.” One victim’s father shook his head at the tone-deaf metaphor and afterward, vented his disgust to me: Can’t any of these people take responsibility?
Indeed, when the topic moved from delayed school-safety upgrades to the relaxed disciplinary infrastructure that saw Cruz shunted between schools, avoid referral to law enforcement, and allowed to opt out of psychiatric monitoring, the assembled district officials pointed to federal law and defended the county’s policies. “We as a Broward County community made the decision that we were going to be treating our students differently,” said Michaelle Valbrun-Pope, who is in charge of the district’s student-support policies. “We don’t want school leaders to say, ‘If you do this, this is what will happen.’ ” “This is not an average student,” she said of Nikolas Cruz, who was in a special-education program and so fell under a different disciplinary category than would a conventional student who exhibited his behaviors. “He has a disability.” And Runcie scoffed at Preston’s inquiry into Broward’s policies on student behavior. “Are you suggesting,” he challenged, “that the discipline matrix here is connected?”
But Preston isn’t the only one. There is a growing anger that Cruz’s violent and erratic actions at the six schools he attended over three years were not appropriately reported, documented, or dealth with because of policies that encourage school leaders to keep district teachers from reporting student offenses. “Teachers come to me and tell me, ‘My principal’s making me feel like it’s my fault when students misbehave,’ and ‘I’m asking for help, and they’re still putting it on me,’ ” Anna Fusco, the Broward County teachers’ union president, tells me the following day. We are at a downtown café between sessions in the all-day school board meeting, and she is describing a form of negligence that doesn’t show up in any documents. “Management denies it,” she says, but hundreds of teachers have complained to her about the district’s “unspoken” rule to avoid referrals.
As I head back to the board meeting, I talk to a Stoneman Douglas teacher. Speaking on the condition of anonymity given the “media freeze” imposed on teachers since the shooting, she tells me that permissible lengths of suspension for a violent or misbehaving student have shrunk to 3 days in recent years—down from 10. Under the old system, she says, a student like Cruz would have been referred to local law enforcement. “What should’ve happened was: Somebody does something bad, then somebody calls the police, and then the police take the actions that are set up.” The sheriff’s office, she believes, “had the opportunity to Baker Act him”—to mandate an involuntary psychiatric evaluation—“and made a decision not to.” As we speak, the school board building’s parking lot is filling up in advance of the meeting’s public-speaker portion—and Preston’s presentation. But the teacher says she can’t attend: The school day is over, yes, but she has a second job to get to.
What the school board heard from Preston was unimpressive compared with his confrontation with Runcie the day before. His scheduled time was brief due to the press of speakers wanting to be heard. He referred to his findings, but did not read from his report. And at the end of the meeting, Runcie, by way of rebuttal, said he applauded Preston’s efforts but worried he was spinning the wrong story. “Without integrity in journalism, you have,” Runcie said, volleying a misquotation from Macbeth back at Preston’s allusion to Hamlet, “a tale with a lot of sound and fury yet saying nothing.”
After the meeting, I found Preston standing with Sun-Sentinel reporter Scott Travis, who tells us he’s been covering the delays in the school-improvement bond’s implementation for years. Foot-dragging like this isn’t out of the ordinary for Broward, but the county’s sluggish operations take on new meaning with a nationally resonant tragedy. At a school in Palm Beach County, where county-level operations tend to run on time, he notes, they’d probably have had that state-of-the-art alarm system already.
Preston’s reporting can’t assign responsibility for the tragedy at Stoneman Douglas. But it does remind us how much bureaucratic buck-passing, from excused lags in local projects to blindly followed federal discipline guidance, goes unnoticed until tragic consequences bring it to light.
