You’re reading this because I don’t want you or anyone else to feel the way I feel. After my daughter Meadow was murdered on Valentine’s Day 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, I wanted answers. At first, I thought getting those answers might help me come to terms with losing her. It didn’t. But my hope is that what I’ve learned will at least help you keep your kids safe.
If the shooter had acquired his gun through a legal loophole, or if a background check had failed and there was some NRA connection to what happened, I would have gone after the NRA. Hard. But when 18-1958 (I don’t like to say his name, so I usually call him by his prison number) bought his guns, he had a totally clean record. On paper, he was a model citizen. In reality, he was a well-known wolf. Our laws already say such people can’t buy guns. But he was never institutionalized. He was never arrested. And maybe most important of all: He was never really helped.
I wanted to know everything about why the shooting happened, so I launched my own investigation. The more I learned, the less I could believe how much incompetence there was.
I truly mean that. It didn’t even make sense how everyone in Broward County could have been so incompetent. But eventually I figured out the explanation: political correctness.
You could write several books about the failures that enabled my daughter’s murder. You could write a book about the police and how their politically correct policy to reduce juvenile arrests allowed 18-1958 to keep a clean record despite 45 police visits to his home. You could write a book about how mental health professionals, in the name of “civil liberty,” refused to have him institutionalized when he was suicidal, when he threatened to kill people, and when he was obsessed with buying a gun.
It might sound strange to point a finger at the Broward County School District. After all, when people think of schools, they think about caring teachers who want to do right by kids. But teachers don’t have much power anymore. They report to their principals, who report to district bureaucrats and superintendents. In theory, superintendents report to locally elected school boards that are accountable to citizens. But citizens don’t have much power over our schools anymore either.
Instead, school superintendents follow orders and take their cues from federal bureaucrats and social justice activist groups, who view students and schools as statistics on a spreadsheet. They slice every data set by students’ race, income, and disability status, and then blame every inequality on teachers. They view schools as laboratories for social justice engineering and force politically correct policies into our schools based on the assumption that teachers are too prejudiced to be trusted to do the right things.
One policy is known as “discipline reform” or “restorative justice.” Activists and bureaucrats saw that minority students were being disciplined at higher rates than white students, and rather than recognize that misbehavior might reflect out-of-school inequities, they blamed teachers for the disparity. They essentially accused teachers of racism and sought to prevent teachers from enforcing consequences for bad behavior. They thought that if students didn’t get disciplined at school, they wouldn’t get in trouble in the real world. Superintendents then started pressuring principals to lower the number of suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests. All that actually happened was that everyone looked the other way or swept disturbing behavior under the rug, making our schools more dangerous.
Nationwide, this pressure to reduce discipline is especially strong when it comes to students with disabilities. Bureaucrats and activists think teachers unfairly discipline them as well. In truth, students with disabilities tend to be disciplined less often than their peers, with one category exception: students with “emotional and behavioral” disabilities, which is a blanket label for students who frequently behave very badly. 18-1958 was one of those kids. Principals also face pressure to educate students with disabilities in the “least restrictive environment” possible. It sounds nice in theory. But it means pushing troubled kids into normal classrooms rather than giving them the specialized services they need to actually address their issues.
Kids with severe behavior problems are forced into classrooms where they don’t belong, and principals have a strong incentive to ignore their misbehavior. This is great for superintendents, who can advance their careers on manipulated statistics. It is fine for principals, who get rewarded for not documenting problems so that their school’s data looks good.
It is bad for teachers, but they have little say. It’s worse for regular students, but they have even less input. And it’s worst for the troubled and disturbed students, who have the least say of all. This is what happened to 18-1958, and it is why the Parkland massacre happened.
At every critical point in 18-1958’s life, the adults in the school system had a choice: Do the obviously responsible thing, or do the easy thing that’s encouraged by these policies. They did the latter every time. Parkland was the most avoidable mass shooting in American history. 18-1958 was never going to be a model citizen, but it truly took a village to raise him into a school shooter. I can’t even say he killed my daughter. They killed my daughter.
18-1958’s story is so bad that I approached his defense attorney and said, “Give me all of his education documents and I’ll testify as a witness for the defense about how the system failed him.” I understand that this might sound crazy. This psychopath murdered my daughter, and I firmly believe in the death penalty. But the most important thing is that America learns from what happened so that this never happens again.
Right after the tragedy, people started raising questions about the role that the Broward County School District’s disciplinary leniency policies might have played. Broward had launched the PROMISE (Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Support, and Education) program to dramatically decrease student arrests by giving students three free misdemeanors every year, favoring counseling over introduction to the juvenile justice system. Students told the media after the tragedy that 18-1958 had committed all sorts of crimes in school without consequence. If he’d been arrested, he could have been prohibited from buying a gun. Or maybe an arrest would have made the FBI follow up on, rather than drop, tips that 18-1958 might shoot up the school. This seemed like an issue worth investigating.
But Broward County School District Superintendent Robert Runcie called me and others “reprehensible” for even asking it. First, he said there was no connection whatsoever between PROMISE and the shooter. Then, perhaps after someone on his staff actually looked at 18-1958’s school records, Runcie said that he “had never been referred to the PROMISE program nor committed a PROMISE eligible offense while in high school.” (Emphasis added.) Then he called the whole question “fake news.”
Runcie went to Harvard, so I’m sure he thinks he’s clever. Me, I barely graduated high school. But I knew that if he was saying “while in high school,” it meant that 18-1958 was sent to PROMISE while in middle school. Months later, a reporter proved that. The reporter also revealed that 18-1958 never actually attended the program, but the district didn’t follow up on his absence and couldn’t explain what had happened. The media called this a “shocking revelation.” But I knew it.
The fact that 18-1958 had been referred to PROMISE once isn’t that important in itself. Runcie could have told the whole truth rather than telling a half-truth (or just not looking into it) and then labeling grieving families as “fake news” mongers. But the morning after the tragedy, he blamed the gun, maybe expecting that the media would be content to leave it at that. And they were.
But I wasn’t about to let anyone off the hook. Now that I’ve investigated, I think I have a pretty good idea why the school district didn’t tell the full truth. Part of it has to do with this culture of pathological unaccountability within the Broward County School District. For a bureaucrat like Runcie, the very idea of accountability became politically incorrect.
But more of it, I think, is the fact that these discipline policies had made Runcie a national star and transformed American education. President Barack Obama’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, who was Runcie’s boss back when they both worked in the Chicago Public Schools, forced hundreds of school districts serving millions of students to adopt Runcie’s discipline policies. Thousands more districts serving millions more students adopted the policies because of pressure from other bureaucrats or because the policies were the new politically correct thing to do. And that’s why what happened here matters far beyond Parkland: The policies and the culture that enabled my daughter’s murder have probably come to your child’s school.
Andrew Pollack is founder of Americans for Children’s Lives and School Safety (CLASS) and co-author, with Max Eden, of Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies that Created the Parkland Shooter and Endanger America’s Students, from which this essay is adapted.
