FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — A statewide grand jury’s blistering critique of a school renovation program led to the removal of four Broward school board members, but the report also accuses the school district of serious safety failures.
The state Department of Education believes some of these issues — including underreporting of crimes, failure to work with law enforcement and allowing students with serious felony issues back on campus — “are ongoing and require immediate action,” according to an Aug. 29 letter to Superintendent Vickie Cartwright from Tim Hay, director of the department’s Office of Safe Schools.
Hay met with Broward school officials Thursday. A spokeswoman for the state Department of Education did not reply to requests for comment.
School district spokeswoman Keyla Concepcion refused to answer specific questions about how the district was addressing issues outlined in Hay’s letter.
“Broward County Public Schools remains committed to providing safe and secure learning environments for students and staff and is happy to collaborate with the Office of Safe Schools in that endeavor,” Concepcion said in an email. “We are looking forward to receiving the state’s report about their visit to the district, which will address all the questions you have outlined.”
Safety concerns in Broward were the impetus for the grand jury report since the county was the site of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, which left 17 dead.
The grand jury report was completed in April 2021 but remained sealed for 16 months, so it’s a snapshot in time that may not reflect current conditions. Still, it was used by Gov. Ron DeSantis to remove four School Board members who were criticized in the report. He replaced them with four conservative members.
Cartwright told the new school board Tuesday that she’s fixed many safety issues.
“I think you will be pleasantly surprised,” Cartwright said at Tuesday’s meeting. “You would have thought I had a copy of the grand jury report, which I didn’t. These are areas myself and staff recognized early on as areas that needed to be shored up.”
Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, who chairs the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission, said he’s seen “exponential change” under Cartwright. The commission was formed to investigate the tragedy and make safety recommendations statewide.
“The district is moving in the right direction,” Gualtieri said. “The grand jury report is old, and the district has been self-correcting or is in the process of correcting. But there are still some issues of concern.”
The main concern, he said, is underreporting of crimes, which he said is happening in districts statewide.
Here are some of the safety-related issues from the grand jury report that the state Department of Education letter says may need fixing, and what steps the district has taken.
Underreporting of crimes
The letter from Hay said “school officials violated — and continue to violate — state law by systemically underreporting incidents of criminal activity to the Florida Department of Education.”
This issue is still happening across Florida, Gualtieri said, and the commission is studying ways to fix it.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel identified this as a problem in 2018 as part of a series of investigations into the Parkland tragedy. The newspaper reviewed police logs, incident reports and news accounts and found school districts throughout the state were failing to report to the state numerous crimes, including rapes, arsons and gun-related incidents, giving parents a false sense of how safe schools are.
At that time, there were no consequences for underreporting. Then in 2019, the state Legislature passed a law saying the commissioner of education could order a school board to withhold a superintendent’s salary for false reporting.
Gualtieri said that hasn’t happened.
The Stoneman Douglas Commission recently identified large discrepancies between districts. At an Aug. 2 meeting, Gualtieri noted Marion County, with 43,000 students had 176 of the most serious “Level 1″ incidents, including aggravated batteries, sexual batteries and arsons. Miami-Dade County, with 331,000 students, had 28 and Broward County, with 258,000 students had 32.
“If I was using that information to be informed about school culture and safety, I wouldn’t send my kids to Marion County, but I don’t think that’s right,” Gualtieri said, noting Marion may be overreporting while other districts are underreporting.
Broward did report more total incidents — major and minor — during the 2021-22 school year (10,054), than it did in the 2018-19 school year (7,685). The two school years between are not comparable because so many students were attending remotely during the pandemic.
“Do I think our numbers are completely accurate? I do not,” board member Debbi Hixon said. “But I would say we’re definitely moving in the right direction.”
10,000 court appearances
One surprising finding in the state grand jury report is that former Superintendent Robert Runcie “proudly included in one of his annual self-evaluations that he had made 10,135 court appearances on behalf of students.”
The letter from Hay asks why most of those were never reported to law enforcement.
The Sun Sentinel reviewed Runcie’s self-evaluations from 2013 to 2020 but was unable to confirm where that claim was made. The grand jury said it was a lie anyway.
“Under no circumstances could this number be accurate; there simply are not enough court days in the year,” the grand jury report said, adding that Runcie “speaks with a forked tongue.”
Hixon said she’d be surprised if the 10,000 figure “was even close to being accurate. How would he even fit that in his schedule? He’d be sitting in court forever.”
Runcie could not be reached for comment.
Hiding crimes through Promise Program
The Promise Program is a diversion program that allows students to avoid criminal prosecution for nonviolent crimes by attending a program at an alternative school. It started in 2012 after Broward discovered a disproportionate number of Black male students were being arrested.
“One of the eligibility criteria for Promise includes having a misdemeanor offense. The offense has to be documented to fulfill this eligibility requirement,” former board member Rosalind Osgood said. “If the Promise Program is hiding crime stats, I have not been privy to the data that was used to support such a statement.”
Amid criticism, the state ordered Promise and similar programs to report data to a criminal justice database, so law enforcement could see if children have had previous interventions. During Runcie’s tenure, the district was reluctant to do so, but that changed during Cartwright’s tenure. She started sharing data in September 2021.
The concept of the Promise Program — giving kids second chances for minor offenses — “is a great thing to do under the right circumstances and framework,” Gualtieri said. “The problem before is it was not the right circumstances and not the right framework. There was no accountability.”
But he said he has no concerns about how it’s run now.
Violent felons returning to campus
The grand jury report said the district’s “Behavior Intervention Program” and “Juvenile Justice Educational Transition and Support” resulted in individuals with pending felony cases returning to classrooms. It quotes a 2017-18 program handbook, saying “students convicted of a serious crime such as rape, murder, attempted murder, sexual battery, or firearm-related” were returned to schools, “including mainstream schools from which their behavior caused their removal.
A school district spokeswoman refused to say whether this still happens. Dan Gohl, former chief academic officer, who resigned in April, said it does not.
“Over the last several years, the practice has been that anyone charged or convicted of a violent crime against a person was to be in a specialized school or on home instruction,” Gohl said. “Whether the policy changed, I don’t know.”
Student discipline was moved from Gohl’s department to another after the Stoneman Douglas shooting, Gohl said.
District not cooperating with law enforcement
The Stoneman Douglas commission frequently complained that the district was hostile to law enforcement under Runcie and former General Counsel Barbara Myrick. Among the complaints were that they wouldn’t allow the sheriff’s office real-time access to school cameras. Sheriff Gregory Tony told the commission last month that had been resolved under Cartwright.
The school district is also regularly including law enforcement on behavioral threat assessments of students to determine if they are likely to cause harm to themselves or others, officials said.
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