One of the parents of a victim in the Parkland shooting has written a book about the shooting, the policies that made it happen, and what we can do about it now. The following excerpt was originally published in USA Today.

“The Parkland shooter never should have been in the same school as my daughter. But his misbehavior and warning signs went unpunished and ignored.

As students settle in for the new school year, parents must ask: Do I really know what’s happening in my kids’ school? Do I really know whether they are safe?

I didn’t know. But I want to be the last father in America who can honestly make that excuse.

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After my daughter, Meadow, was murdered in the February 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, I wanted every answer. As I investigated, I realized that it was the most avoidable mass murder in American history. And I learned something else that keeps me up at night: The policies that made this massacre inevitable have spread to schools across America.

A few weeks after the massacre, I asked whether the Broward school district’s disciplinary leniency policies enabled the shooter to slip through the cracks. Broward Superintendent Robert Runcie called questions like mine “fake news” because, he said, the shooter had never been referred to the school district’s PROMISE diversionary program “while in high school.” The program allows students who commit certain misdemeanors to avoid getting involved with the criminal justice system.

Later, the news broke that he had been referred to PROMISE while in middle school. But the superintendent’s carefully crafted denial obscured the unmistakable fact that the school district’s failure to properly handle the shooter happened by design.

The confessed shooter allegedly threatened to kill other students and threatened to rape. He threatened to shoot up the school, according to the sheriff’s office. Classmates said he brought knives and bullets to school. He wrote hideous racial slurs on his backpack. He carved swastikas in the lunchroom tables.

But the assistant principals at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School didn’t have him arrested. Rather, they simply banned him from bringing a backpack to school and frisked him every day, according to the sworn testimony of the security guard who searched him, for fear he’d bring a deadly weapon and kill.

Broward’s policies allowed juveniles convicted of crimes as serious as murder and rape to go back into normal classrooms. Broward’s “Policy 5006” said that referring serious felonies like sexual assault and arson to the police was optional. Principals were trained to not cooperate with law enforcement, refusing to even tell officers whether suspected felons were on campus.

In this environment, it was no surprise that the Parkland shooter’s crimes went unpunished. And that his subcriminal misbehavior, which could have earned him a ticket to the specialized school he so badly needed to be in, went ignored.

Beyond the fact that my daughter was murdered in the most avoidable school shooting in history, what keeps me up at night is the fact that Broward’s anti-discipline policies have spread to schools nationwide.

(Excerpt from USA Today. Article by Andrew Pollack.)

Have these anti-discipline policies spread to your schools?  Leave a comment.