Over the weekend, the Florida Sun-Sentinel revealed that a “diversion” program designed to reduce the number of arrests and violent offenses in Broward County public schools — but which may have forced administrators to ignore warnings about a mass shooter — is fraught with even more trouble than originally suspected, leaving Broward County students in serious danger.
The program, called “Promise,” was designed to lower the number of students who ended up either facing serious legal consequences for offenses committed in school by rerouting problem kids into alternative education programs. But the Obama-era program, implemented in more than just Broward County schools, also scaled back punishments problem students could receive, leaving schools powerless to enforce the rules against repeat offenders.
The result, the Sun-Sentinel reports, is a “culture of leniency” that allowed “children to engage in an endless loop of violations and second chances, creating a system where kids who commit the same offense for the 10th time may be treated like it’s the first.”
And that’s not all. The Sun-Sentinel found a host of problems buried within the program.
— Students can be considered first-time offenders even if they commit the same offenses year after year.
— The district’s claim of reforming bad behavior is exaggerated.
— Lenient discipline has an added PR benefit for the district: lower suspensions, expulsions and arrests along with rising graduation rates.
In cases like that of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooter, students end up getting away not being labeled a “repeat offender” or a “problem student” as long as they committed the same type of offense consistently over the course of a single school year. Each year, their “permanent record” is wiped clean, meaning a student who was a problem the previous year won’t be considered a problem the following year — that is, until he or she commits a new offense.
The students weren’t tracked year-to-year, so the slate was, essentially, wiped clean every 12 months.
Broward initially insisted that the shooter was not part of “Promise,” but after several weeks of questions, admitted that he had been referred to the program and was one of the students whom the “Promise” program protected.
The repeat-offender problem got so bad, teachers brought up safety issues at faculty meetings: “The message out there is that the students are untouchable. Habitual negative behavior means nothing anymore.” Others complained that students who committed serious offenses, like bringing weapons to school, could never be expelled no matter how much harm they posed to other students.
According to the Sun-Sentinel’s data, the faculty had reason to worry. The number of violent incidents in Broward County schools increased every year after 2012. The number of times schools referred even violent incidents to police declined during the same time period. It meant fewer students were shoved into the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline” — and more graduates overall — but left schools exposed.
In most cases, the problem might have gone unnoticed — except that Broward’s “Promise” program eventually ended in one of the worst school shootings in American history.