Broward County schools started the controversial Promise Program six years ago with the best of intentions _ keeping kids out of the criminal justice system for such petty offenses as sassing teachers and blowing spitballs. Black children were bearing the brunt of what amounted to a zero-tolerance approach to classroom and campus misconduct.
But good intentions don't guarantee good results. Now, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission, still addressing the massacre at that school on Valentine's Day 2018, is calling on the Legislature to effectively end Promise by merging it into the juvenile diversion program that state law now requires state attorneys to run.
The commission is right. The two programs have the same goal of saving a child from a criminal record for relatively minor offenses. It makes no sense to have one program for kids when they're in school and one for kids when they're not.
The problem is, neither program is kept aware of what the other is doing. A deputy sheriff's decision on how to deal with vandalism at a shopping mall may be the wrong one if he doesn't know that the same child has been in trouble for the same thing at school. Conversely, school authorities are flying blind if they don't know what trouble a child has been in outside their jurisdiction.
The law requiring each state attorney to establish and maintain a juvenile diversion program addresses the primary concern the Broward school district had when it began the Promise program six years ago. Children shouldn't have police records dogging them for life _ barring their way into the military or civilian occupations _ if the offenses weren't serious. A child who successfully completes a diversion program leaves nothing but a statistic.
And Broward schools don't need Promise to avoid out-of-school suspensions for the small stuff. They have other ways.
A note of great caution needs to accompany the commission's recommendation. Promise was largely founded on the belief that minority students were being sent off in handcuffs in disproportionate numbers. The Legislature must monitor the state attorneys' diversion programs to guard against even unconscious racial bias in deciding which children get formally charged and which don't.
One thing needs to be clear. Early in its investigation, the commission established that Promise had nothing to do with the murder and mayhem committed by former student Nikolas Cruz, 19, who killed 17 people and injured 17 more at the Parkland high school.
Cruz had been referred to Promise while in middle school four years earlier. Whether he actually attended the program could never be established.
In reaching that conclusion, the commission opened a window into the district's problematic record-keeping and disconcerting lack of communication with the diversion program overseen by State Attorney Mike Satz.
Worse, school administrators have since stopped updating the Department of Juvenile Justice database with the names of students enrolled in the program, as required by state law. The district justified that by quibbling that Promise was an alternative to out-of-school suspension, rather than a criminal diversion program. In fact, it is both.
Within its vacuum, it can't be said how well Promise is or isn't working without an audit of its effectiveness. The unanswered question is whether Promise successfully diverted children from the criminal justice system or simply postponed their entry. Needless to say, the same question applies to the state attorneys' diversion programs.
An urgent related question is whether discipline has become too lax in Broward schools and whether Promise is a factor.
In a recent survey conducted by their union, 24% of Broward teachers who responded said students had threatened them with violence and 13% said they had actually been attacked. A teacher who said she needed surgery for a knee injury after a student threw a chair at her reported that he was removed from class for one day and then allowed back in.
Ending Promise, or folding it intact into the state attorney's program, will leave yet another problem unsolved.
In its investigation of the Parkland tragedy, the commission ran headlong into federal and state laws that are grossly over-broad in cloaking student records with secrecy. The commission's report included appendixes accessible only to a few people entitled to see student records. The commission called last January for reform of these laws. Nothing has been done. Florida's congressional delegation doesn't seem interested.
Without FERPA, the federal education privacy act, the people of Florida would have a much clearer picture of what went wrong at Parkland and whether the Promise program has worked well or poorly. FERPA needs to be rooted out. U.S. Reps. Ted Deutch and Debbie Wasserman Schultz should take the lead.
Other serious questions remain from the commission's meeting last week in Fort Lauderdale. The others:
_Why were as many as 29 charter schools preparing to open last Wednesday without solid plans for the armed security required by state law? Broward is apparently the only county where that happened.
There's a dispute over who was responsible for getting a Broward deputy to one school at the last minute, but it begs two larger questions: Why are so many charter schools flouting the law? And why wasn't the shortage exposed and fixed much earlier?
Parents also deserve to know which charter schools were lax. Broward is, after all, where 17 students and staff were murdered just 18 months ago.
_Why is it taking so long to complete an investigation into what five administrators at the ill-fated school did or didn't do to prevent Cruz, whose record fluttered with red flags, from perpetrating the massacre?
We understand that the MSD Commission asked the district to hold off its review until after the state had completed its investigation. But the results of the district's review, contracted to an outside law firm in November, were promised to the commission by April. It's now mid-August and School Superintendent Robert Runcie told the commission it may take as long as October to complete.
Two commission members implied the School Board should fire Runcie. In March, it voted 6-3 against doing so.
Runcie's future is an issue certain to be raised again in next year's School Board elections, along with the staggering news that it will cost an extra $436 million to complete a school renovation program for which he promised an $800 million bond program would suffice. Work has been completed at only seven of 234 schools and is underway at only 55 more, five years after Broward voters okayed the borrowing.
There seems to be far too little sense of urgency and follow-through at Broward school headquarters, and much too little concern over consequences.
