Thread: It's Too Late - Broward County School Board Beginning to Admit Their Mistakes?

It’s Too Late – Broward County School Board Beginning to Admit Their Mistakes?…



February 22, 2018

by sundance


As expected – buried deep inside a Miami Herald article about the Parkland school shooter, Nikolas Cruz, and a school board questioning their progressive policies, we find the following:

[…] Absent Cruz’s school records, it is hard to say precisely when Cruz’s behavior became an acute problem for teachers and administrators. Disciplinary reports obtained by the Herald show that at Westglades Middle School, which he attended in 2013, he’d been cited numerous times for disrupting class, unruly behavior, insulting or profane language, profanity toward staff, disobedience and other rules violations.



Records show the behaviors continued at Marjory Stoneman Douglas [High School], which he attended in 2016 and 2017 before being transferred, with discipline being dispensed for fighting, profanity, and an “assault.” It appears the Jan. 19, 2017 assault resulted in a referral for a “threat assessment.” A few months later, Cruz landed at an Off Campus Learning Center, where he remained for only about five months. (read more)

Well, there it is.



This is what Jack Cashill was writing about yesterday: “Did the Progressive ‘Broward County Solution’ Cost 17 Student Lives?” –


Yes Jack, yes it did.



Jack Cashill knows all too well, because he watched us follow a similar 2012 Trayvon Martin trail into the rabbit hole of manipulated diversionary school discipline to avoid criminal arrests. Just so the school system could “improve their statistics.”



Broward County schools intentionally created polices from 2011 through 2015 that culminated in the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland. We know this with great specificity because five years ago we warned Broward County Florida school board members this could happen.






In 2012 and 2013 while doing research into the Trayvon Martin shooting we discovered an alarming set of school policies being enacted in Miami-Dade and Broward County Florida. The policies were called “diversionary programs” and were essentially about stopping High School students from being arrested. Law enforcement was instructed to avoid arrests and defer criminal conduct to school administrators.



Students who engaged in violence, drug sales, robberies, burglaries, theft and other various crimes were intentionally kept out of the criminal justice system. County administrators and School Superintendents told local and county law enforcement officers to stop arresting students.

2013 […] Broward, the nation’s seventh largest district, had the highest number of school-related arrests in Florida in the 2011-2012 school year, according to state data. Seventy-one percent of the 1,062 arrests made were for misdemeanor offenses. (more)

Unfortunately, the school board mandated policies came into conflict with law and order. The problem of the conflicted policy -vs- legality worsened over time as the police excused much more than misdemeanor crimes. Over time this culminated in police officers falsifying documents, hiding criminal activity, lying on official police reports and even hiding stolen merchandise police retrieved from high school students.



In 2012 Trayvon Martin was one of those students. –SEE HERE–



It was our initial FOIA requests to the Miami Dade School Police Departmentwhich revealed the secret discipline and diversionary program Trayvon Martin was granted to avoid a criminal record. The School Board and M-DSPD kept trying to hide the issue; they delayed responses and charged us thousands for FOIA information; but we knew this story was huge… so we kept going.



Specifically Trayvon Martin’s criminal conduct was hidden behind school discipline. Stolen jewelry was recorded as random ‘found items’ (the jewelry just intentionally placed in storage with no investigation), Trayvon’s possession of marijuana was similarly obfuscated, and all of the incident reports were intentionally falsified by officials and School Resource Officer, Daryl Dunn, to avoid the Criminal Justice system.






It is all well documented. None of this is supposition. Our research discovered sworn affidavits from the police department HERE. No-one was ever been held to account – it was just too politically dangerous an issue.

SRO Dunn never filed a criminal report, nor opened a criminal investigation, surrounding the stolen jewelry. Instead, and as a result of pressure from M-DSPD Chief Hurley to avoid criminal reports for black male students, Dunn wrote up the jewelry as “found items”, and transferred them, along with the burglary tool, to the Miami-Dade Police property room where they sat on a shelf unassigned to anyone for investigation.



A separate report of “criminal Mischief” (T-08809) was filed for the additional issue of writing “WTF” on a school locker. [It was the search for the marker used to write the graffiti that led to the backpack search].



The school discipline, “suspension”, was attached to the graffiti and not the stolen jewelry.

The connections between the Police Burglary report and the School Report of “found items” were never made because the regular police detective in charge of the Burglary case had no idea the School Police Dept. had filed a “found items” report.
Two differing police departments, and the School Officer, Dunn, intentionally took the criminal element out of the equation – instead preferring “school discipline” and not “criminal adjudication”. (more)

And it wasn’t just Trayvon Martin, there were hundreds of similar actions taken by conflicted School Resource Officers – totaling thousands of crimes over the course of just the first few years of these programs (2010 through 2013).



CTH contacted the Miami-Dade School District, every single school board member, and the Broward County School District – to warn them of what was taking place.
We provided thousands of pages of sworn affidavits and transcribed testimony from law enforcement. We spent several thousand dollars locating, transcribing and assembling the documents and evidence; and hundreds more hours compiling all the information. –SEE HERE– We sent all of it to both school districts and both school superintendents.



Their response: “go away”.



The school board’s in Miami-Dade and Broward County had created a disastrous scheme and it didn’t take long to see where this was going. The scheme was supported by President Obama’s federal education policy, and executive orders –SEE HERE– and people like Jesse Jackson –SEE HERE– In August of 2012 President Obama issuing an “executive order” establishing the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence. Effectively placing “quotas” on school discipline based on race:



View this document on Scribd
Broward County, even went one step further. They stopped arresting students and then changed the policy of suspension. Broward enhanced their program in 2013:

Broward’s Collaborative Agreement on School Discipline was announced in early November. Instead of suspensions, students can now be referred to the PROMISE program, where they receive counseling for several days and then return to school. A host of non-violent misdemeanors no longer require an arrest, though officers can sometimes override that if they feel it is necessary (“I wanted to make sure deputies always had discretion,” says Scott Israel, Broward County’s sheriff). The school district’s Office of Minority Male Achievement reviews data to ensure that punishments for minor infractions and racial disparities are on the decline. (read more)

In 2015 School Superintendent Robert Runcie then began bragging about it.

“Our goal can’t be to have students go into the courtroom,” Runcie said. “Our focus has got to be keep them in the classroom and out of the courtroom.”

Follow a simple timeline: ♦In 2011/2012 Broward County School administration made a policy decision to block the arrests of students in order to improve their education statistics. ♦In 2013 that same school board was warnedwhat was happening as a result of that policy. ♦In 2015 the School doubled-down on the diversionary policies and allowed students to break the law, including physical violence, without legal consequence. ♦In January 2017Nikolas Cruz criminally assaulted someone; again, law enforcement engagement was blocked by policy. ♦A year later in February 2018 Cruz killed seventeen students.


What happens when you stop arresting students for clear criminal conduct and then lessen the school punishment therein?…. You get this:






The Department Of Justice – Civil Rights and School Discipline October 21st 2010

2010 – In recent years, many school districts across the country have begun to adopt strict zero-tolerance discipline policies that impose increasingly harsher punishments for seemingly minor infractions. These disciplinary measures – in-school or out-of-school suspensions, alternative school placements, expulsions, and referrals to police departments and juvenile authorities – disrupt a student’s education and diminish their chances for success.


For too many students, these school-imposed sanctions lead to the criminal justice system, a pathway commonly referred to as the School-to-Prison Pipeline. Regrettably, studies have shown that children of color are disproportionately affected by zero-tolerance policies, a trend that increases already significant disparities. (read more)

2010 – ERIC HOLDER – Never before have our two agencies come together in this way – or brought together such a large and diverse group of partners – to discuss the best ways to ensure that civil rights and educational opportunities are protected for every student, at every level, and in every community…But it is just the beginning of what I know – and I pledge – will be an ongoing conversation about how we can better understand the causes, and most effectively remedy the consequences, of disparities in student discipline. I want to assure all of you that for me, for Secretary Duncan, for the agencies we lead, and for the administration – this work is a top priority.
US DOJ October 2010

Resources:

]


Boward County schools superintendent Robert Runcie


♦2013 Broward County Schools were warned here.
♦2013 Broward County Policies Explained HERE
♦2013 Six School Police Affidavits HERE
♦2013 Example the way the Police Covered-Up Crime HERE
♦2013 President Obama’s Executive Orders HERE
♦2015 Broward County School Superintendent brags about statistical success.
♦2017 Article on the Broward County policy
♦2018 Article on Broward County rethinking policy.


https://theconservativetreehouse.com...heir-mistakes/

Did the Progressive 'Broward County Solution' Cost 17 Student Lives?

February 20, 2018

Jack Cashill

"We're not compromising school safety. We're really saving the lives of kids," boasted Michaelle Valbrun-Pope, executive director of Student Support Initiatives for Broward County Public Schools, in August 2017.

Valbrun-Pope was referring to what an article by Jeffrey Benzing in Public Source calls the "Broward County Solution." As Benzing relates, Broward County used to lead the state of Florida in sending students to the state's juvenile justice system. County leaders responded with a perfectly progressive solution: "lower arrests by not making arrests."
Authorities agreed to treat twelve different misdemeanor offenses as school-related issues, not criminal ones. The results impressed the people who initiated the program. Arrests dropped from more than a thousand in 2011-2012 to less than four hundred just four years later.


One particular motivation behind programs like Broward County's was the pressure from multiple sources to reduce the statistical disparity between black and Hispanic student arrests on one hand and white and Asian student arrests on the other. Benzing writes, for instance, how a Denver organization called "Padres & Jóvenes Unidos" successfully advocated for a program like Broward's to help achieve "racial and education equity" in Denver schools.

By virtue of his name alone, Nikolas de Jesús Cruz, the adopted son of Lynda and Roger Cruz, became a statistical Hispanic. As such, authorities at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland had every reason not to report his troubling and likely criminal behavior to the police.

According to a source who spoke to the Miami Herald, Cruz had been suspendedfrom Stoneman Douglas High for fighting and also for being caught with bullets in his backpack. This was apparently at least one of the reasons why administrators reportedly emailed a warning to teachers against allowing Cruz on the campus with a backpack. He was later expelled for reasons that have not been disclosed, but he was apparently not arrested.

This is not the first time that this "solution" to school crime has produced lethal results. An earlier case in the nearby Miami-Dade County public school system should have been a warning, but unfortunately, the media conspired to suppress the details of the case. The victim in Miami-Dade was one Trayvon Martin.
Miami-Dade schools have their own police department. The exposure of the department's practices began inadvertently with the Miami Herald story on Martin's multiple suspensions. The article prompted M-DPD's police chief to launch a major internal affairs investigation into the possible leak of this information to the Herald.


As the investigation began, the officers realized immediately that they had a problem on their hands. "Oh, God, oh, my God, oh, God," one major reportedly said when first looking at Martin's data. He could see that Martin had been suspended twice already that school year for offenses that should have gotten him arrested. In each case, however, the case file on Martin was fudged to make the crime seem less serious than it was.


As one detective told investigators, the arrest statistics coming out of Martin's school, Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School, had been "quite high," and the detectives "needed to find some way to lower the stats." This directive allegedly came from the police chief. At least a few officers confirmed that the chief was particularly concerned with the arrest rates of minority males in the Miami-Dade system.

In July 2012, the Obama administration formalized the pressure on school districts with an executive order warning school districts to avoid "methods that result in disparate use of disciplinary tools." The White House focused on black students in particular and headlined the press release announcing this dubious stroke of racism "President Obama Signs New Initiative to Improve Educational Outcomes for African Americans."


Like Cruz, Martin was frequently suspended, three times in his final school year. In one case, Martin had been found with stolen jewelry and burglary tools in his backpack. Had he been arrested and not merely suspended, his parents and his teachers would have known how desperately far he had gone astray. Instead, Martin was "diverted" into nothing useful. Just days after his last non-arrest, he was allowed to wander the Retreat at Twin Lakes high and alone, looking, in George Zimmerman's immortal words, "like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something."


The media's larger motive in suppressing the facts of this story was to protect the narrative of innocent black youth killed by white cop wannabe George Zimmerman. A secondary motive was to protect Obama's misbegotten quest to achieve racially statistical "equity" for youthful offenders by not arresting them for very real crimes.


Cruz had to have done something more troubling than carry bullets in his backpack. Before even talking about gun control, Republican leaders should demand a complete audit of Cruz's school records and the rethinking of the "Broward County Solution" wherever it is applied.


https://www.americanthinker.com/arti...7t3rqM.twitter

Trump met with the Broward County Sheriff and now Broward County Sheriff's Deputies will be carrying rifles when patrolling the schools. Robert Runcie, the Broward County School Superintendent is "on board".

"So you best get your mind right about what's got to be done, Charlie." --Robert Duvall, "Open Range"

Next up, some armed personnel at schools.

Next up after that, better locks, better doors, better systems, better procedures.

One of the craziest things about this Parkland School is that they had a lock-down program, but they unlock the doors 20 minutes before the end of class-time. That should never happen. That's how Cruz knew what time to go there and waltz right in. Why would they do that? To accommodate what or whom??!! So sad, such a fatal mistake.