An audit has found that many Broward County schools were not following the proper procedures for conducting “threat assessments” on students who posed a danger.
After the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting, the school district asked an outside auditing firm to determine whether administrators systemwide were using all of the required forms and completing them properly.
They were not.
Auditors reviewed a sample of 60 threat assessments — out of 642 entered into a district educational management database over three school years beginning in September 2015. The audit did not include names of schools or students or any specifics of the situations.
Among the findings:
— Fourteen cases sampled had no supporting documentation at all.
— Of the 46 that had paperwork, only 16 included records that were “substantially complete.”
— One elementary school evaluation of a “medium-risk” threat was missing 18 required documents.
— Of the samples, no high school conducted a “high-level” threat evaluation properly. One, in fact, did not complete any of the required forms.
The reviewers found “the existing process is extremely paper driven” and recommended that the district turn to an electronic system to improve and streamline the process.
They also concluded that the district had no formal process for follow-up to check that the documents were fully completed or to ensure that the recommended help for a child actually occurred.
The findings largely bolster the concerns of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Public High School Safety Commission, which blasted the ineffective threat assessment process at Stoneman Douglas.
The statewide commission reviewed the paperwork for a September 2016 threat assessment done on Nikolas Cruz — the eventual gunman — and found forms missing or incomplete. The school’s assistant principal, Jeff Morford, was unfamiliar with how to do a threat assessment, and the principal, Ty Thompson, was not engaged in the process or routinely informed of them, the commission reported.
Both men are now under internal investigation.
Generally, threats in Broward Schools range from low to middle to a high-level threat. The greatest threats are those in which the student seems to have a specific target, plan of violence and a means to carry it out.
In 2016, Stoneman Douglas considered Cruz, then 18, a “high-level” threat because he wrote “kill” on a notebook and was obsessed with guns. He met key indicators for aggression and depression.
The district barred him from carrying a backpack and he was forced to withdraw from the school months later. He’s now accused of killing 17 people in the February 2018 massacre.
State law now requires threat assessment teams in every school, but the commission found that they “are not fully developed, and there is a need for consistency, training and overall improvement in the threat assessment process.”
The commission warned: “Currently, there is not a standard threat assessment process in Florida, and there is no automated threat assessment system known to the Commission. The current threat assessment process in Florida is school- or district-specific and there is little to no information sharing as a result of the threat assessment process.”
Broward Schools has a 50-page threat assessment manual for educators.
The process requires teams to be convened to evaluate the threat and complete numerous forms to guide the decision-making and remedy the problem.