Early last month, the Florida Senate signed into a law a new bill (F-SB 7030) that augments last year’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas Act (F-SB 7026) and calls for more rigorous safety measures in Florida schools and more accountability to the state. Major Brian Hester, who oversees St. Lucie Sheriff’s school safety initiatives, says that the county had already begun implementing many of the mandates from last year’s bill long before the new bill was voted on by state legislature.
“Immediately following Parkland, we began putting deputies in the schools and expanding our program. We immediately put together our own committee in this county. It was made of school district personnel, representatives from every law enforcement agency in our county, as well as dispatchers, social services – everybody we felt would need to be represented,” says Hester. Since then, the St. Lucie School District has devoted additional focus to school safety, with a particular emphasis on threat assessment and school hardening. Fifty-five various safety trainings have been conducted throughout the year, and two annual Code Red drills per school have been administered, according to St. Lucie School District Chief Operations Officer Terence O’Leary.
Florida Senate Bill 7030 outlines more stringent protocol for incident reporting throughout and between districts, more attention to mental health services within schools, and extensive training in Code Red active assailant negotiation. Hester says that before Senate Bill 7030, internal and external incident reporting was not so formalized, and this new bill, along with the county’s School Resource Deputy Program, makes sure that fewer students fall between the cracks: “After an incident, the team has to come together and they have to make a report. That report has to be provided to the superintendent, and they have to report to the Office of Safe Schools.”
The new bill has also set the precedent for establishing a state-wide threat assessment database and a state-led hardening and harm mitigation rubric, with which all Florida districts must comply. While the state-run initiatives are currently being developed by FDE’s newly formed Office of Safe Schools, O’Leary says that so far the St. Lucie School District has not only complied with state legislature, but in some cases pre-empted it.
In terms of campus hardening, which can include everything from developing single egress plans for school grounds to updating security cameras and strengthening fences, O’Leary says the district has been proactive in assessing the grounds of the 67 schools that comprise the district. Since 2017, St. Lucie has not only met all state guidelines from a hardening standpoint, but they have also invited local law enforcement to school grounds to conduct their own assessments. O’Leary says that all law enforcement personnel in the county have toured each school and have been familiarized with each school’s emergency plan.
Another requirement of the bill is the employment of advanced “mobile suspicious activity tools” on school campuses. St. Lucie School District currently uses four mobile apps that allow students, teachers and staff to report suspicious activity, including the new Fortify Florida App that was created in response to the Stoneman Douglas Commission last year. In addition, O’Leary says, the district is refining a new app that allows employees to initiate an instantaneous Code Red alert and utilizes real-time integration, geo-fencing, camera feeds and centralized command centers to facilitate on-the-ground communication in the event of an active assailant incident.
Much of Senate Bill 7030 relies on an intimate cooperation between Florida school districts and county sheriff departments. In this as well, St. Lucie has an advantage. Hester says, “After the Parkland incident and the Stoneman Douglas commission was put together, we were so far ahead of the curve on what the requirements were.” The working relationship between the two entities has been so effective, according to Hester, that he has even been asked to speak to several school boards across Florida on their business practices.
The most controversial aspect of the new bill is its treatment of the new Coach Aaron Feis Guardian Program. This program, one of four mandated possibilities for school security, involves a rigorous training and certification of school employees, whereby they are invested with the right to carry arms and “prevent or abate an active assailant incident on a school premises.” This certification does not extend to staff who “exclusively perform classroom duties as classroom teachers.”
Hester says that this Guardian Program is intended for more rural counties that have limited law enforcement resources and funding. Since last year, St. Lucie County has assigned sheriff’s deputies to all schools in its district, and therefore has opted out of the Guardian Program.
On April 23, St. Lucie County taxpayers approved a millage tax increase, which is expected to raise approximately $22 million for the school district. A quarter of these proceeds will fund the employment of sheriff’s deputies as school safety officers, for the next four years. Additionally, the St. Lucie School District has qualified for a $1.4 million Educational Facilities Security Grant from the Florida Department of Education this year which, along with Safe Schools, School District and County Commission allocations, has helped fund several components of safety implementation.
Looking forward, O’Leary says that the school district is right on track for the state’s Aug. 1 deadline, when they will have to provide threat assessment analytics to the state, and an Oct. 1 deadline, by which time they will need to have conducted a safety investigation of their schools using the Florida Safe Schools Assessment Tool.
The school district’s priority is a holistic approach toward school safety, says O’Leary: “We’re really proactive, and we want to make sure that we’re designing infrastructures that meet the security posture we have, but we also understand that we’re talking about schools. We need to make sure that these look like schools, yet have real time intelligence, especially in critical emergencies.”
Written by Adam Laten Willson, correspondent