What Did YOU Learn Today? (not earn, LEARN)

Donald J. Trump:

There is nothing that I would want more for our Country than true FREEDOM OF THE PRESS. The fact is that the Press is FREE to write and say anything it wants, but much of what it says is FAKE NEWS, pushing a political agenda or just plain trying to hurt people. HONESTY WINS!

Part of the trouble with today's press is that it's no longer a working-man's trade. It's an elitist job, often filled by celebrity types, or the offspring of the wealthy. They simply do not have the work experiences to understand our shared world, so they cover fluff...

Is Omarosa even a B-list celebrity? I thought once you had fallen to a Big-Brother reality type career, you were no longer taken seriously. I don't think anyone really wants to read Omarosa's "book". But that's considered newsy today, so it seems, all the "reporters" are on it... Sad.

Take a tip from a real reader?
This is a national news story. People need to know facts like these. What we really need from our free press today, is honesty, not advocacy. If we want to help our shared society, we have to value intelligence more, and listen to our cerebral leaders, not our celebs, our opinion-makers, or our commercial-click industry.

Schools' culture of tolerance lets students like Nikolas Cruz slide

by Megan O'Matz and Scott Travis, Reporters
Sun Sentinel

Broward Schools have grown so tolerant of misbehavior that students like Nikolas Cruz are able to slide by for years without strict punishment for conduct that could be criminal.

The culture of leniency allows 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, according to records and interviews with people familiar with the process.

Cruz was suspended at least 67 days over less than a year and a half at Westglades Middle School, and his problems continued at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, until he finally was forced to leave.

The South Florida Sun Sentinel obtained Cruz’s discipline records, reviewed discipline policies and found:

-- 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.

The forgiving attitude goes beyond the schools’ controversial Promise program, the target of considerable public scrutiny for enabling students to avoid criminal charges for misdemeanor offenses.

Desmond Blackburn, then Broward’s chief school performance and accountability officer, specifically instructed teachers and staff in a video years ago to challenge and nurture students, while using suspensions, expulsions and arrests as “absolute last resorts.”

Now, many teachers and parents say Broward has created a culture in which teachers are expressly told or subtly pressured not to send students to the administration for punishment so a school’s image is not tarnished.

Mary Fitzgerald taught for 37 years in the district before retiring from Sunrise Middle in Fort Lauderdale in 2016. She said she retired a year early due to her concerns about student discipline.

“It was so many things. I had three students bring knives to my classroom. One was out of the classroom for one day. Another had so many things on his record, he was gone for five days. None were expelled.”

Safety concerns at Sunrise were brought up at faculty meetings. “The message out there is that the students are untouchable. Habitual negative behavior means nothing anymore,” state the minutes of a Faculty Council meeting on Feb. 2, 2015.

“My principal basically would tell me it was his job to market the school. He was adamant about not looking bad,” Fitzgerald said.

Runcie, in an interview with the Sun Sentinel, acknowledged there are complaints that discipline isn’t consistently enforced.

In a memo to principals Wednesday, Runcie said he reinforced that “we have to be vigilant in reporting every incident so that we can ensure our students who are victims, as well as offenders, get the appropriate intervention and support.

“We’re going to try to make sure, from the top, we’re sending the right message related to discipline and holding our schools accountable,” he said.

The superintendent said in the memo that he will propose the School Board create a Climate and Discipline Department to “better monitor and support school teams as they address students with major challenges and concerns.”

The Pine Ridge Education Center, just outside Fort Lauderdale, houses the Promise program, as well as secure classrooms for other children who have been expelled from their regular school but need supervision and guidance.

The principal describes it as a “school of promise and encouragement, not a school of punishment.”

Students call it the “Zap School,” as in you’ve been “zapped” and sent there as punishment.

Runcie claims the Promise program has a 90 percent success rate at keeping children from re-offending, but that statistic can be deceiving.

A student can commit a subsequent infraction without being considered a repeat offender, as long as it’s not the exact same violation, in the exact same year.

The following year, they start with a clean slate.

“It’s extremely problematic,” said Tim Sternberg, a former assistant principal at Pine Ridge Educational Center who administered the Promise program. “You can develop a psyche that it is OK to commit crime because you can refresh the clock every year.”

Sternberg says he doesn’t have confidence in the district’s data. “They aren’t tracking kids over time.”

Asked about kids starting each year anew, without marks against them from prior semesters, Runcie told the Sun Sentinel he will review it.

“We’ll make whatever adjustments we need to. We review the discipline policy every year and have made some adjustments and continue to take feedback.”

The district’s Student Code of Conduct, first created in 2004-05, includes a complicated discipline “matrix” that lists the prescribed punishment for a litany of offenses: skipping school, violating rules, being disruptive, having drugs, fighting, destroying property, committing a crime.

It was designed to help staff make fairer and more equitable decisions in handing out penalties. But potential punishments have become more lenient over the years.

More than five years ago, a high school student who used profanity toward a staff member would receive a three- to 10-day suspension. That was reduced to one to two days after the discipline chart was revised.

The first violation for disruptive classroom behavior called for an in-school suspension of one to five days. Later, it was reduced to a suspension of under one day.

Since the 2012-13 school year, suspensions have declined 27 percent, according to the Florida Department of Education. Incidents reported to law enforcement have fallen 8 percent. The number of arrests per 1,000 students: down 64 percent.

The district’s menu of choices for dealing with rule-breaking students include detention, internal suspension, out-of-school suspension and expulsion, where children can be sent to an alternative education center.

Or another option: the Promise program.

Runcie is proud and protective of the program, which was launched under his leadership in November 2013 when the Broward Sheriff’s Office, the Public Defender's Office, the NAACP, the state Department of Juvenile Justice and the State Attorney signed an agreement to reduce school-based arrests.

But the program is under attack because of widespread allegations that Cruz, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooter, benefited from it.

Runcie had insisted that Cruz was not in the Promise program, but he did an abrupt shift this week and said Cruz had been referred to it in 2013 for vandalizing a bathroom. Cruz did not complete the three-day stint, the district said, but administrators haven’t said why.

A couple of months later, he was sent to a special school for children with severe emotional and behavioral disorders. As a tot, he was found to be developmentally delayed and had been considered a special needs child in school, entitled to certain services and protections under law.

Some parents and community leaders have criticized the superintendent for misleading the public about Cruz, and the school district appears not to be able to make sense of all of the records it has on him.

“To me, it’s an indication that the various discipline programs in place at the district are confusing, poorly implemented and executed, and clearly if we take the district at its statement, they’ve been difficult to track,” said Ryan Petty, whose daughter Alaina was one of 17 people shot to death in Cruz’s Valentine’s Day massacre. “If the records are this difficult to find, clearly it would be difficult to know whether this is helping students or not.”

Despite Cruz’s history of discipline problems, neither the schools nor police ever steered him to the justice system.

A video on social media shows him with a bullet at school. Police reports have him batting his elderly mother with a vacuum hose, destroying property and pulling a gun on her and his brother.

On Feb. 5, 2016, the Broward Sheriff’s Office got an anonymous call that Cruz posted on Instagram that he “planned to shoot up the school.” He was never disciplined or charged, even though it’s a felony in Florida for someone to threaten to “discharge any destructive device” with the intent to harm someone.

Jeff Bell, president of the Broward Sheriff's Office Deputies Association, said the district’s more-tolerant culture has taken much of the discretion away from deputies on whether to make an arrest.

“No officer wants to fill up jail cells with juvenile offenders, but they need that discretion to give warnings and second chances or if the child is completely out of control, you can arrest them.”

Runcie disputes that the discipline matrix is too soft on kids.

“In many ways, it’s tougher because it calls for mandatory types of interventions,” he said. For example, it used to be that a student suspended for vandalism would be sitting at home or wandering the streets, he said. Now they are assigned to an intense program through Promise to help correct their behavior

But Fitzgerald, the former Sunrise Middle school teacher, thinks discipline has become lax.

“A lot of principals are afraid,” she said. “You don’t report theft because reporting it makes your school look dangerous.

“There are a lot of things going on in the school that are being overlooked. Only when things are obvious and egregious will they arrest the child.”

Go to the story to read the 4-page chart of Nicholas Cruz' disciplinary infractions imposed from the beginning of his school years. How did these intrepid reporters find such facts? They simply took the redacted reports given to them by the school district, and did a simple copy and paste to reveal the text underneath. Smart reporters, right?

The judge, and the school board, think otherwise.* But these facts are important. Learning how schools can deal with violent, mentally ill children -- providing them with a public education -- while also protecting the children who are in school to learn, in a safe space, is so important.

As a healthy society, we can pretend the answer is as easy as... repealing the 2nd Amendment and taking guns away from law-abiding others. Both of which have been "seriously" suggested by media elites. But when we look closer at the perfect storm that produced Nicholas Cruz (wealth to purchase weapons, elderly parents who did not have the ability to parent because of their ages and health conditions/ deaths; no discipline in the home or school; no justice-system involvement), we need to find honest answers on what should have been done differently for this poor rich child.

Because, if your eyes are open and you follow your own local school district disciplinary-reporting practices, it seems we will be seeing plenty more Nicholas Cruz's in the future. Let's learn from past facts...

Sure beats reading Omarosa's new book, and losing a few brain cells in the process, no?
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* Threats will not work: Sun Sentinel editor to School Board

by Rafael Olmeda, Reporter
Sun Sentinel

The South Florida Sun Sentinel did not violate a court order by releasing confidential information about Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz, attorneys for the news organization said in court papers filed Friday.

If Cruz’s privacy rights were violated, it was by the Broward school district, which failed to properly shield the information contained in a report that was released last Friday, the newspaper argued.

The Broward School Board wants the Sun Sentinel and reporters Paula McMahon and Brittany Wallman held in contempt for reporting on the full contents of the report.

“The school board’s attempts to threaten the Sun Sentinel and keep it from reporting on its missteps with the Parkland shooter will not work,” said Sun Sentinel Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. “We are committed to digging into all aspects of this tragedy and the issues it raises for our community. We believe that a well informed public will find solutions. That is what drives our newsroom.”

The school board commissioned the report in the wake of the Feb. 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Cruz is charged with 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder, and the report was intended to examine his education record to determine what school officials could have and should have known ahead of time about the risk he posed.

Education records are shielded from release under Florida’s public records law, so when the school district posted the report on its website, close to two-thirds of it was blacked out in compliance with a civil court order.

McMahon and Wallman learned that the hidden information could be obtained by copying the report and pasting it into another file.

The information that was supposed to remain private included revelations that:

-- School officials didn’t properly advise Cruz of his legal options when he was faced with removal from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School his junior year, leading him to give up special education services.

-- When Cruz failed to file the required written rejection of special education services, school officials nudged him, writing it up for him to sign.

-- The district “did not follow through” on Cruz’s subsequent request to return to the therapeutic environment of Cross Creek School for special education students.

In part because of the district’s mistakes, Cruz had no school counseling or other special education services in the 14 months leading up to the shooting.

“In a rush to deflect from its own negligence in publicly disclosing the … report at issue in a wholly unsecured format,” Sun Sentinel attorney Dana McElroy wrote, “the School Board now seeks to have this Court find the Sun Sentinel in contempt for exercising their First Amendment rights to truthfully report on a matter of the highest public concern.”

McElroy argued the journalists obtained the full report legally and were not restricted from reporting on its contents.

The school district sent an e-mail to the reporters and their editors Monday demanding the removal of articles and links to the information from SunSentinel.com and warning them not to publish further reporting on the contents.

The school district did not reply to a request for comment Friday afternoon.

Media attorney Tom Julin, who is not involved in the case but has represented the Miami Herald in court, said the school district is out of line.

“The judge’s ruling applied to the school board,” he said. “The judge never ordered the Sun Sentinel not to release information provided by the school board.”

McElroy’s response to the contempt motion asks the court to find the school district in violation of a state law that forbids public agencies from punishing people and organizations for exercising their first amendment rights by filing motions that have no legal merit.

As a document-review attorney, you learn how to redact, and also, how to find information that really hasn't been effectively redacted. I wonder how many elite reporters know how to manipulate, or even request, such documents to learn facts necessary to build, or destroy, a case? Perhaps cross-training is not just an athletic thing, but might benefit our shared society if we practice true diversity and inclusion in our hiring practices?

Good work Sentinel reporters... I learned something from your work today.