Free Republic

In mid-February of 2014, two 17-year-old Marjory Stoneman Douglas students assaulted a 14-year-old baseball player near the high school stadium. They kicked the boy, a police report said, held him to the ground and simulated a sexual assault through the teen's clothing with a baseball bat. One of the assailants was Broward Sheriff Scott Israel's son, Brett Israel, according to the incident report. When the attack was reported to authorities, Brett Israel and the other 17-year-old, Anthony Broderick, were not arrested. They were suspended from the Parkland high school for three days based on the school's conclusion that they had...

Sheriff admits Nikolas Cruz was in program that enabled classroom-to-casket pipeline. Florida’s Broward County School District revealed Sunday that Nikolas Cruz, who on February 14 gunned down 17 students and wounded 17 others, was part of the PROMISE program, “Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Intervention, Support, and Education.” The “Obama-era program” replaced a zero-tolerance policy with leniency toward student crime.  As district official Tracy Clark told reporters Sunday, Nikolas Cruz was referred to PROMISE in 2013 after he vandalized a bathroom at Westglades Middle School. The district had previously denied that Cruz was part of the program and called such reports...

Critics have slammed Broward County Public Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie all day amid news that — contrary to Runcie's repeated claims — Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooter Nikolas Cruz was involved in the controversial Promise disciplinary program before becoming a mass killer. Now Runcie is pushing back by blaming scattered record-keeping and insisting he gave the best information he had at the time about Cruz's participation in Promise. In a phone interview with New Times this afternoon, the superintendent said the district keeps student data in multiple systems — sometimes only in paper files, which took time to review....

Broward County schools, after over two months of claiming the opposite, admitted on Sunday that confessed Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz had been referred to the PROMISE Program. The PROMISE Program, an alternative discipline program designed to limit on-campus arrests, has been widely reported as ineffective and corrupt. It has come under intense scrutiny in the weeks since the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, but until Sunday, school officials were still denying that Cruz ever had any connection to that program.

(snip) -- RUSH: Now, expanding on the PROMISE Program that we on this program explained to you yesterday. Here’s the upshot of the PROMISE Program. It was started in Chicago by the current superintendent in the school district in Broward. Robert Runcie was in Chicago. The premise of the PROMISE Program is federal grants. This happened under the Obama administration and Eric Holder. The money came from the Department of Justice. It originated from the premise that the Democrats hold that the prison population is disproportionately minority and African-American because of injustice in America. You have the black population, what,...

RUSH: I want to play some sound bites of President Trump today with the nation’s governors at a working business session with them at the White House. And we have three bites. And in the first one, here is the president saying that if Congress doesn’t ban bump stocks, then he will. THE PRESIDENT: Bump stocks, we’re writing that out, I’m writing that out myself. I don’t care if Congress does it or not. I’m writing it out myself, okay? (applause) You put it into the machine gun category, which is what it is, it becomes essentially a machine gun...

The collaborative agreement, signed by Runcie; Sheriff Scott Israel, now fully embroiled in his agency's failure to get Cruz off the streets; state's attorneys; the president of the Broward chapter of the NAACP; and many others, has the fundamental goal of keeping minority students involved in various "transgressions" away from law enforcement and out of the courts. In one feature of PROMISE, Judge Williams circumvents the criminal justice system by participating in a simulated court hearing called "The Juvenile Justice System of Care," where he encourages the delinquent student to participate in the program rather than risk arrest.With the promise...

Good Morning/Afternoon, MEGAWELCOMEToHumpDayDITTOS!

No one who follows the blogging collective known as the "Conservative Treehouse" will dispute my claim that its most prominent blogger, "Sundance" by name, is America's best reporter. I got to know Sundance doing research for my book on the Trayvon Martin shooting, If I Had a Son. So instrumental was the research of Sundance and his colleagues that I made the "Treepers" the protagonists of the book. Sundance's research into the political dynamics of Martin's Miami-Dade school system led him to expand his research into neighboring Broward County years before the Parkland shooting. We communicated the day after that...

In the aftermath of 17 students and teachers being gunned down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, schools, colleges, and universities are reevaluating campus safety and taking a closer look at their active-shooter protocols. There are questions about how this could have happened when there were so many signs for earlier detection. In a three-part series, we will examine a local well-publicized case involving the University of South Florida where an incident was detected at the Tampa campus but went unreported by the USF police department and how the failure to take appropriate action could have just...

If the FBI and local law enforcement had followed established policy, the Valentine’s Day murder of 17 high-school students by Nikolas Cruz could very well have been stopped. Gaining less media attention, on the other hand, is the role of educational policies in the total failure to protect the students from a known threat.  As the Sun-Sentinel of Florida’s Broward County reports, Nikolas Cruz “kicked doors, cursed at teachers, fought with and threatened classmates and brought a backpack with bullets to school.” In 2014, administrators transferred Cruz to an alternative school for students with “emotional and behavioral disabilities” but...

It doesn’t come as a surprise to find the most appropriate discussion headline behind the Parkland, Florida school shooting did not come from an MSM news article, but rather from a person who understands the origin of the issue. Writer Jack Cashill publishes an article in American Thinker today appropriately titled: “Incompetence Wasn’t The Problem in Broward County“. Mr. Cashill, a person adept at tracing complex issues to their truthful origin, has it entirely correct. Nothing about the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was based on structural incompetence; the horrific event was an entirely predictable outcome of intentionally...

For the last week or so, the entire nation has been talking about gun control — or at least the media has been talking about it. The sudden tsunami of gun control stories, articles, op-eds, and segments is the result of the terrible mass shooting that took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in beautiful Parkland, Florida. Sadly, the focus on gun control has caused the media (and the people who get their news from the media) to miss the far-larger scandal revolving around Douglas High School. First, let me be clear; I’m not talking about the scandal of...

For the last week or so, the entire nation has been talking about gun control — or at least the media has been talking about it. The sudden tsunami of gun control stories, articles, op-eds, and segments is the result of the terrible mass shooting that took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in beautiful Parkland, Florida.Sadly, the focus on gun control has caused the media (and the people who get their news from the media) to miss the far-larger scandal revolving around Douglas High School.First, let me be clear; I’m not talking about the scandal of four police...

Full title of article: Broward County Likely ‘Inspiration’ for Obama School Discipline Policy to Report Fewer Arrests, Suspensions Text of excerpt: The Broward County school district’s adoption of a school discipline policy that was praised by the Obama administration for seeking to reduce the reported number of school suspensions, expulsions, and arrests may have played a role in the fact that Nikolas Cruz remained under the radar until his shooting rampage in Parkland, Florida, on February 14.

Good Morning/Afternoon,MEGARushReadyForMondayAndTheOngoingGunControlDebateDITTOS!