Grand jury calls out ‘data manipulation’ in Miami-Dade, Broward school districts

A scathing Florida grand jury interim report released Wednesday said the brazen and continued violation of state laws passed in response to the Parkland shooting was so severe that local school officials needed to be more severely penalized.

“School district noncompliance with state-level laws has been a persistent problem,” the report stated. “It is clear to us that, once our terms end and the threat of public shaming or indictment is no longer on the table, compliance will never be satisfactory.”

The grand jury recommended that tougher penalties could include the withholding of state money, criminal charges and the removal of superintendents, administrators or school board members.

The report asked that the Florida Department of Education be given more resources to investigate whether districts comply with school safety laws passed after the February 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School left 17 people dead and 17 others injured.

The grand jury asserted that the districts are intentionally manipulating data they report to the state, playing games with the requirement that all campuses have armed security and excluding charter schools out of school safety planning, creating “unnecessary chaos.”

It specifically called out Miami-Dade and Broward school districts for manipulating discipline data in the School Environmental Safety Incident Reporting System, known as SESIR.

The report cited the Broward Teachers Union’s school safety and discipline survey of 2019, “where a number of teachers describe reporting SESIR-eligible incidents perpetrated by students in their classrooms to administrators, only to later have those same students returned to their classes without being disciplined at all, or in some cases, after some sort of ‘conference.’ ”

“Even more troubling are the instances where teachers claim to have referred students for discipline, only to be told by administrators to modify their own conduct to curtail the student’s behavior, or worse, to be told that the perpetrator cannot be disciplined because of a disability, and thus, is allowed to remain in class without consequence and continue disrupting the learning environment of the other students,” the report read.

In an emailed response, school district spokeswoman Kathy Koch said the presence of a designation of a disability is only relevant to the disciplinary consequence if the misbehavior is a manifestation of a previously identified disability. If the misbehavior is a manifestation, she wrote, then the consequence may be modified by the student’s Individualized Education Plan but does not result in a student being exempt from disciplinary action.

“BCPS and the BTU are concerned about the teacher concerns raised by survey results and have established a joint task force to review and address these concerns,” Koch said.

She added that BTU’s survey is a compilation of anecdotal information but without names or dates, is “impossible” to track or verify the information or tie it to any specific behavioral incident. “It is therefore unable to establish any relationship with SESIR-eligible, or other, disciplinary actions,” she wrote.

Why did fighting numbers plummet in Miami-Dade?

The report went on to call out Miami-Dade for data manipulation at the district level. It cited that more than 5,000 fights were reported in Miami-Dade schools in the 2014-15 school year, but that number went down to 311 in the 2015-16 school year. WLRN pointed that out in a 2017 series titled “How Miami-Dade Schools Made Thousands of Fights Disappear.”

“What innovative program did the district adopt to resolve this issue? Counseling? Group therapy? Improved disciplinary measures for students involved in physical altercations? No,” the report read. “The district instead chose to modify its own interpretation of what kinds of physical altercations qualified as ‘fighting’ for the purposes of SESIR reporting.”

Miami-Dade’s disciplinary figures have been called into question several times over the past few years. The Stoneman Douglas commission singled out the district when it publicly doubted that zero physical attacks took place anywhere in Miami-Dade in 2017-18 while a single elementary school in Gainesville had 11. State Sen. Lauren Book, D-Plantation, pointed out at a Senate committee meeting that the district reported no homicides for the 2009-10 school year when a student was stabbed to death at Coral Gables Senior High.

Miami-Dade reported 540 fights in the 2017-18 school year, the latest year of data available. Broward reported 2,695 that same year.

The grand jury followed those findings with a warning. It cautioned school officials and reminded law enforcement that attempts by anyone to obstruct the reporting of criminal activity — done with the intent to impair a current or even an imminent law enforcement investigation — is a crime and should be treated as such.

“This Grand Jury will not hesitate to indict school officials for evidence tampering or obstruction based on their efforts to quash law enforcement investigations of SESIR incidents if sufficient evidence of this conduct is placed before us,” it read.

The Miami-Dade school district responded with a written statement that it followed the Florida Department of Education’s definition of “fighting.” The district’s chief operating officer, Valtena Brown, explained in a 2017 op-ed that the district over-reported incidents of fighting that did not lead to rendering first aid or an adult getting physically involved, triggering the state’s definition of fighting.

“The Report’s characterization of our school district’s reporting as some form of data manipulation is, unfortunately, mistaken,” spokeswoman Daisy Gonzalez-Diego wrote in a statement. “The District uses the same definitions prescribed by the State.”

According to the statement, the school district is also preparing a response to be sent to the grand jury to “address several mistakes and incorrect characterizations” in its report.

Some of the grand jury’s findings

▪ Districts are becoming “experts at data manipulation” to avoid telling the state the accurate number of incidents of crime, violent or disruptive behaviors on school campuses or at school events. The grand jury said districts are intentionally under-reporting incidents on campus to save face, using Broward and Miami-Dade as examples. “After all, the data is public, and the people ultimately in charge of the school districts directly benefit from maintaining ... an impression of safety.” To deal with that, “this grand jury will not hesitate to indict school officials for evidence tampering or obstruction.”

▪ A program created by the Legislature, which allows school staff to be armed on campus after being screened and trained by law enforcement, is “widely misunderstood.” The so-called “Guardian” program’s “potential life-saving benefits ... greatly outweigh the risks,” and more districts should take advantage of it, rather than opting to use solely sworn law enforcement officers who pose greater staffing challenges.

▪ Charter schools, which are publicly funded but operated privately, are often not in compliance with the law that requires armed security on every campus. Already, the post-Parkland commission had revealed that in the first week of this school year, a third of Broward County’s charter schools did not have a long-term agreement in place for armed security. “It appears many school districts have taken the position that charter schools are somehow outside their governance,” but it is their job to ensure schools have this protection, or revoke the schools’ charters.

▪ Radio communications for first responders, despite being a well-known contributor to the failures of the Parkland shooting, are still suffering “large-scale deficiencies” because of “squabbling” between local and regional government entities. Additionally, some newly constructed schools have been approved for use despite the fact that their construction is such that emergency radios do not work indoors — a fact that the grand jury called “inexcusable.” School districts should be “stripped of their authority to inspect their own construction.”

▪ Having only one security staffer who is armed is not enough for each campus, as is currently outlined in state law. Florida should develop a formula that accounts for “the size of a school’s campus, its location and the composition of its student body” to calculate minimum number of armed staff required (currently, they can be either law enforcement or armed school staff).

While most of these issues are not new to the policymakers who’ve closely studied the failures and fallout of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the grand jury’s emphasis on these specific areas will undoubtedly bring new pressures to school districts. Its recommendations will likely also materialize into bills, as state lawmakers head into the 2020 session in January.

Book, who is on the post-Parkland commission that has closely studied the tragedy, said districts think they are “being cute” by finding technical run-arounds to avoid compliance.

“They’re doing what is convenient for the districts, saying, ‘Let’s do it on the cheap,’ ” she said. “When you do it on the cheap, kids end up dead.”

Other than a few references to Broward, where Parkland is located, and Miami-Dade, the grand jury report didn’t mention which individual districts were making the violations.

Grand jury meetings are not open to the public and the members are kept secret. This grand jury was convened by Gov. Ron DeSantis in February 2019, and was given a broad mandate to investigate districts’ compliance statewide and issue any relevant indictments. This was its second interim report; its term expires after one year.

This story was originally published December 12, 2019 at 5:46 PM.