By Tom St. Myer
Valentine’s Day 2018 started on a positive note for Max Schachter. He said goodbye to his kids as they headed off to their Parkland schools and he and his wife enjoyed a romantic lunch. Later that afternoon, though, his world crumbled apart.
First, notifications on his Marjory Stone Douglas High School band app began pouring in about a shooting at the school. Two of his sons, senior Ryan and freshman Alex, attended the school and Schachter drove to the campus only to be stopped by gridlocked traffic in what he described as a “chaotic” scene. He parked in a roundabout and began walking to the school.
Law enforcement stopped him from entering the school and he started to walk back to his car until his wife called, screaming and crying. A classmate of Alex’s called her and told her he had been shot. Schachter raced back to the school, but a deputy stopped him from entering. Schachter explained the situation, but the deputy told him not to worry that all the injured people had been taken to the hospital.
Schachter rushed to the hospital and a nurse told him not to worry that she would find his son. Thirty minutes passed before the nurse returned telling him she found Alex in the emergency room. She took him to the room, but the bed was empty. He soon discovered that the hospital confused his Alex for another Alex who had also been shot. Schachter then headed to the Marriott where hysterical, sobbing families of missing children gathered in the conference room.
At 2 a.m., nearly 12 hours after the shooting and seven hours after Schachter arrived at the Marriott, he finally learned that Alex was one of 17 people killed in the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in U.S. history.
“It was so excruciatingly painful,” said Schachter who founded Safe Schools for Alex, a nonprofit that provides school safety best practices and resources to students, parents, school districts and law enforcement. “I just wanted to know if I was going to see my little boy again. Don’t make people wait seven hours.”
Schachter shared the tragic story with Escambia County Public Schools administrators and campus security officers during a riveting two-hour presentation Friday at the J.E. Hall Center. He described in detail the countless mistakes made by school administrators and law enforcement that permitted Nikolas Cruz to walk into the school with an AR-15 rifle, open fire and walk out unnoticed after killing 17 and injuring another 17 people.
All the signs were there that Cruz, known as “crazy boy,” was dangerous. He had over 55 disciplinary incidents at school and law enforcement had been to his house over 40 times. Cruz posted on social media his intentions to kill people. The Broward County Sheriff’s Office and FBI received multiple tips for two years that Cruz planned to kill people, but the agencies ignored the warnings.
Ineptitude by law enforcement continued the day of the mass shooting. Broward County school resource officer Scot Peterson refused to enter the building. Three Broward County Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the scene but did not enter the building either. Schachter played a clip during his presentation that showed a deputy telling another to wait for him while he put on his gear.
“Our past is both a history lesson and a fortune teller,” Schachter said. “Understand failures in Parkland so this never happens again.”
Schachter commended Florida lawmakers for their actions in the wake of the Parkland shooting. Nine bills addressing school safety have passed since the shooting including a new law that requires entry points and classroom doors in public schools be locked unless a staff member is guarding them.
Florida now leads the nation in school specialists. State funds are granted to participating Sheriff’s offices to cover the screening and training costs for each school district or charter school guardian. The Escambia County Sheriff’s Office has trained about 40 campus security officers for the upcoming school year. Nearly all of them showed up for Friday’s presentation wearing black vests with the word “Guardian” etched in yellow letters.
Kyle Kinser, director of protection services for the school district, underscored the importance of campus security officers when he said, “Administrators documented almost 400 cases of threat management last year from January to May and 20 of those being high-level cases that if we didn’t do something, something would have happened.”
Guardians receive the same training as the sheriff’s deputies in responding to active assailants. They are usually retired law enforcement and military that the school district primarily stations at elementary schools.
“We’re required to have a safe school officer at every school, so we’re really focused on middle schools and high schools having resource officers to deal with some of these criminal behaviors but also to protect the schools,” Kinser said. “Our elementary levels, we’re not dealing with as many criminal activities, we’re really dealing with the protection of our schools so that’s really where the guardians step in.”
Brentwood Elementary Principal Jennifer Sewell described the guardian at her school as “fantastic” and “highly trained.”
“He takes his job very seriously and he doesn’t let down his guard,” she said.
After listening to the presentation by Schachter, West Florida High School Principal Esi Shannon said she feels reassured about the threat response training she and her staff have received and she is grateful the school district employs mental health counselors at the high schools. She said the mental health counselors allow the schools to be proactive in making sure threats are documented and that they can provide students with the help they need. She said another takeaway from the presentation was to emphasize to students, faculty and staff the importance of reporting any suspicious activity and to take all reports seriously.
“There were so many signs,” Shannon said, “and if someone had taken the time to report it, and not just to report it, but follow through it could have made all the difference.”