Broward County, Florida, Schools Lockdown

According to Reuters.com, reporting from a radio station in Broward County, Florida, a county-wide school and education center lockdown was imposed due to a shooting threat. All facilities were locked, restricting anyone from entering or leaving. Captain Dan Rakofsky of the Pembroke Pines police department said when a woman reported that her husband threatened to enter a school and begin shooting, the information was taken very seriously. Extra officers were called in and dispatched throughout the county to maintain the safety of the students, teachers and administrators.

Over the years, as the parent of a student who attended Jim Bailey Middle School and Escambia High School in Pensacola, Florida, my child had to sit through several lockdowns in Escambia County schools. The experiences were quite distressing, but I commend the school administrative team for their efforts to guarantee the safety of our children and teachers.

The first episode began when a group of badly behaved students decided they did not want to stay in school. They used their cell phone to place a call to the school secretary or administrator with a bomb threat. The threat was not taken lightly. Within minutes, the sheriff's department and the county school board had been alerted of the call. Bomb experts were notified and all students were removed from the school onto a football field. The school was searched. Bomb-sniffing dogs were used to sniff out explosives and all resources were used to determine if there was any danger.

After it was determined there was no problem, the children were returned to their classrooms and everything was back to normal. However, the cell phone used to make the call was located, along with the children who placed the call. After a few weeks, the students were expelled.

The situation did not die down. From this one event, a series of bomb threats occurred. Over the next months on into a few years, the episode played out over and over again. Rather than our children going to school and learning, each day we found our educational system disrupted due to students who clearly wanted nothing to do with the learning process. Instead, there were some who wanted only to entertain themselves by interrupting others. Weeks of education and vital information were lost in the process. Students who wanted to learn became discouraged because, rather than being in class, they never knew when the alarm would sound and they would be ushered onto the football field or sent home.

Parents would send their students to school with cell phones, which were against the rules. However, when you had a student with medical problems sitting out on bleachers in the cool or cold rainy weather, what else could you do?! I, for one, would pick my child up during these episodes and wait for the okay for the students to return to class.

I felt it a necessary evil, however, I felt there had to be something drastic done to prevent students from such actions. After the disciplinary actions taken became such that it was a no-excuse-accepted penalty, the bomb threats came to a halt. In other words, when the person making the call was discovered, that student was expelled with no exceptions and charges were placed against the child and the parent, the threats stopped.

Sources:

Pembroke County School Lockdown