Education Week - January 16, 2019 - 14

Photographs by Josh Ritchie
for Education Week

After Tragedy, Runcie Struggles to Connect
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

this piece of shit working at the school," Pollack
told Stoneman Douglas's principal. "I don't want
to come back tomorrow and see this guy here."
Still, it wasn't the end.
Medina and Taylor were immediately reassigned, then fired at the end of the school year.
Both later challenged their terminations, saying
they acted in accordance with their training and
bear no responsibility for the tragedy.
But a week after they were removed from
Stoneman Douglas, the Sun Sentinel published
another story.
Months before the shooting, Broward schools
detectives had found probable cause that Medina
had sexually harassed two students at the school.
One was Meadow Pollack. Medina reportedly
whispered in the high school senior's ear that she
was "fine as f---."
Though Medina denied the accusations, a dis-

and the Broward sheriff's office showed up. With
search warrants. They wanted the Stoneman
Douglas surveillance footage.
Without the video evidence, Runcie said, his
ability to conduct a meaningful investigation
went out the window.
And now there was also a more pressing problem. To make sure they got all copies of the footage,
the FBI initially demanded the servers that power
the payroll, attendance, and other data systems of
the 271,000-student, 39,000-employee district.
"We had to argue with them, 'Look, you can't
take this,' " Runcie said. "I literally had to get the
governor on the phone."
Tall, soft-spoken, and deeply religious, the
57-year-old superintendent is quick to acknowledge
that anything he's been through pales in comparison to losing a loved one in a school shooting.
It's also true, though, that there's no real way to
prepare for having 14 children and three employees killed on your watch. Or for finding yourself

This was the most
avoidable school
shooting in the
history of the
country, and it
feels like it's still
business as usual."
ANDREW POLLACK
whose daughter Meadow Pollack,
18, was killed at Marjory
Stoneman Douglas High School

trict disciplinary committee had unanimously
recommended he be fired.
Instead, Broward schools' human-resources director had overruled the committee and signed off
on a three-day suspension.
For Andrew Pollack and other parents of Parkland's victims, the revelation was gasoline on an
already-burning fire.
Now, nearly a year after the shooting, the Broward district has received more than 100 notices
of potential lawsuits. Victims' families accuse the
district of sweeping trouble under the rug and
failing to act on years' worth of warning signs
about Cruz. They also blame lax district policies
and poor training for worsening the chaos last
Feb. 14. And the families say Superintendent
Runcie and the Broward County school board
have prioritized protecting the district over getting to the bottom of what went wrong, repeatedly backtracking on promises and showing a
distressing lack of compassion in the process.
"It kills me every day," Pollack said. "This was the
most avoidable school shooting in the history of the
country, and it feels like it's still business as usual."

A Profound Rift
Almost immediately after the shooting at
Stoneman Douglas, Runcie found himself in uncharted waters.
Standing outside Stoneman Douglas on the evening of Feb. 14, the superintendent had granted
an interview to CNN. He vowed the district would
conduct a "thorough investigation."
Forty-eight hours later, Runcie and his team
were hunkered down at the school, managing the
district's round-the-clock crisis response. The FBI
14 | EDUCATION WEEK | January 16, 2019 | www.edweek.org

on the receiving end of the grief and anger that
result. Or for handling the avalanche of problems
that suddenly fall in your lap.
"You can practice all you want. The reality becomes very different," Runcie said. "It absorbs you
and takes over your life."
What's happening now in Broward County isn't
unique. After a school shooting, district leaders'
biggest challenge is often healing the profound rift
that emerges with victims' families. In Santa Fe,
Texas, where a gunman killed 10 and wounded 13
at the local high school last May, parents also accuse district officials of inaction and insensitivity.
As in Parkland, they've turned to political action,
seeking to oust the superintendent and some school
board members.
Just how difficult is it to shepherd a school community through such a time?
Few people understand better than Frank
DeAngelis.
In 1999, when 13 people were gunned down at
Columbine High in Littleton, Colo., DeAngelis was
the school's principal.
He'd started at Columbine two decades earlier,
as a history teacher and baseball coach. He ended
up staying on as the school's principal for 15 years,
helping an entire generation of Littleton families
rebuild their lives.
But it didn't start out that way, DeAngelis said.
For years, he was slammed with criticism and
lawsuits.
"The media was portraying me as this clueless
leader who didn't care about kids. That hurt me
more than anything," he said. "But that's where
the relationships I'd built over 20 years helped.
Parents knew the way I was being portrayed was
not how I am."

In Parkland, Runcie has had no such roots to
anchor him.
He came to Florida in 2011, from Chicago.
His biggest backers are in the Broward business
community, where his economics degree from Harvard and MBA from Northwestern, experience in
the private sector, and work to straighten out the
school district's finances have all earned high marks.
In 2014, Education Week recognized Runcie for his
work in smoothing over what had been acrimonious
relationships between the district and the nearly
100 charter schools operating in Broward County.
"I firmly believe that Superintendent Runcie is
one of the most innovative public school leaders in
the country," said Bob Swindell, the president and
CEO of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance, an
area business-development group. "Anytime I need
to reach out to him, he's incredibly responsive."
Since the shootings, Runcie has tapped that highpowered network for money and help. In the immediate aftermath, for example, the superintendent
made numerous hospital visits with the family of
15-year-old Anthony Borges, who was touch-and-go
after suffering five gunshot wounds on the third
floor of Stoneman Douglas. Upon learning the
Borges family needed help with their bills, Runcie
said, he called a local businessman and got him to
write a $25,000 check on the spot. The superintendent also got a prominent restauranteur to donate
free meals.
But something about such efforts didn't connect.
"About a week after that, I guess [the Borges
family] got an attorney, and I see him on TV blasting me," Runcie said. "You start sometimes secondguessing yourself."
In search of a compass that might guide him
through the volatile emotional terrain, Runcie
drew on his own experience.
When he was 8, he said, he'd watched as his
mother was shot in the face on the porch of their
Poughkeepsie, N.Y., apartment building. That was
in 1969. The family had recently emigrated from
Jamaica, where they'd been living in a cinderblock
shack with no electricity or running water.
The incident doesn't compare to what happened
at Stoneman Douglas, Runcie said. While his
mother survived, no one in the family ever got any
counseling. He wanted Parkland to have better.
"That's one of the reasons why I focused so hard
on making sure we provided as many supports as
we could," he said. "Even if I couldn't meet with everyone directly, at least I had social workers."
The district helped open three "resiliency centers"
in Parkland. Stoneman Douglas got two wellness
centers of its own, plus trauma counselors, new guidance counselors, a new school psychologist, and therapy dogs. Liaisons were appointed to serve as direct
points of contact for the families of injured students.
Runcie also mobilized Broward schools' $4 billion
bureaucracy in other ways.
Since the shooting, for example, Stoneman
Douglas has received new portable classrooms, to
replace the building where the shooting occurred,
which is still being treated as a crime scene. New
security measures throughout the school include
a 12-foot fence, classroom door locks, electronic
building-access cards for staff, surveillance cameras, and stop-the-bleed kits. Stoneman Douglas
this school year has a total of seven new school
police officers, campus monitors, and security specialists. Districtwide upgrades were also made to
all schools' video-surveillance systems. Most Broward schools now have armed officers or guardians. Runcie hired an independent firm to conduct
risk assessments of all 234 schools in the district.
"I would get emails and calls," he said. "Some
people felt like it was too much."
Still, the gulf between the superintendent and
the victims' families kept growing.

Missed Warning Signs
In the weeks following Feb. 14, a fuller picture
of the Parkland massacre-and the voluminous
warning signs that were missed in the months

http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - January 16, 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - January 16, 2019