Last Tuesday morning, I dropped my kids off at school and then drove past Hollywood Hills High School, where it looked like every police car in the city was parked around it.
I drove past again later. Still an active scene. Officers everywhere, a helicopter overhead, parents across Stirling Road with their phones out, refreshing for information that hadn’t been released yet while trying to look calm.
It was nothing, thank God. Hollywood Police cleared the campus and reported no credible threats. Hollywood Hills and Stirling Elementary had been locked down after a threat was reported nearby, and detectives said it didn’t appear to have been aimed at either school. Officers went classroom by classroom. Students waited on the athletic fields. Then everyone went back to fifth period.
Warren H. Cohn is the founder and CEO of RocketshipPR and TAIPR. (courtesy, Warren H. Cohn)
It went the same way with another hoax bomb threat to Hollywood Hills High last Thursday.
Both scenarios ended the way you want these to end. But on Tuesday, I keep thinking about the 20 minutes before I knew that.
Hollywood Hills is around the corner from my house. It’s also around the corner from where my own children go to school, and from several other campuses where a few thousand Broward families hand over everything they love at eight in the morning and drive away.
Which brings me to the people we complain about on every other day.
You know who I mean. The officer who makes you wait while the car ahead gets checked when you’re already late. The guard who wants your ID again even though you were there Sunday. The drop-off line that moves at a pace apparently designed by someone who has never had a nine o’clock call.
Of all the places in America where that irritation should give us pause, Broward County ought to top the list. We learned what happens here on Feb. 14, 2018, before I even made my COVID move to Florida.
And here is something most Broward parents may not know. Florida’s school guardian program, the one that puts armed safe-school personnel on campuses across this state, has a formal legal name that almost nobody uses. It is the Chris Hixon, Coach Aaron Feis, and Coach Scott Beigel School Guardian Program.
Chris Hixon was Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ athletic director and a security monitor. Aaron Feis was an assistant football coach and a school security guard. Scott Beigel was a teacher killed while unlocking his classroom to pull students inside.
Two of the three men this state named its school security law after were, in the plainest sense, the guy at the gate. The person you wave to. The person some parent, on some ordinary morning, probably found mildly inconvenient.
I was part of the problem. When my family rejoined our local Jewish Community Center recently, my first instinct at the entrance was impatience with how long it took to get in.
Then I tried something else. I said good morning. I learned their names. I asked how the shift was going. It cost nothing. I have a JCC pass now, and getting in is easier. But the part that matters is that I stopped experiencing the entrance as a delay and started seeing it as several adults standing between my children and something I would rather not name.
Tuesday was also a reminder that this is nobody’s private issue. Hollywood Hills is a public high school, and the threat wasn’t aimed at anyone in particular. Every school in this county now lives with some version of Tuesday morning, and the people doing this work are protecting all of our children, on the same streets, at the same hour.
So, learn their names. Say good morning like you mean it. Don’t make the person at the gate absorb your bad morning. Buy a coffee occasionally, or a cold drink in August, which around here runs April through November. When your district or your PTA asks for security funding, understand exactly what you’re paying for and don’t make them ask twice.
None of that is heroic. It takes four seconds at a car window. But I’ve watched what it does to someone’s face when a parent treats them like a colleague instead of a turnstile.
Tuesday was a scare. The police were extraordinary, the district did what it was supposed to do, and every child went home. Meanwhile, a lot of people we rely on have spent years preparing for the alternative.
I’d rather thank them on a week when the news is good. This county, of all counties, knows why.
Warren H. Cohn is the founder and CEO of the public relations firm RocketshipPR and the AI-powered public-relations tool TAIPR.