By Jay Waagmeester, The Florida Phoenix<\/p>\n
High school students headed to college will have their disciplinary records transferred to the institution they attend, a policy prompted by the Legislature\u2019s post-Florida State University shootings\u00a0higher education safety package.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The provision was part of\u00a0HB 757, a package designed to prevent another tragedy such as the campus shootings at FSU in 2025, when two people were killed and more were injured. Most notably, that package arms trained college and university faculty.<\/p>\n
Wednesday, the Florida Board of Education adopted a provision requiring the records transfer into administrative policy.<\/p>\n
Under the language approved, when a student enrolls in a postsecondary institution, his or her school district must transfer disciplinary records for the student to the college. Those records include\u00a0\u201cverified reports of serious or recurrent behavior patterns, including all documentation and related information for reports of concerning behavior, concerning communication, or threats that are documented.\u201d<\/p>\n
Also, the report should include any \u201cpsychological evaluations, including therapeutic treatment plans and therapy progress notes created or maintained by district or charter school staff.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis builds on the system that we\u2019ve developed over the past two or three years of providing a portal for our districts to be able to keep track of threats that are posed to the schools, and it just makes sense to be able to share that information more easily with other districts, because we have kids that move,\u201d Board of Education Chair Ryan Petty said Wednesday at a meeting in Orlando.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Petty\u2019s daughter, Alaina, was killed in the Parkland shootings in 2018. Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed Petty to the board following the 2018 mass shooting and he commonly advocates for school safety.\u00a0<\/p>\n
State law already\u00a0required\u00a0threat assessments to be transferred with a student from K-12 school to K-12 school.<\/p>\n
Board member Layla Collins asked questions about the sequence of college applications and forwarding the behavior reports to the university. She voiced concern about keeping students safe from other students with intent to harm while balancing the unintended implications of forwarding a student\u2019s juvenile record into his or her adult life as a college student.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Petty said the process is not meant to be \u201cpunitive,\u201d but to \u201caddress the concerns or the grievances the student may have that\u2019s causing them to think or plan some sort of violent activity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Petty conceded: \u201cI can\u2019t sit before you right now and say that a college that got this information couldn\u2019t use that in some punitive way; perhaps they could. Maybe it could be a condition of admittance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Collins, a former military counterintelligence agent, said she is \u201call for the security aspect\u201d but that the board might want to revisit the topic as it pertains to data collection.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom my perspective as someone that was a collector that understands how things change, and perspective and so much is subjective, that at some point we say, \u2018We might need to revisit that break between childhood and adulthood,\u2019 to ensure that our students are not penalized for a rough patch that they had,\u201d Collins said, offering a hypothetical of a young girl making comments about self harm affecting her as a college student.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Jay Waagmeester, The Florida Phoenix High school students headed to college will have their disciplinary records transferred…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":37498,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[232,234,233],"class_list":["post-349796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tallahassee","tag-tallahassee","tag-tallahassee-headlines","tag-tallahassee-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}