The Daily Signal - #397: 1 Year After Parkland Massacre, School Board Still Failing

Episode Date: February 12, 2019

It’s been a year since the tragic school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that took the lives of 17 people. Today, we spoke with Kenneth Preston, a student journalist from Broward County who helped shine light on the corruption in that school district after the shooting. We ask him about what's changed, and what hasn't, since that fateful day. Listen below or read the transcript a little bit further down.We also cover these stories:-Mexican drug lord El Chapo is convicted in U.S. court. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz says, why not use his money to build the wall?-Mitch McConnell calls Democrats' bluff by arranging a vote on the radical Green New Deal.-The accuser of Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax speaks out.-National debt tops $22 trillion.-A zoo in Texas wants to help you celebrate Valentine’s Day in perhaps the oddest way possible.The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, February 14th. I'm Rachel Del Judas. And I'm Daniel Davis. It's been a year since the tragic shooting in Parkland, Florida that took the lives of 17 people. Today we'll talk to Kenneth Preston, a student journalist from Broward County, Florida, who helped shine light on the corruption in that school district after the shooting. We'll talk to him about all that's changed since that faithful day. Plus, a zoo in Texas wants to help you celebrate Valentine's Day in perhaps the oddest way possible.

We'll discuss. But first, we'll cover a few of the top headlines. Well, Mexico's notorious drug lord El Chapo was convicted on 10 criminal counts on Tuesday in a Brooklyn court. He's expected to face life in prison. The trial took three months, and by the end of it, the jury found him guilty of leading his drug cartel in a continuing criminal enterprise that carries a mandatory life sentence. U.S. officials promised Mexico that they would not seek the death penalty. El Chapo and his cartel made billions for years by smuggling cocaine, heroin, meth, and marijuana into the United States. He had actually been captured before and managed to escape a maximum security prison on two occasions.

The Mexican government then recaptured him and extraded him to the U.S. in 2017. Texas Senator Ted Cruz wants to pass a bill to make Mexican drug lord El Chapo and other drug lords pay for President Donald Trump's border wall with Mexico. Cruz tweeted Tuesday, quote, America's justice system prevailed today in convicting Joaquin Guzman Laura, also known as El Chapo, on all 10 counts. U.S. prosecutors are seeking $14 billion in drug profits and other assets from El Chapo, which should go towards funding our wall to hashtag secure the border. It's time to pass the El Chapo Act.

I urge my Senate colleagues to take swift action on this crucial legislation, he added. Here's what Cruz had to say about his. legislation. That said the total value of El Chapo's global criminal net worth was $14 billion. That's a whole lot of money. The same time, I saw articles that said the cost to build a wall along the entire border was between $14 and $20 billion. Now, there's a natural and elegant symmetry there. What the El Chapo Act does is real simple. It takes the money, the billions that El Chapo made, crossing the border illegally, and it takes that 14 billion and it uses it to pay for the wall. And the end result is we have the wall and we have an essential element to secure the border.

And critically, not one penny comes from the U.S. taxpayers. Well, some high-profile Democrats are pushing for what they call the Green New Deal. That plan includes some pie-in-the-sky ideas like, you know, getting rid of coal and oil in the next 10 years. Well, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is asking Democrats to put their money where their mouth is. He announced that he's scheduling a vote on the package, giving Democrats a chance to put themselves on the record. But Senator Ed Markey, the main Senate sponsor of the bill, said this was a Republican trick. He tweeted out, quote, don't let Mitch McConnell fool you. This is nothing but an attempt to sabotage the movement.

we are building. He wants to silence your voice so Republicans don't have to explain why they are climate change deniers. But Connell wants this to be the end. This is just the beginning, end quote. The first woman who accused Virginia lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax of sexual assault spoke at a symposium held at Stanford University Tuesday night and addressed sexual misconduct and the Me Too movement without naming Fairfax specifically. Vanessa Tyson said, quote, when women and survivors start competing, pairing notes, that's when the light bulb goes off. This has been happening to everybody. That's the most important part of hashtag Me Too. Vanessa Tyson also mentioned her respect for

Christine Blazy Ford's testimony. Ford accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as sexually assaulting her, although Ford's accusation was never corroborated. Tyson said, quote, As she shook, we shook with her. As she told her story, we felt the pain she so vividly demonstrated. End quote. Well, the U.S. national debt reached a new high on Tuesday, topping $22 trillion, according to the Treasury Department. In just the past 11 months, the country has added another trillion dollars to the national

debt, and there's no sign of it slowing down. Leaders of the nonpartisan group campaigned to fix the debt, Judd Gregg and Edward Rindle, said it's another sad reminder of the inexcusable tab our nation's leaders continue to run up and will leave for the next generation. Well, apparently Panera Bread is learning that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Panera Bread has shuttered the last of its ideologically driven pay-what-you-want restaurants, PJ Media announced in an article. The socialist-tinged ventures were called Panera Cares,

and the higher-ups have finally figured out that caring is not synonymous with viable business model. On February 15th, the final Panera Cares, located in Boston, will close. It's too bad. I didn't even know about Panera cares. I would have gone there all the time. I didn't either. Pay 50 cents. Yeah. I had no idea that was a thing and I never was aware that I don't even think we had any around here. Coming from Ohio, I wasn't aware of any Ohio either. Up next we're going to talk to Kenneth Preston, who is a student journalist who covered some of the fallout from the Broward County School shooting last year. Want to get up to speed about the Supreme Court? Then subscribe to SCOTUS 101, a podcast about everything that's happening at the Supreme Court. and what the justices are up to.

Well, today marks one year since the horrific high school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Joining us now by phone is Kenneth Preston. He's a student journalist who helped expose incompetence and corruption in the Broward County School District in the weeks after last year's shooting. Kenneth, thanks for being back on the podcast. Happy to be here. And, of course, some of our listeners might recall that we had you on the podcast last year. Give us a sense of the atmosphere now in the park,

community as we hit this one year anniversary and any new developments that are noteworthy. So it's just as last year, pretty divisive, if not more divisive down here. Unfortunately, where this shooting could have been an opportunity to unite us in a lot of ways, it's divided the community over politics, over our elected officials. So, you know, obviously our sheriff was removed, but most of the families and students actually supported that decision. So we're getting some common ground here. And moving forward, today the governor is actually intended to announce that the school board and the private school district are going to come under a grand jury investigation. So we're getting accountability a year later. It's taken quite a long

time, but slowly but surely it's coming together. Well, Kenneth, after the shooting, you investigated your school's policies and found, among other things, that the Broward School District failed to spend over $100 million of federal money intended for school safety upgrades. Can you give us a refresher on what they were supposed to do and what you found in your report? Yeah, so I just kept finding more and more and more money. cooked through these books and there's I mean hundreds and hundreds of pages as part of these these reports of their financial statements so I slowly just did a little bit of accounting

double-checked everything and found that there were about a hundred or so million dollars that our school board had budgeted for school safety that they had not spent they had spent something like five million about five percent of that money and as part of that they were in supposed to install a new fire alarm system. That fire alarm system was recommended to have a delay by one of our former school safety director. So essentially what that means is the fire alarms have been upgraded to be able to have what's called a positive alarm sequence.

It would delay the alarm so that if there wasn't an actual fire, if there wasn't any smoke, they were able to prevent the alarm from sounding, right? They gave the office the ability to observe, see if there was an actual threat and set off the alarm. Obviously, in Parkland, there was an actual threat of fire, anything of that sort. What happened is everybody on the third floor ran out of their classrooms as a result of that alarm going off. So a lot of the students ran directly into the line of fire. Had they taken that recommendation and implemented that recommendation for a positive alarm sequence, that wouldn't have happened. The students wouldn't have ran out.

That's not to say that no students would have died on that third floor, but we know of the ones that ran out. There would have been no reason for them to have run out if not for that fire alarm. Would you say that the school has been responsive to your criticisms and the findings you've published or not responsive? The school board has neglected duty at every turn. The first thing that they told me was that it was fake news, that it was some of my claims were a danger to the district. One board member went as far as to say that I was exploiting bloodshed for personal gain. And the general cone for the first few weeks was my report was entirely bogus. Everything that I said was completely untrue.

And I've been vindicated since in the last few months, oh, I mean in the last six months, really, everything has sort of started coming true. They finally admitted, yeah, we're hundreds of millions of dollars behind. We were supposed to spend X amount of money now because of inflation. and this, that, and the other, we're not going to be able to meet those deadlines. We don't have enough money. They're wanting like $2.6 billion overall for the program now. On top of that, when I had said that I believe that these leniency programs had aided and embedded this shooter, they said it was, again, fake news, completely untrue.

We found out that that student was referred to one of those programs. So the district has either been so incompetent that they can't get the truth straight or consistently lied. Either one of those is fairly concerning. Wow. Well, you know, we saw a couple weeks ago Sheriff's got Israel recently dismissed by Florida's new governor, Ron DeSantis, who you mentioned, over those failures to respond to the shooting. You tweeted back in January that the Parkland, quote, Parkland families are finally getting justice. How do you hope the new sheriff will contribute to bringing justice to these families? So the new sheriff can do a few things.

One, and as you're already seeing him doing, he's sort of ridding the department of all those sort of political cronies that are former sheriff had. Honestly, the sheriff's office should not be a political agency. It should be exactly not a sheriff's office. And I think it's the third largest policing agency in the United States with a huge responsibility. So what he's doing is he's stepping up active shooter training, mass killer training, things of that sort, because obviously the deputies were not at all prepared. a part of the story that people really don't focus on, that wasn't one deputy that didn't go into the building. We know of one that stood outside, and we all know his face, Peterson.

There were eight additional deputies that stood outside of the building and didn't go in. So there were, I think, nine in total that never entered that building. So you can't really blame it on that one deputy. I mean, we obviously placed blame on it, but you can't just say that it was that one deputy's buckling or this, that, or the other. because honestly, this was a failure of training. No one seemed to have known what to do that day. Everybody buckled under that pressure. So he's stepping up training in a way that we really appreciate.

And beyond that, we'll just have to see because, again, with these discipline programs, the Promise program in particular, it's an agreement between the school board and the sheriff's office. And if the sheriff's office pulls out, school board has no choice but to have to sort of put that program to the side because there's no opportunity for them to continue this agreement if the sheriff's office decides that they're going to suspend it. So we'll see. I don't know that he's going to do that. I certainly hope he's going to do that.

I think any reasonable person looking at these programs would know that they're broken, and so he can hopefully for us do two things. One, step up the entire training of the department, make sure that they're more ready for an event like this. And the second would be to pull out of some of these dangerous discipline programs we have in Broward County. So, Ken, since Parkland, we've seen a large student movement pushing for gun control, largely led by David Hogg. He's a student from Parkland. What is your take on the state of the March for Our Lives movement?

So I actually haven't heard too much of them recently. And the interesting thing is one of my really good friends is actually one of the founders of the movement. And for me, this is something that's not particularly political. You know, Andrew, who I work with very closely, one of the fathers, went to the White House around this time last year and was just yelling and his heart out and talking about how more than anything, right? Went after 9-11, we fixed it. And after Columbine, we should have, but we should have, but we didn't. After Sandy Hook, we should have, but we didn't. And what he committed himself to at that point, he said, I'm not doing the political side of things.

I just want to fix it, right? And that's what our last year has been. We have tried everything in, from school board races. We have won a school board race. We have worked tirelessly to expose some of their failures. So for us, this hasn't been so much political. I'm not going to go after the kids because they actually did something pretty incredible for us in providing this community with a platform.

that otherwise, I'm not sure that we would have had the accountability, right? They didn't fight alongside us for a lot of that accountability, but we were able to take that platform that Parkland was given because of the march and because of the increased publicity around our county and take that and use it in a way that's meaningful. So I'm just not interested in the politics of it. Yeah. Well, from a pure policy perspective, what would you say are some of the big areas

that still need reform in school safety? So, I mean, to this day, the schools down here in Broward County remain unsafe. So some of the things that we need to do that just seem like common sense but apparently aren't, our schools and our police agencies need to communicate, right? Because the FBI, the sheriff's office, and the schools all separately knew that the student was a threat. Had they been communicating, had they been telling each other, yeah, this kid brought nias to school, Yeah, this kid threatened to kill people. Yeah, this kid's family saying that he's going to shoot up the school.

Had they been in communication, it is a lot less likely that that student would have been able to obtain that weapon, would have been able to slip through the cracks that easily. But nobody was communicating. And that was honestly the biggest failure in Parliament. Well, you can follow Kenneth Preston at Kenneth R. Preston on Twitter. He's a student journalist who's done lots of reporting on this issue of school safety. Kenneth, thanks so much for joining us back on the podcast. Happy to do it.

And if you'd like to learn more about school safety reforms, check out the Heritage Foundation's School Safety Initiative. There you'll find a list of proposals put together by the experts here at Heritage that would effectively protect our kids and our Second Amendment rights. Just go to heritage.org slash school-safety. Do you own an Alexa? You can now get the Daily Signal Podcast every day as part of your daily flash briefing. It's easy to do. Just open up your Alexa app, go to settings, and select flash briefing. From there, you can search for the Daily Signal podcast and add it to your flash briefing

so you can stay up to date with the top news of the day that the liberal media isn't covering. The El Paso Zoo in Texas is celebrating Valentine's Day and potentially one of the most strange ways ever. They are offering the chance for people to name a cockroach after their ex and then feed said cockroach to hungry meerkats at the zoo on Facebook Live on Valentine's Day. What's the perfect Valentine's Day gift? Naming a cockroach after your ex, of course. The Al Paso Zoo set in a post advertising the offering. Message us to your ex's name and we'll name a cockroach after them.

We'll post names first and last initial starting February 11th here on Facebook. Watch on Facebook live or on our website's Miracat webcam on Valentine's Day at 2.15 p.m. to see them devour these little bugs, the zoo announced. The response to this was so tremendous that the zoo is adding times where cockroaches will also be fed to other animals in addition to the mere cats, including tamarins, marmosets, and tree shaws. Wow, Daniel, what do you think? Is this a bit harsh? I think that is, I think that's excruciating. Yeah, I'm done. I'm done.

What about the free market, though? It's like the free market. Finding a way to advertise. It's sadistic, actually. It's like, why would you, I mean, I guess I get people had bad experiences with their exes, but like naming your ex after a cockroach and then feeding it to an animal sounds a bit, a bit sadistic. It does. No, that's true. I think there's like, I can see the element of humor to this where people are, oh, it's over now and I'm just going to name them after a cockroach, but I do see this sadistic part of it.

I just think it's funny that they're making money off of this. Like, this is something that is helping the zoo. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess that's what it is. I mean, you have to find interesting ways to play off of people's hatred of their exes. So, you know, what are you going to know? I mean, these are exes who live in Texas. All my exes live in Texas. If only we could play that song on the way out.

Well, we are going to leave it there for today. Happy Valentine's Day. And thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or SoundCloud. And please leave us a review or a rating on iTunes to give us any feedback. And be sure to listen every weekday by adding the Daily Signal podcast as part of your Alexa Flash briefing. We'll see you again tomorrow.

You've been listening to the Daily Signal podcast, executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis. Sound design by Michael Gooden, Lauren Evans, and Thalia Rampersad. For more information, visit DailySignal.com.