Contact: Timothy Svoboda, (202) 225-2476
(Washington, D.C.) – Congressman Glenn Grothman (R-Glenbeulah) today, along with 13 original cosponsors, introduced the Make Schools Safe Again Act. This bill would prohibit the Secretary of Education or the Attorney General from authorizing agreements between schools and law enforcement agencies to encourage the non-reporting of criminal activity of students.
“If a student commits, or is suspected of committing a crime, police need to know about it. After the tragic shooting in Parkland, FL, we discovered that the shooter had a troubled past but was rarely reported to authorities for misbehavior, including when he was expelled for bringing weapons to school.”
“This lack of communication between schools and police was encouraged by an Obama-era guidance from the Department of Education aimed at reducing the number of school-based arrests. This guidance ended up fudging the numbers to make the school look good, but by doing this they let potentially violent students slip through the cracks.”
“Every student deserves to learn in a safe environment, which is why we need our local law enforcement to be up-to-date on all criminal activity in the area. This bill will allow police to be better able to make a meaningful impact on reducing the amount of violence in our schools.”
Background
Following the tragic school shooting that took the lives of 17 students in Parkland, Florida, reports quickly surfaced that Broward County Public Schools had an agreement with local law enforcement agencies to explicitly not arrest students or refer them to the proper authorities if they were involved in criminal misconduct or misdemeanors. This collaborative agreement in Broward County was one of the catalysts for President Obama’s Department of Education 2014 guidance on school discipline, which advised school districts across the country to reduce referrals to law enforcement authorities in an effort to reduce what they termed as the “school to prison pipeline”.
