'The Florida Model': Pinellas sheriff explains how state is working to stop school shootings after Iowa tragedy

LARGO, Fla. (WFLA) — Like many others, Mistie Swaine, a mother of three, was devastated to hear about the shooting that killed a sixth grader and injured five others at an Iowa school on Thursday. “I just broke down yesterday and cried,” she said in tears. “I’m a parent, and I can’t image what those families are going through.” “I get chocked up all the time,” she added.

“If those were my children, and I know the love families have for their children, I can’t image what they’re going through.” “I feel so bad,” she continued. So, what is Florida doing to try to prevent another tragedy like this from happening here? “Whether it’s Oxford, Uvalde, Parkland or Sandy Hook, it doesn’t matter,” Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said.

“It’s all because you got a young person who is a recent or former student at the school who is ticked off about something that doesn’t know how to deal with that, deal with that grievance in an effective way, and decides they’re going to take out that hostility on others.” Sheriff Gualtieri also serves as chair of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission, something established in 2018 to address and identify what went wrong on that horrific day.

“Broward County Schools and Marjory Stoneman Douglas was a complete disaster when it came to this,” he said. “They didn’t have it.” “They didn’t use it,” he continued. “It was botched.” Seventeen people were killed. “There were a lot of signs,” Sheriff Gualtieri said. “There were a lot of indicators.” “Nobody did what people call for, and that is connecting the dots,” he continued.

“So as this process relates to what didn’t happen at Stoneman Douglas, this fixes the holes that were identified with what happened there.” He’s referring to the new Florida model of school based threat assessment. The whole idea is to identify concerning behaviors in students before it’s too late.

“The concept is to get as much information as we can from as many people as we can who know these kids whether it’s teachers, whether it’s parents, whether it’s other students, to see something that’s off at the earliest possible stages before it turns into something really bad, before it turns into a threat,” he explained.

Sheriff Gualtieri told 8 On Your Side that there’s a pattern, and that most school shooters are between 14 and 19 years old—many former or current students who are upset over something and don’t know how to deal with it. That’s where this new threat assessment model comes into play. “It’s very important at the earliest possible stages to get these people of what’s called the pathway to violence,” he said.

“The pathway to violence begins when they are mad about something, ticked off about something, they’ve got a grievance, and they don’t have to proper coping mechanisms and they start moving down that path and it results in something really bad like a school shooting.” The modernized model helps to identify concerning behaviors in students.

Sheriff Gualtieri said this isn’t necessarily something wrong, just something someone finds is concerning, something that usually stems from something that upset the child. “It could be anything from they were bullied to they got a bad grade on a test to they didn’t get onto the football team,” he explained.

Before this year, school districts across the state used an older model for vetting threats in their schools. The sheriff’s office said school districts used 12 different software systems, with some districts relying on pen and paper records. School based threat management teams are helping to identify concerns and categorize threats to be low, medium or high risk.

A low threat is something the sheriff’s office said could be based on a psychological issue. They said an example of this would be a student is hearing voices. A medium or high threat might arise if someone reports that a student showed them a knife on campus. The sheriff’s office used this example saying, if the student had a plan of attack or specific target, the threat might be categorized as high.

They said if the knife was brought for protection against a perceived threat from another student, it might only be categorized as a medium threat. Sheriff Gualtieri said the idea of the new model is to be proactive. “It’s going to happen again,” he said. “The question is when and where.” “If you’re being intellectually honest about it, you have to accept that,” he continued.

“Given that it could happen at anytime anywhere any place, at the hands of anybody; you have to plug the hole first.”.