In Florida, if a student has ever been the subject of a threat assessment, there is a file. When that student moves from one public school to another, the file goes with them. The next school knows.
Until this year, that file stopped at one door.
Graduation.
A student could be assessed 3 times in high school, see a school counselor every week for 2 years, and walk onto a state university campus in August as a complete stranger. Nobody there would know a thing.
That changed this year. In May, Florida passed a law that sends those records on to the state's public colleges and universities. As far as I can find, no other state does this. The fall semester that just started is the first one under the new rules, and most families have no idea.
I think the law gets the big idea right. I also think one part of it needs guardrails before it hurts the kids it is meant to protect. Let me walk you through both.
What follows the student now
The law is House Bill 757. It passed the Florida House 88 to 20 and was signed on May 15, 2026. It was written in response to the shooting at Florida State University in April 2025. In July, the State Board of Education adopted the policy that tells schools how to send the records.
Here is what goes.
What now follows a Florida student to college
Records sent when a public K-12 student enrolls at a Florida public college or state university.
- Verified reports of serious or recurring behavior
- Threat assessment reports and documentation
- Psychological evaluations
- Treatment plans
- Therapy and progress notes written by school staff
This is new. Before HB 757, K-12 threat records moved between schools but stopped at graduation.
The law covers records created by school district or charter school staff. It does not reach notes kept by a private therapist your family sees outside school.
Source: Florida HB 757 (2026), ch. 2026-80, Laws of Florida, Section 5; Florida House final bill analysis, May 19, 2026
That last group is the part people are arguing about. I will come back to it.
The dots nobody connected
To understand why someone would want this, go back to April 16, 2007. Virginia Tech. 32 students and faculty killed.
The shooter had received mental health treatment and special support at school for years before he ever got to college. His middle and high schools knew. Virginia Tech did not. The state panel that investigated afterward wrote that the university "never even had access" to his K-12 records.
The panel found that confusion about privacy law kept people from sharing what they knew, even when the law allowed it. And then it wrote the sentence that has stayed with me for years.
The panel considered whether K-12 records should follow students to college. It called the question too thorny to make a recommendation, and left it alone.
11 years later, it was my son's school.
After Parkland, the commission that investigated the shooting found the same pattern. Administrators were so cautious about federal privacy law that credible information about the shooter was never shared with law enforcement. Different state. Different decade. Same failure.
Florida spent the next several years building a threat assessment system so that would not happen again inside its K-12 schools. HB 757 carries that system across the line to college.
19 years from Virginia Tech to HB 757
How the question of who knows what, and when, has moved.
- 2007Virginia Tech. 32 killed. The university never had the shooter's K-12 records. The review panel calls the records question too thorny to resolve.
- 2008Virginia requires every public college to have a threat assessment team.
- 2018Parkland. 17 killed. Florida requires a threat assessment team in every public school.
- 2019Parkland commission finds privacy fears kept information about the shooter from police. Says records can and should be shared when safety is at stake.
- 2023Texas requires threat assessment records to follow students to new school districts.
- 2024Florida moves every school to one statewide threat assessment system, so results follow students through K-12.
- 2025Florida State University. 2 killed, 6 wounded by gunfire.
- 2026HB 757. K-12 threat and school mental health records follow students to Florida's public colleges and universities.
Sources: Virginia Tech Review Panel (2007); Va. Code 23.1-805; MSD Public Safety Commission (2019); Texas HB 3 (2023); Florida HB 757 (2026)
The hard truth about FSU
Here is the part that most coverage of this law skips.
On April 17, 2025, a gunman opened fire near the student union at Florida State. It was over in less than 5 minutes. Robert Morales, 57, the university's dining director, and Tiru Chabba, 45, a regional vice president for Aramark, were killed. 6 others were shot and wounded.
The accused was a 20-year-old FSU student at the time. His case has not gone to trial, and I will not name him.
A Leon County grand jury later looked at what was known about him before that day. It found no mental health or behavioral referrals flagging him in his school district, at the college he attended before FSU, or at FSU itself.
Read that again. The law written in response to FSU would most likely not have changed what happened at FSU. There was no file to send.
I do not think that makes the law wrong. Virginia Tech had a file that never moved. Laws get written after the tragedy that gets the attention, and they protect against the next one, which never looks quite like the last. But we should be honest about what this law can and cannot do.
What other states do
Florida is not starting from zero, and neither is the rest of the country. Threat assessment teams have spread fast. As of early 2025, about 18 states required them in K-12 schools, and a 2025 national survey sponsored by the Secret Service found that 97% of public schools use a team with threat assessment duties.
Schools with their own threat assessment team
Share of public schools with a school-level team, as reported by principals.
Source: RAND and U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center, The State of Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management in K-12 Public Schools (2025). Survey of 1,746 principals.
The teams exist. What happens to their work when a student leaves is a different story. Here is how a few states handle it.
When the student moves on, does the file go too?
Examples of what state and federal law require.
| Where | What the law does | Since |
|---|---|---|
| Federal (FERPA) | Allows a school to send records to a school where the student plans to enroll, without consent. Allows it. Does not require it. | 1974 |
| Virginia | Every public college must have a threat assessment team. When a student is flagged, the team can obtain health and criminal history records, and must notify the next school, where the law allows, if a student it judged a threat transfers. | 2008 |
| Texas | Threat assessment records and the full discipline history follow a student to any new school district. Records are kept until the student turns 24. | 2023 |
| Florida | Threat assessment records follow a student between K-12 schools. | 2019 |
| Florida New | Threat assessment, serious behavior and school mental health records follow the student to a Florida public college or university. | 2026 |
Sources: 34 CFR 99.31(a)(2); Va. Code 23.1-805; Texas Education Agency, HB 3 transfer of student records (2023); Fla. Stat. 1003.25; Florida HB 757 (2026)
Notice the pattern. Virginia built its college system after Virginia Tech, but it starts the clock when a student gets to campus. Texas makes sure the file follows a student anywhere in K-12, and holds onto it until age 24, but it does not send it to college. Florida is the first to connect the two.
And the teams themselves are still uneven. In the same national survey, only about half of principals said their program had written policies. Fewer than 1 in 4 with a team said it had dedicated funding.
The teams are almost everywhere. The basics are not.
What principals reported about their school's threat assessment program, 2024 to 2025.
Source: RAND and U.S. Secret Service NTAC (2025)
That matters for Florida's law. A file is only as good as the team that wrote it. And now a college may be reading it 3 or 4 years later.
The question nobody has answered
Sending a threat assessment to a college makes sense to me. If a student made a credible threat in 11th grade and a team spent months working with him, the college should not have to start from nothing.
Therapy notes are harder.
When the State Board adopted its policy in July, chairman Ryan Petty, who lost his daughter Alaina at Parkland, said the change "just makes sense." He also said a college "perhaps could" use the records as a condition of admission.
Ryan is a fellow Parkland parent, and I agree with him on the goal. That second idea is where I get worried.
Board member Layla Collins raised the other side at the same meeting: kids go through rough patches, and what happens in childhood should not define an adult. Think about it this way. A 15-year-old who talked to a school counselor every week after a death in the family is not a threat. If that history can follow her into an admissions office, some families will make a simple calculation: don't let my kid talk to the school counselor.
Privacy advocates raised the same concern after Parkland. Without privacy around mental health, they warned, students who need help are less likely to ask for it. So the real question is who reads these records, and what they are allowed to do with them.
Where my own argument is weak
There is no research yet on whether sending K-12 records to college prevents campus violence. No state has done it long enough to measure. Virginia Tech is the strongest case for it, and FSU is a reminder that it would not have helped every time.
Most young people who see a school counselor, and most students who are ever assessed, never hurt anyone. Threat assessment works best as a way to get a struggling kid help. It was never meant to be a permanent label. A law like this can serve either purpose depending on how colleges use it, and the rules for that are still being written.
What actually works
Send the file to the threat team. Keep it out of admissions. Records like these belong with a college's threat assessment team and counseling center, and nowhere near an admissions decision. Florida's colleges should put that in writing now, before the first case tests it.
Write every report as if someone will read it in 3 years. Because now someone might. A good threat assessment says what happened, what the team did, and how the student responded. It ends with where things stand, so a reader can see a kid who got help and got better.
Fund the teams. Fewer than 1 in 4 schools with a team say it has dedicated money. A law that moves files without paying for the people who write and read them is only half a law.
Close the loop with families. Parents and students should know when a record is being sent, what is in it, and how to add context. Transparency builds the trust that keeps kids talking.
If you are the parent of a high school student in Florida, ask the school one question: "Is there a threat assessment, behavior report or counseling record in my child's file that would go to a Florida college?" Under federal law you have the right to review your child's education records. Once your child turns 18 or starts college, that right passes to them. If you work in a school, pull one recent threat assessment your team closed. Read it as a stranger would. Does it show the help the student got and how it ended? If not, fix the template.
See the safety picture for your district. Our School Safety Dashboard shows the safety incidents your district officially reported, how they have changed over time, and how your district compares with the state average.
- Open the dashboard and search for your school or district.
- Go to Safety Incidents. You'll see every incident type the district reported, from threats to weapons.
- Click any incident type to see this year's count, the change from last year, and the trend against the state average.
For Alex. And for all of them.
Max Schachter
If someone needs help
If a young person is struggling: call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
Report a threat in Florida: FortifyFL, the state's anonymous reporting app, or getfortifyfl.com
Anonymous tips anywhere: Sandy Hook Promise Say Something, 1-844-572-9669
Immediate danger: call 911.
Data: Florida Legislature, Virginia Tech Review Panel, RAND and the U.S. Secret Service. The accused in the FSU shooting is not named here. Learn more at schoolsafetydashboard.org.