When I sent Alex to school on February 14th, 2018, I had no idea he was going to school with a violent individual. I had no idea this person had accumulated over 70 disciplinary referrals. I had no idea law enforcement had been called to his home more than 40 times. I had no idea the FBI had received tips that he wanted to become a school shooter.

I did not know because the school was reporting zeros.

Zero bullying. Zero assaults. Zero threats. Zero intimidation. Three consecutive years. At a school with 3,000 students.

That was obviously not true. And because parents like me had no way to see what was actually happening in that school, we had no way to ask the right questions, raise the right concerns, or push for the kind of intervention that might have changed what happened on February 14th.

After Alex was murdered I joined the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission. We were tasked with investigating what went wrong and making recommendations. One of the things we found over and over again was that schools across Florida were not reporting incidents accurately. They were sweeping things under the rug. And when I went to look at the data for my other three children's schools, what I found was a massive Excel spreadsheet with millions of pieces of unorganized information that made it impossible for any parent to evaluate, compare, or understand what was happening in their child's school.

That is why I created the School Safety Dashboard. Not because I wanted to build a website. Because I was a parent who was completely blind to what was happening inside the walls of my son's school, and I am not willing to let that happen to other parents.

Threat assessment is not complicated in concept. It is the process by which a school identifies students who are showing behavioral warning signs and evaluates whether those signs represent a genuine risk. It is about getting students help before something irreversible happens. Florida now requires a threat assessment team in every public school and every assessment done anywhere in the state gets uploaded to a statewide portal so patterns can be tracked across districts.

Most states do not have this. Most school districts are still making judgment calls without a consistent process, without proper training, and without any system to make sure the information reaches the people who need to act on it.

If your state does not have a threat assessment mandate, that is something worth pushing your legislators on. And if your school is reporting very low numbers across every safety category, the right question to ask is whether those numbers reflect what is actually happening or just what is being reported.

Those are not always the same thing. I know that better than anyone.

One thing to do this week

See what your school is actually reporting. Real data on disciplinary incidents, threat reports, and safety measures - free at schoolsafetydashboard.org

For Alex. And for all of them.

Max Schachter