While jarring, the chaotic scene in Room M211 is the exception, not the rule. School shootings remain uncommon, and local schools officials insist the campus is the safest place for any student.
But the incident — followed one week later by the discovery of a special needs fifth-grader with a loaded Smith & Wesson at a K-8 center in Doral — brought a close to a South Florida school year marred by the fatal November shooting of a 13-year-old girl aboard a private school bus in South Dade. It raised questions about local gun prevention measures and added to calls for increased campus security heard around the nation in the wake of a gunman's rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn.
But how much of a threat do guns really pose to South Florida schools?
• In all, more than 70 firearms were confiscated by police from inside Miami-Dade and Broward schools, on campuses and in school safe zones during school hours or functions. Close to two dozen weapons were snared in Broward; the rest in Miami-Dade, including three that police say were quietly intercepted during the first week of the current school year. Most were brought by students.
• A majority of the 600-plus schools in Miami-Dade and Broward reported no problems at all with firearms either during or after school hours. In Miami-Dade, which also responded to 33 gun incidents that didn't result in confiscations, only one in four schools reported a weapons incident to police.
• Two dozen guns, about 40 percent of the guns found in Miami-Dade, were reported at two middle schools — Charles R. Drew and Carol City — and four high schools — Miami Carol City, Miami Central, Miami Northwestern and Norland. These six schools were the only in the county to have at least four incidents in which authorities took firearms into custody. But none experienced a school-related shooting.
• In Broward, police reports available showed that only Plantation Middle, JP Taravella High and the Hallandale Adult Community Center dealt with more than one gun confiscation. Reports, however, weren't nearly as comprehensive as Miami-Dade, which district Police Chief David Golt attributed to the fact that Broward polices its schools by subsidizing school resource officers at other departments, which don't always forward reports to his office. Only about half the gun incidents reported by the district were available through the district's police office, and the reports available documented only incidents that ended in confiscations.
The issue is frustrating for Miami-Dade Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, who has made youth safety a pillar of his administration and called a news conference Friday — 10 days after sitting down with the Herald for this report — to talk about violent crime and efforts the district is taking to keep schools safe.
After last year's Newtown tragedy, the Miami-Dade school district announced it would begin training teachers to spot signs of mental illness among students. Carvalho also joined with county Mayor Carlos Gimenez to encourage collaboration between all local police departments and other community organizations, both in reaction to school emergencies and elsewhere in the community.
This year, the Miami-Dade School Board, like Broward, agreed to pay for more officers to bolster police presence at schools. Police are also launching a gun education forum in elementary schools, and annouced Friday that they're doubling up on random metal detector searches. Carvalho said he's also pursuing legislation in Tallahassee to place more penalties on parents who don't properly secure their guns, because he believes many students are getting their firearms at home — though police reports show guns are also sometimes stolen or found on the way to school.
"One gun in schools is too many," Carvalho said.
But he also says media and political fixation on fail-safe ways to ward off hypothetical gunmen or prevent the encroachment of guns ignores that students are safer in class than out, evidence that current prevention measures are working.
In Broward, which spends $6 million to staff schools with municipal police officers and sheriff's deputies, Chief Golt said they are always reviewing security measures, though never in a reactive way.
In fact, South Florida students are less likely to carry a weapon on school grounds than their peers across the country, according to a bi-annual study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2011, the latest study available, students in Miami-Dade and Broward reported carrying guns and bringing weapons to school at a lower rate than the national average. Data provided to the Florida Department of Education by school districts, which are required by law to document gun-related incidents, also show that Miami-Dade and Broward counties reported fewer guns between 2009 and 2012 than Palm Beach and Hillsborough counties.
Dade schools police chief Ian Moffett credits mentorship, active policing, counseling and other prevention methods. One of the most important deterrents, he said, is gun education and relationships with students, who often don't adhere to the no-snitching code that frustrates so many police investigations.
Reports show that schools police go out to homes and into communities in response to tips from parents, other agencies and social media to try and catch guns before they get to campus. But guns do still make it into classrooms and schoolyards, sometimes randomly in restrooms or, in one case, a donated golf bag. And when that happens, principals, teachers and students become responsible for finding and reporting the weapons.
Latoya Thomas, for instance, was teaching seventh-grade science at Madison Middle in 2009 when she noticed her students were passing around a backpack. She thought someone had a pet, because students had been sneaking rabbits and snakes into class.
About one year later, American Senior High teacher Bello Jean-Baptiste overheard two seniors talking about bringing a gun to school, so he wrote a referral to administration. Police found a loaded .22-caliber, double-action H&R Sportsman revolver on the student, who told them he was trying to sell the gun for money. He also had 109 bullets.
Jean-Baptiste said the discovery was disconcerting. But he said worries about students with guns are overblown.
But as last year's shootings show, one undiscovered or unreported gun can have frightening consequences. And sometimes, the safety net breaks down when guns go unreported or tips aren't followed up properly.
That's what Amanda Collette's parents alleged in a lawsuit settled by the Broward School Board after their daughter was shot dead at age 15 in Fort Lauderdale's Dillard High by another student in 2008. And last year, police say the students who shot D'Angelo Marte and Lourdes "Jina" Guzman-DeJesus had both shown their guns to classmates before the firearms went off. Criminal charges were filed in both cases.
Lourdes' mother, Ady DeJesus, says her daughter's shooting is proof that schools need better security measures. Jina, a Palm Glades Preparatory Academy student, was fatally shot in the neck by another student while riding to their charter schools aboard a private school bus that was also transporting her younger sister to school. Witnesses told police in depositions that the shooter, Jordyn Howe, 15, brought his stepfather's gun to Somerset Academy Silver Palms for as long as two months. Some said he let other students see or play with the gun on the bus, including Jina, though her mother doubts that's true.
After Jordyn's most recent court hearing last month on a manslaughter charge, a trembling DeJesus said Silver Palms, which as a charter isn't policed or operated by the school district, failed her family, which she is struggling to hold together. She takes Jina's younger sister to therapy each week in Broward County and drives her to school because she can't bear to put her back on a bus.
The issue of school safety continues to hold traction among some state lawmakers, including Sen. Dwight Bullard, a Coral Reef Senior High teacher and Democrat who wants to tax gun sales to establish a gun safety fund that he'd like to see further preventative measures, like counseling. His Senate colleague, Eleanor Sobel, D-Hollywood, believes voters should be allowed to establish special taxing districts to fund additional school resource officers at elementary schools, where gun reports are rare but fears of intruders run high.
In the House, Rep. Greg Steube, R-Sarasota, intends to resurrect a bill to allow for trained and armed employees at elementary schools in order to ward off attackers while waiting for police to respond.
"My goal is just to ensure our kids are safe, and right now, in my opinion, they're not," Steube said.
Schools officials believe they're better off making their own decisions about gun prevention.
For instance, the random wand searches that Miami-Dade brought back in January of 2012 have proven to cut down on the percentage of students toting weapons to schools, according to a recent Georgia State University study that focused on Miami-Dade and Broward schools. On the other hand, some research has found inadequate evidence to support daily weapons searches and entryway metal detectors. And the National Association of School Psychologists this year questioned whether schools are harming learning environments by increasing security regardless of need.
"If you walk into a place that looks like a prison then I would argue students are likely to behave in accordance with the culture that's been created," said, Shaun Harper, an associate professor at the Penn Graduate School of Education.
Harper is publishing a study this month on factors of success among high-achieving African-American and Hispanic students in high-minority high schools. He said most of the 325 students interviewed talked about the importance of feeling safe and trusted in their schools — most of which lacked metal detectors in a city where the New York Civil Liberties Union says 100,000 students are searched for weapons before entering class.
It's one reason Carvalho says he won't endorse metal detectors in schools like Miami Central, Miami Northwestern and Miami Carol City, where the number of gun incidents were highest. He said he'd rather expand access and hours at schools in rough neighborhoods, like Overtown's Booker T. Washington Senior High, which students have repeatedly called a safe haven.
There's also an issue with the configuration of Florida's schools, which in some cases have dozens of access points. Both districts say they're working to create single entry points to schools.
Carvalho, however, doesn't argue that schools can't be safer. Rather, he says efforts are better focused on cutting down community violence, securing firearms in the home, and shielding kids from the gunplay that resulted in 81 homicides of kids 18 and younger in Miami-Dade between 2009 and 2012 — all but two of them outside school settings.
He rapped that he'd shoot up the University of Florida. Are his lyrics free speech?