JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Campus safety on college and university campuses is in the spotlight after this weekend’s mass shooting at Brown University.
For Makiko Felice, seeing news of the mass shooting at Brown University brought difficult memories back to the surface.
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Back in April, she received a text from her daughter informing her there was an active shooter at her school, Florida State University.
“I always thought, ‘Not my kids.’ And it happened close to my daughter,” Felice said.
There have been at least four notable shootings at colleges across the country this year, including the one at FSU.
Ever since the shooting that killed 17 and injured 18 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland in 2018, Florida’s K-12 public school districts have had the option of arming school teachers and staff.
The Guardian Program, as it’s known, involves school districts entering into agreements with their local sheriffs’ offices, which offer training to school employees who choose to participate.
“This is a bill I hope I never would have had to file,” State Senator Don Gaetz (R-Pensacola) said.
Gaetz’s legislation, which was filed one day before the Brown University shooting, would allow Florida’s colleges and universities to participate in the Guardian Program.
He noted that while universities generally have their own police departments, officers can’t be everywhere at once.
“What this bill seeks to do is make sure that in a classroom, in a campus setting, in a gathering of students or faculty, if something terrible happens, that we’ve taken every step that we can take,” Gaetz said.
But Felice, who has worked as a gun safety advocate for the last several years, doesn’t believe that more guns on campus is the answer.
Instead, she believes it only stands to make active shooter situations more confusing.
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“Is that a real shooter or is that a security guard? It just does not make any sense,” Felice said.
Gaetz noted that entering into the program is optional.
He also argued that the success of school guardians operating in public schools over the past seven years speaks for itself.
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“To awful-ize it is one thing, but to look at the evidence and find out that there have been no bad problems, no problems at all, and God-willing it would never have to be used,” Gaetz said.
Gaetz’s bill also includes new training requirements for annual risk assessments and training for college and university staff on mental health and threat management to try and identify potential threats before they happen.
He argued that piece is as critical as the guardian program expansion.
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