An Exceptional Student
There was something profoundly dark and disturbed at the core of Nikolas Cruz’s soul. Even his mother, Lynda, described her son as “evil.” But as a society, we build our institutions to contain our demons. There are hundreds if not thousands of students like Nikolas Cruz across the country. But they do not do what he did because we reach them. We help them or we stop them. Nothing in the next three chapters provides an excuse for what he did. But it does provide an explanation of how he was enabled to do it. Every institution around Cruz, especially the school system, failed. He did not have to become a mass murderer.
Early Life
Nikolas Cruz’s birth mother, Brenda Woodard, was a career criminal and drug addict. She had been arrested twenty-eight times for crimes ranging from drugs and car theft to weapons possession, burglary, and domestic violence and was using crack while pregnant with her eldest child, Danielle. In middle school, Danielle was placed in her grandmother’s care when her mother was sent to jail. Danielle, in turn, has been arrested seventeen times and is currently serving an eight-year prison sentence on charges including attempted murder of a police officer.1
Brenda was also arrested for possession of crack cocaine while pregnant with her second child, Nikolas.2 He was born on September 24, 1998. Three days later, Jacob Cruz and Lynda Kumbatovich effectively bought him for $50,000. As an older (Jacob was sixty-two and Lynda forty-nine) and then-unmarried couple, they had difficulty adopting through the traditional system. So they paid Brenda’s lawyer for the “expenses” associated with transferring custody of Nikolas. Brenda gave birth to Nikolas’s half-brother Zachary in prison a year and a half later, and Lynda and Jacob adopted him as well.3
Elementary School
From the time he learned to walk, Cruz displayed deeply disturbing behavior. Former neighbor Trish Duvaney recalled, “My [four-month-old] son was crawling on the back patio and [Cruz] threw my son into the pool. And Cruz was only two then.”4 At age three, Cruz was kicked out of a private pre-K program because he wouldn’t stop biting other students. Lynda brought him to specialists from the Broward school district and they determined that, at three years and five months old, Cruz had the mind of a child who had just turned two.5 He was diagnosed at that time with a developmental delay; later, with a speech impairment, a language-processing deficiency, and attention deficit disorder. Specialists determined that because of his propensity to bite, pinch, and scratch, he required “maximum teacher assistance” to interact safely with peers in his public school pre-K class. For his two years of pre-K, he had to be placed in a restrictive harness in order to ride the school bus.
In June 2004, Cruz’s kindergarten teachers met with Lynda to discuss his “aggression and animal fantasies.” They explained that he “seems to identify as an animal. He often crawls on the floor or ground, pounces on another student, makes seemingly animal-like growling sounds, and grimaces while holding his hands in a paw-like manner.” This was far beyond normal child’s play. His teachers recorded that he was “impulsive with no sense of boundary; he acts out his fantasies, often explosively, in expressing his feelings of stress and anxiety. Transition times appear to be particularly threatening to him; [he] appears to react more aggressively.” After the meeting, he was labeled as requiring Exceptional Student Education (ESE), similar to special education in other states, due to his “emotional and behavioral” disability.
Two months after the meeting, Cruz walked into his kitchen in tears. “What’s the matter?” Lynda asked. “Did Daddy punish you?” Cruz replied, “Nope. Daddy’s dead.”6 Jacob had died of a heart attack in front of Cruz, a trauma that could do lasting and profound damage to even the most stable of children.
Later that month, Cruz entered kindergarten in a self-contained classroom for ESE students with behavioral disabilities. By the end of the year, Lynda decided that he should repeat kindergarten to “create a stronger foundation.” By the end of his second year of kindergarten, he had transitioned successfully into a normal classroom and began first grade in 2006 as a normal student. But two months in, his teacher reported that she was unable to control his aggression. By the end of first grade, he had to be physically removed from the classroom on an almost daily basis, often several times a day. For second grade, Cruz returned to a self-contained classroom for ESE students with behavioral disabilities.
By third grade, Cruz was calmer but sadder. His ESE specialist wrote in her notes in May 2008 that Cruz “expressed feelings of sadness and not feeling as if he is in control of things. [Cruz] reported that nothing goes his way and he does not seem to be able to control what happens to him. He also reported that he almost always feels that his life is getting worse and worse and he used to be happier” and that he would physically lash out at other students.
In the middle of his fifth-grade year, Cruz’s teachers had to make a choice that would define the future of his education. In an earlier era, a student like Cruz could continue to receive specialized attention in a self-contained classroom for students with similar disabilities for at least part of each day in middle school. However, between the pressure on schools to assess students using standardized tests under the federal No Child Left Behind Act and the pressure on schools to put students in the “least restrictive environment” possible under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, spending part of the day in a specialized classroom was no longer an option for a student like Cruz in a Broward middle school. It was either full “inclusion” at Westglades Middle School or full “exclusion” at a specialized school for students with emotional and behavioral disabilities: Cross Creek.
His teachers decided to try to prepare him to attend Westglades. Halfway through his fifth-grade year, they placed him in a normal classroom for 40 percent of the day. By the end of the year, Lynda was pleased with her son’s ability to sit in a normal classroom without being disruptive or violent. The educators on his Individualized Education Program (IEP) team, who create tailored plans for students with disabilities in consultation with their parents, decided to enroll him at Westglades as a sixth-grader for the 2011–2012 school year, where he would be treated essentially the same as any other student.
Westglades
Cruz struggled academically in sixth grade. His IQ was not substantially below average, but his teachers were not trained to address his language-processing impairment. One Westglades teacher noted that around the time Cruz enrolled, Broward teachers were receiving what she called “shotgun” ESE certifications via cursory online courses. She and other teachers felt unprepared to handle students like Cruz. But these certifications provided a way for the school district to comply with state law while also cutting costs by not providing students like Cruz with specialized support.
Cruz received occasional therapy and counseling services, and, according to his official records, he kept his aggression in check through most of sixth grade. But in April 2012, Lynda told her son’s teachers that she intended to consult a doctor about his behavior, which had again become erratic and aggressive. His teachers noted that he frequently refused to complete assignments. By the end of sixth grade, his behavior had deteriorated further. He was suspended four times in the last three weeks of school, and his mother complained to teachers that he was “burnt out and sick of school.”
In August 2012, during his first month as a seventh-grader, Cruz was disciplined for fighting. According to his official disciplinary records, he received no other disciplinary referrals until February 2013, after which he was suspended for nearly half of the next calendar year. The problem at Westglades certainly was not a refusal to suspend Cruz. The problem was that Westglades school administrators kept a student who was displaying deeply disturbed and dangerous behavior on a daily basis for a full year before transferring him to Cross Creek, where everyone knew he needed to go.
Staff and Student Recollections
“I never had him as a student,” one teacher recalled. “But everyone knew who he was because he wreaked havoc.” What sticks out to her was his “screaming in the hall. And [me] trying to ignore it.”
If something frustrated Cruz, he would curse and threaten anyone nearby. He would hide behind corners and doors, jump out and scream at people, and then cackle at their fear. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, he would burst into maniacal laughter.
One former Westglades student, Paige, met Cruz in eighth grade. As they both stood outside their classroom waiting for their teacher to open the door, Cruz offered her a hug, which Paige accepted. Paige loved hugs and was eager to make a new friend. Their teacher later pulled Paige aside and warned her, “Don’t touch him. He just got caught jerking off.”7,8
Another student, Sarah, never learned Cruz’s name but instinctively feared him. Whenever she saw him in the hallway, she would turn and walk the other way. She recalled a time when he threw his chair across the classroom. Later, Sarah recalled seeing him sitting outside the classroom with his desk tied down so he could not throw it again.
Sarah and other students recalled an incident where Cruz banged on a classroom door so violently that the glass shattered, striking students inside. His disciplinary records show that the teacher referred him to the principal for this action on September 4, 2013, which the teacher characterized as vandalism. (However, administrators do not appear to have recorded the incident in his formal disciplinary record.)
Cruz’s torture and killing of animals became a source of pride for him as he interacted with other students. One student, Devin, recalled that, although he tried to avoid Cruz, Cruz would approach him almost every day and ask, “Would you like to see videos of me skinning animals?” Devin always declined, but Cruz kept asking.
One student—who spoke on condition of anonymity and whom we’ll call Nicole—recalled being so frightened of him that she often wanted to stay home. One day, a rumor spread around school like wildfire: Cruz had killed his cat. Nicole and a friend worked up the nerve to ask him, “What happened to your cat?”
He replied, “I took it in the backyard. I have a lake. I put it in its cage and I drowned it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I killed my cat.”
Cruz showed them a series of pictures on his phone. His cat. His cat in the cage. The cage going into the water. The cage coming out of the water. The cat, wet and dead. Nicole was horrified. Cruz was transfixed, both by the pictures and by her horror.
“If Any Good Comes Out of All of This…”
Reflecting on Cruz, a Westglades teacher, who spoke to us on condition of anonymity for fear of professional retaliation and whom we’ll call Mrs. Pangrace, said, “If any good comes out of [the Parkland shooting], I hope it’s that the district finally gets rid of Response to Intervention.”
Response to Intervention (RTI) is only one part of the alphabet soup of disciplinary reforms—which also includes Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS), Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports (PBIS), and restorative justice (RJ)—that thousands of schools serving millions of students now use. We explore these policies further in Chapter 9, but in short: the MTSS/RTI/PBIS approach to student behavior requires extensive documentation in the name of “data-driven decision-making.” In practice, it deters teachers from reporting disciplinary problems and makes administrators less inclined to trust teachers’ intuition and more inclined to make decisions that produce the disciplinary “data” that their district-level superiors want to see.
Mrs. Pangrace lamented, “A teacher can no longer just say, ‘I have a bad feeling about this student. He needs serious help. Let’s get him tested or into a different school,’ and have the principal respond, ‘I trust you. Let’s do it.’” These days, she explained, “there’s a lot of paperwork, a lot of wasted time, a lot of ‘let’s see what he does for the next three months.’”
In Broward, a school must document multiple parent conferences and mental health observations, conduct psychological and psychosocial evaluations, administer a Functional Behavioral Assessment (FBA) and then implement a Positive Behavioral Intervention Plan (PBIP) for at least six weeks before a student is eligible to transfer to a specialized school. The full process often takes four to six months.
Here is some of the “data” that was recorded at Westglades and would have been available to school administrators at Cross Creek and MSD.
Lynda’s Perspective
As part of Cruz’s FBA, Westglades’s social worker interviewed Lynda Cruz.9 Here is how Lynda answered the standard questions:
What is the child’s problem behavior?
He can’t control his temper, especially when faced with frustration. He has frequent anger outbursts.
How would you describe these behaviors?
He starts screaming, kicking, throwing things, and punching holes on the walls.
What are the most problematic for you?
“Destruction” when he throws a tantrum, things get broken, nothing is safe. I have polka dotted walls from all the Spackle I have to use to fill the holes in the walls.
How often do these behaviors occur?
Every day, especially while playing Xbox.
Are there situations in which the behaviors never or
rarely occur?
No, if he is losing at Xbox there are no two ways about it.
What do you think needs to be done to help this child?
He needs to be properly diagnosed before he can be treated. I know ADD is not the cause of all of his problems. We need to know what is wrong with him.
Ms. Yon’s Logs
Teachers are required to collect “data” for FBAs. The following excerpts are taken from notes kept by Cruz’s eighth-grade language arts teacher Carrie Yon:
September 3: While reviewing [a] homophones worksheet, when another student mentioned the amendment that talks about ‘the right to bear arms’ Nick [sic] lit up when hearing the word that related to guns and shouted out “you mean like guns!” he was overly excited thinking that we were going to talk about guns. Nick later used his pencil as a gun…shooting around the classroom.
September 4: Nick drew naked stick figures (showing body parts, sexual) and drew pictures of people shooting each other with guns.
September 11: Nick returned from being out for [internal suspension]. After discussing and lecturing about the Civil War in America Nick became fixated on the death and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He asked inappropriate questions and was making shooting actions with his pencil. Some questions he asked were “What did it sound like when Lincoln was shot? Did it go pop pop or pop pop pop really fast? Was there blood everywhere? After the war what did they do with all the bodies? Did people eat them?”
September 16: When we began to read the Odyssey Nick paid partial attention (in-and-out) until we came up to the gruesome scene when the giant eats Odysseus’ crew members, only then Nick was interested in the lesson and got my 100% attention.
September 18: Nick was very worked up and anxious and he was making obscene gestures with his pencil and his hands (sexual in content).
September 24: Nick then began making inappropriate hand gestures (pretending to masturbate) and looking at other kids and laughing.
September 27: Another student also informed me (once Nick was escorted out of class) that Nick asks him all of the time “How am I still at this school?”
October 1: When talking about figurative language and onomatopoeias, Nick shouted out “Like a gun shooting.” Nick will find any excuse to bring up shooting guns or violence.… He got frustrated and said “I hate security, I hope they die.” Then he stated to me, “Fuck you.” I called security to pick him up immediately.
October 15: Spoke to his mother on the phone about the “F” in my class.10… We discussed that he should not be playing violent video games and that he should be put in a different school that can help with his behavior and emotional issues. We also discussed his obsession with guns/violence. She stated that he is interested in buying a BB gun from Walmart and was asking his mom, repeatedly, if he could get the gun, promising that he would “just shoot at trees.”
October 17: Nick began reading the last couple of pages out to the students, intentionally trying to ruin the book for everyone else. I asked him to stop and he told me that he dislikes the book and then he stated, “I like guns” can we talk about that. Then he continued to read the book out loud again.
On October 21, Yon emailed assistant principal Antonio Lindsay: “I wanted to let you know about Nick’s behavior today. He seems to be getting worse with each day. Following is what took place in the first ten minutes of class.” Yon described how, when Cruz wouldn’t stop screaming, she told him that she would have to ask him to leave if he kept up the disruption. When he stuck up his middle finger, she went over to the phone. Cruz ran over, took the phone from her, tried to dial 911, banged the phone on the receiver when that didn’t work, and then ran out of the classroom.
On October 24, Lindsay came to class to observe Cruz. As soon as Lindsay left the room, Cruz yelled, “Yes, now I can talk!” He continued to be disruptive, and Yon said, “I know that you can behave, I have seen you. You’re a good kid.” Cruz shouted, “I’m a bad kid, I want to kill!”11,12
Yon provided her opinion for the FBA:
I feel strongly that Nikolas is a danger to the students and faculty at this school. I do not feel that he understands the difference between his violent video games and reality. He is constantly showing aggressive behavior and poor judgment. His drawing in class show violent acts (people shooting at each other) or creepy sexual pictures (dogs with large penises). He has pretended to masturbate in class, he uses foul language and disregards everyone around him. Nikolas has been reprimanded on many occasions (verbally, referrals, IS, etc.) and continues to act in the same manner over and over again. I would like to see him sent to a facility that is more prepared and has the proper setting to deal with this type of child.”
“I know that this issue is not conducive to you all doing your jobs…”
On September 13, 2013, Lindsay sent this email to Cruz’s teachers and support staff:
This memo shall serve as notification from this day forth until otherwise notified. Nickolas [sic] Cruz will be on escort only status. If he needs to leave the class to use the restroom, go to the clinic, or any other reason please notify the front office and wait for a security escort. Under no circumstances should Nickolas [sic] be allowed to leave a supervised setting without an escort.
One month later, Lindsay sent a follow-up email:
As additional interventions, please be advised that N. Cruz will be “shadowed” by his mother when he chooses to run / walk out of class in “his attempts” of avoiding getting into trouble. His mother will be called immediately when it happens to come to school and “shadow” him for the rest of the day or she will “shadow” him the following day. As a result of today’s incident of him running out of class, mom will come to “shadow” him tomorrow. Nick has been advised that if he feels as though he is having a bad day / period, that he is supposed to “ask” his teachers to be excused to go to Mr. Lindsay, Mrs. Watkins, or Mrs. Fondren. At that point, the teacher will need to call for an escort to take him to either location.
On another note, please do not alert him to when you are going to call security to have him removed as a result of his inappropriate behavior. Please call discreetly or send a student to the front office to alert security. When he hears a teacher say that they are calling for security, in his mind he needs to “escape” the situation to avoid getting in trouble.
I know that this issue is not conducive to you all doing your jobs to the best of your ability, but rest assured that we are working to ensure that N. Cruz is in the best situation possible to be academically and behaviorally successful. Please continue to work with us as we undergo this process of observation and decision-making. Thank you in advance!
Take a moment to put yourself in the position of any of Cruz’s teachers. You have diligently documented this student’s deranged behavior for months. You have related Cruz’s many threatening statements to your assistant principal, as well as his troubling preoccupation with guns, killing, and cannibalism. All of your colleagues have had similar experiences with this student. You have expressed the opinion, supported by extensive “data,” that Cruz is a danger to others and belongs at a specialized school. And after six weeks of diligent documentation, you get that e-mail from your assistant principal.
Then, imagine that three weeks later, on November 4, armed with all of the “data” from the Functional Behavior Assessment, your assistant principal sends you a new Positive Behavior Intervention Plan that provides these instructions for managing his behavior:
If Nikolas becomes disruptive,
1. Try to assess what is causing it.
2. If he seems to be struggling with his work,
a. DO NOT comment on his behavior or argue with him.
b. Prompt him to request help appropriately. For example, “Nik, I can see you need help with that. The way to ask me is to raise your hand.”
3. If he does not seem to need help, but wants to get others off task for attention or escape.
a. DO NOT comment on his behavior or argue with him.
b. If he escalates, prompt him to take a break/use a cool down pass. Remind him that this is not a reward break, but just a brief work break. For example, “I can see this is bothering you. Do you want to take a 5-minute break? Then you can get back on track and earn your reward.
c. If he continues to escalate, follow procedures for major disruption/property destruction.
If Nikolas destroys property at a lower level,
1. Calmly let him know he has not followed one of the expectations. Remind him what he is working for.
2. Prompt him to use a cool down pass and walk away to diffuse [sic] the situation
3. If he does not escalate, allow him to cool down until he has regained control
4. If he continues to escalate, follow procedures for major disruption/property destruction.
If Nikolas engages in major disruption/property destruction,
1. Let Nikolas know, “you’re getting too loud. I need for you to get back into control by using a cool down pass or calming down at your desk. If you get back into control, you can stay in class. If you continue, I’ll need for you leave [sic].”
2. Walk away and do not pay attention to his behavior.
3. If Nikolas regains control, praise him for being able to stay in class.
4. If Nikolas continues after a brief increase in behavior, call for support staff to remove Nikolas.
5. Send his work with him so that work is not avoided.
6. Do not argue with Nikolas or engage with him.
7. When class is over, Nikolas needs to go to his next class and behavior plan should re-set with able to [sic] earn reward breaks again.
NOTE: For behaviors where others’ safety is a concern (i.e. throwing objects at others which may injure them, such as books, etc.), immediately call for assistance and implement safety procedures.*
(*Document abridged; emphases in original.)
The “data-driven decision” regarding Cruz’s behavior was that teachers should ignore it unless he commits sustained “major disruption/property destruction” or directly threatened the physical safety of other students.
District policy required that teachers implement this PBIP for at least six weeks before Cruz could transfer to Cross Creek. By this point, some teachers refused to allow him into their classrooms without the campus security monitor, Ms. Fondren, present. Several teachers, in exasperation and perhaps fear, tried to refuse to let him into their classroom. But they were informed by school administrators that this was not permitted.
Social Justice Child Abuse
Now imagine that you are a student at Westglades with Nikolas Cruz. In particular, imagine that you are a pre-teen girl named Isabelle Robinson. You have been deputized by school administrators to be Cruz’s “peer counselor” as part of the Broward County Public Schools’ new focus on restorative justice (RJ).
RJ comes to education from the world of criminal justice: after a criminal serves his prison sentence and is released, he is encouraged to make amends with his victims. But in K-12 education, rather than try to make amends after a punishment, RJ is done instead of punishment. It includes practices such as “reparative” dialogues to address the “root causes” of misbehavior, “healing circles,” and peer counseling. In many school districts, RJ has become a catchall term that allows adults to ignore misbehavior by arguing that students are responsible for their peers’ behavior. After the shooting, Isabelle described her peer counseling experience with Nikolas Cruz in the New York Times:
My first interaction with Nikolas Cruz happened when I was in seventh grade. I was eating lunch with my friends, most likely discussing One Direction or Ed Sheeran, when I felt a sudden pain in my lower back. The force of the blow knocked the wind out of my 90-pound body; tears stung my eyes. I turned around and saw him, smirking. I had never seen this boy before, but I would never forget his face. His eyes were lit up with a sick, twisted joy as he watched me cry.
The apple that he had thrown at my back rolled slowly along the tiled floor. A cafeteria aide rushed over to ask me if I was O.K. I don’t remember if Mr. Cruz was confronted over his actions, but in my 12-year-old naïveté, I trusted that the adults around me would take care of the situation….
A year after I was assaulted by Mr. Cruz, I was assigned to tutor him through my school’s peer counseling program. Being a peer counselor was the first real responsibility I had ever had, my first glimpse of adulthood, and I took it very seriously. Despite my discomfort, I sat down with him, alone. I was forced to endure his cursing me out and ogling my chest until the hourlong session ended.
When I was done, I felt a surge of pride for having organized his binder and helped him with his homework. Looking back, I am horrified. I now understand that I was left, unassisted, with a student who had a known history of rage and brutality.…
My little sister is now the age that I was when I was left alone with Mr. Cruz, anxious and defenseless. The thought of her being put in the same situation that I was fills me with rage.13
Some people might consider leaving a girl alone with a boy whom teachers considered profoundly dangerous, if not potentially murderous, to be child abuse. But in schools across the country, this is what passes for “social justice.”
PROMISE
The RJ and the PBIP did not work. Cruz was suspended for nearly three quarters of the month of November. It was during this month that Cruz was referred to PROMISE for vandalizing a bathroom faucet. On its own, that may sound minor. But consider the broader context: the bathroom was literally the only place in school where a security escort was not watching Cruz’s every move. He was referred to PROMISE instead of being arrested, but he did not attend for reasons the school district will not or cannot explain. If a student skips PROMISE, district policy requires that he be referred to the juvenile justice system.14 But he was not for reasons the school district will not or cannot explain.15
Cruz’s Suicide Attempt
On November 20, 2013, Cruz ran into the middle of a busy road during a fire drill. Former Westglades student Paige recalls being terrified because he could have died if an oncoming car had not stopped in time. Her teacher told her, “Don’t worry, he’s going to go somewhere where he can get the help that he needs now.”
But Paige’s teacher was being overly optimistic. Another teacher wrote a disciplinary referral for the incident, categorizing Cruz’s suicide attempt as “Gross Insubordination” and “Aggressive and Dangerous Behavior.” But school administrators rejected that categorization and categorized it instead as a minor act of disruption.
If Cruz had been involuntarily committed for psychiatric observation under Florida’s Baker Act in response to his suicide attempt, it could have accelerated the process of sending him to Cross Creek. But he was not. It took until February 2014, five months after Westglades began the evaluation process and one year after his misbehavior became so severe that he was suspended essentially every other day, to send Cruz to Cross Creek. As Yon’s records show, even Cruz couldn’t understand why the school kept him there for so long.
Least Restrictive Environment
This may all sound like madness, but it was just a matter of following policy. An ESE expert with extensive experience in the Broward County school district spoke to us on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. This expert, whom we’ll call Ms. Campbell, noted that the school clearly missed opportunities to commit Cruz for psychiatric observation. However, upon review of Cruz’s middle school history, Ms. Campbell commented:
It actually looks to me like the ESE specialist was sticking to the process. Surely everyone knew that he did not belong at that school. But to send a kid to a school like Cross Creek, you have to go through the checklist process established by the district. Ultimately, the school facilitates the process set by the district. It takes many, many months. It looks like the people at Westglades for the most part did what they could with the resources and constraints that they had.
You may recall from chapter 4 that, when student journalist Kenny Preston asked Superintendent Runcie’s deputy Mickey Pope how a student like Cruz could even be allowed into a normal school, Pope replied, “Where a student accesses their educational services is very much guided by law.” But Ms. Campbell rejects that excuse:
Nothing in federal law requires the full checklist that Broward uses. When it comes to students with physical disabilities, children who are medically fragile, non-verbal, who have nurses with them and g-tubes and trachs and all these incredible medical needs and they’re sitting in a regular school in front of a computer screen because to get these kids into the [special education] center is so much work that school administrators don’t even bother doing it. That’s not federal law. That’s just a local policy.
School administrators often go through the months-long process of evaluating a student for placement in a specialized school for naught. Tim Sternberg, whom you’ll hear from in chapter 11, once worked at Whispering Pines, a specialized school in Broward County similar to Cross Creek. He told us that eight or nine out of every ten recommendations to transfer a student to his school were rejected.
But it was not always this difficult. Joe Parsons, a recently retired art teacher who taught at Cross Creek for twenty-nine years, lamented that the impetus for making transfers more difficult was a desire to save money. It is far more expensive for a school district to serve a student like Cruz in a specialized school than in a traditional school.
It should sound awful that school districts systematically underserve emotionally disturbed students in order to save money, but it actually provides a strong public relations benefit to superintendents like Robert Runcie. That’s because social justice activist groups frame this issue as a black-and-white question of “civil rights.” Putting students like Cruz in schools like Cross Creek is alleged to be “ableist,” (i.e., discrimination against the disabled) and keeping them in schools like Westglades is the self-evidently virtuous practice of “inclusion.”
Shortly after Cruz transferred to Cross Creek, a scathing third-party review of Broward’s ESE program was published.16 The report noted that Broward’s ratio of ESE students to staff was nineteen to one, almost twice that of neighboring Miami-Dade County, and that Broward’s ESE program suffered from poor training and high turnover. Some of these problems could be attributed to administrative incompetence; in the previous year, Broward had cut nineteen positions even as it left over $5 million unspent. But if budgets reflect values, then Broward’s special education spending reflects a perverse and immoral alignment between bureaucratic self-interest and social justice self-righteousness, wherein school districts shortchange ESE students and pat themselves on the back for it.
“How Is That Possible?”
When Westglades staff heard that Cruz had committed the massacre at MSD, some couldn’t believe it. The fact that he became a mass murderer wasn’t what surprised them. They were surprised that he attacked MSD. “How is that possible?” one Westglades educator recalled thinking. “We did our jobs. It took forever, but we got him where he needed to go. We couldn’t believe they ever let him into MSD.”
Cross Creek
Cross Creek is one of three specialized schools in Broward County for students with extreme behavioral disabilities. It serves about 150 students in grades K-12, most of whom have been diagnosed with mental illnesses and take psychotropic medications. It has a two-to-one student-to-adult ratio, including eleven counselors, fifteen behavior technicians, and three therapists.17 There was no question that this was where Nikolas Cruz needed to be. The question that must be answered: How was he sent back to a normal school?
His First Semester
In his first semester at Cross Creek, Cruz’s troubling behavior was much the same as it had been at Westglades. Dr. Nyrma Ortiz, a psychiatrist who consults with Cross Creek, noted, “He goes to YouTube to research wars, military material, and terrorist topics. Wears military related items before he goes to school. Parent stated that all of these ideas are related to his excessive gaming.” Cruz told his school therapist Rona Kelly about a dream he had of killing people and being covered in their blood. By May, Cruz’s consistently disturbing comments made staff fear that he would harm others, so they developed a safety plan for him and recommended that his mother remove all sharp objects from his home. When prompted to describe a perfect summer, Cruz wrote, “Buying some type of gun and shooting at targets that I set up with large amounts of ammo just for fun for hours.”
Shortly before summer break, Kelly and Ortiz took the extremely unusual step of writing to his private psychiatrist, apparently with trepidation about what would happen over the summer when they were not monitoring him daily. They wrote:
Dear Dr. Negin,
We are witting [sic] you with his mother’s consent, to inform you of some of the behavioral problems he continues to display at home and school. Nikolas continues to present with extreme mood liability. He is usually very irritable and reactive. In school he displays oppositional and defiant behaviors and has become verbally aggressive in the classroom. He seems to be paranoid and places the blame on others for his behavioral problems. He has a preoccupation with guns and the military and perseverates on this topic inappropriately.
At home, he continues to be aggressive and destructive with minimal provocation. For instance, he destroyed his television after loosing [sic] a video game that he was playing. Nikolas has a hatchet that he uses to chop up a dead tree in his backyard. Mom has not been able to locate that hatchet as of lately [sic]. When upset he punches holes in the walls and has used sharp tools to cut up the upholstery on the furniture and carve holes in the walls of the bathroom. Per recent information shared in school he dreams of killing others and [being] covered in blood. He has been assessed for the need of hospitalization in school and by the YES team from Henderson Behavioral Health.…
We would like you to be aware of the current concerns since you will see him for medication management during the summer and may need to re-assess his respond [sic] to the current medications. In our opinion his response to medications has been limited at best.
The next fall got off to a rocky start. In late September, Kelly called Lynda and, according to her notes, “shared concerns with parent about obsession with guns/military and his poor anger control. He continues to deploy aggressive behaviors at home. Parent was advised against getting him a gun (pellet) or [shooting] classes for his birthday. Parent advised to restrict access to any weapons.”18 When asked what he was interested in or enjoyed, almost every single one of his teachers mentioned guns, the military, or war.
From October onward, however, Cruz appears to have calmed down. His therapist’s notes reflect that his disruptive behavior and destructive tendencies had decreased, and he expressed the desire to attend a traditional school again. On May 21, his Cross Creek teachers recommended that he be mainstreamed to attend MSD.
Back in April, when Cruz told Dr. Ortiz that he wanted to attend a normal school and join a high school Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) program in preparation for a military career, she noted, “interested in [J]ROTC?—not advised.… Discussed the safety of others/himself.” But every member of his “Child Study Team” recommended that he be mainstreamed for two class periods a day at the beginning of the 2015-2016 school year: for JROTC and another class to be determined.
According to Ms. Campbell, before Robert Runcie became superintendent, she had never seen a student mainstreamed from a school like Cross Creek in less than three years. The process typically took several semesters, with the student’s IEP team gradually adding class periods at the traditional school and carefully monitoring any changes in the student’s behavior. Cruz spent his first semester at MSD taking two classes, largely unsupervised, and then began attending MSD full time the following semester. Ms. Campbell said that she had never heard of anything like it.
This all bears reiterating to emphasize the insanity of it: Cross Creek staff were well aware of Cruz’s profoundly disturbing behavior at Westglades. They knew about his obsession with guns and dreams about killing people. They were so frightened that they took the extremely rare step of contacting his private psychiatrist. Yet not only did they return him to a traditional high school at an unprecedented speed, they also enrolled him in JROTC, a course in which he would learn to shoot using an air gun that resembled an AR-15.
Unfortunately, we do not believe that this was a random act of reckless negligence. Rather, we believe that the explanation is rooted in another policy-caused tragedy.
Why Cruz Was Mainstreamed
When Nikolas Cruz arrived at Cross Creek in the spring of 2014, the school was in upheaval as it struggled to accommodate an influx of students and staff from the recently shuttered Sunset School. The previous year, Superintendent Runcie had announced that the district would close that specialized school for students with behavioral disabilities because it was “under-enrolled.”
Some teachers cried when they learned the news, and parents were even more distraught. For many of Sunset’s disabled and disturbed students, it had taken years to build trust with adults other than their parents. Now those bonds were being broken. Melissa Smith explained that her autistic and nonverbal thirteen-year-old son had finally been successfully potty-trained at Sunset and had even started making friends. “He’s going to go back to the ‘throwing poo’ days because all of this is being taken from him,” Smith said. “He has friends…I never thought he would have friends.… Stuff like that, it matters big.”19
Another mother, Jane Lauren, said, “It was a life-saving ordeal for Justin to get here. The school knew how to handle him.” The fact that it was an ordeal to enroll students like Justin in a specialized school contributed to Sunset’s “under-enrollment,” and its “under-enrollment” was the justification for its closure in the name of administrative efficiency.
David Martinez, whose daughter is fed through a tube, complained, “It’s not right, it’s not right. On the backs of our children, they want to save money.”
But the full story is even worse. Katherine Francis, head of the district’s ESE department, allegedly pushed to close Sunset in part from a desire to use the building as office space for her and her staff. A few days after the closure was announced, she emailed other district administrators to inform them, “Should the current proposal be approved, my Division staff will move into the facility.”20
When that e-mail became public, parents were even more outraged. “This is selfish,” said one parent. “They are only thinking of themselves.”21 Runcie publicly backtracked, insisting that “there was never any official approved plan to do that.”
Although Sunset ultimately did not become office space, it still closed at the end of the 2012–2013 school year. One mother lamented, “This decision is going to literally destroy the lives of hundreds of children.”22 However many lives were figuratively destroyed as children were uprooted from Sunset, we believe that the decision sparked a chain reaction that literally ended seventeen.
Even before the merger, Cross Creek staff were already facing pressures stemming from changes in federal, state, and district policy. The ever-growing emphasis on standardized testing disconcerted students and teachers alike. Broward eliminated teacher tenure, shifting teachers to one-year contracts and evaluating them by test scores, which, given Cross Creek’s student population, made absolutely no sense. Former Cross Creek teacher Joe Parsons said, “Imagine how we teachers felt, let alone the students, about testing. It was highly toxic. Do you want to test a psychotic, schizophrenic, manic depressive, or otherwise emotionally and behaviorally disabled student, or a class of them? What is a fair test? What is a fair score?”23
Parsons also lamented that, just as the school district tried to reduce suspensions in traditional schools, the district also tried to reduce “the use of physical ‘hands’ on a student” at specialized schools. He explained:
There was a significant movement to reduce the ability of security staff at our school to physically touch students. Training was given in “verbal de-escalation.” This unfortunately gave license to the students to run around campus at will, and disrupt other classrooms, etc. ALL doors on campus were required to be locked at all times. The only “justified” hands-on practice was if the student was causing imminent physical harm to themselves or to others (banging their head on a wall/throwing a chair directly at a person). Once hands-on was employed, a pile of district paperwork, parental notification, and other requirements had to be met.24
Add to all of these pressures the challenge of absorbing seventy percent of Sunset’s staff and emotionally and behaviorally disturbed students, and it’s no wonder that Cross Creek principal Ken Fulop decided to retire rather than oversee the merger.
The district selected as Fulop’s replacement Colleen Stearn, who had until that point served as an assistant principal at traditional high schools. Things did not go smoothly. Parsons explained:
This merger was a disaster from the beginning. The district made NO apparent effort to assist in this merging of staff members. They provided no paid extra time, no “meet and greet,” no staff development, no time for staff members to learn and share together (team building). The district appeared NOT to have helped the new principal in orchestrating a smooth merger. The Cross Creek [principal and assistant principal] appeared to make NO effort [either.] The merged staff members were just thrust together and expected to function.…
There became issues between the “Cross Creek Way” and the “Sunset Way.”… Both schools [believed] that they had the better/best way…. The climate was tense, beyond the usual tension of working in a center where a student can go ballistic in a heartbeat, or begin to cry uncontrollably or curse you or [their] peers at the top of their lungs, or throw a chair, or begin a physical fight. There were new staff members you did not know, [and you] did not know if they “had your back.”25
Parsons believes that, despite the strife among the staff, Cross Creek maintained its full integrity when it came to serving students. But there is strong reason to suspect otherwise in the case of Nikolas Cruz.
The explanation as to why Cruz was mainstreamed lies in how two contradictory acts can be reconciled. According to MSD’s ESE support facilitator Tara Bone, Cruz’s therapist, Rona Kelly, called her mental health counterpart at MSD to say that she disagreed with the decision to mainstream him. But the therapist is usually the one steering those decisions. What’s more, Kelly wrote in Cruz’s IEP update when the decision was made that Cruz had proved that he could be “a model student.”
Taken together, these acts suggest that Kelly, to whom Cruz had confided dreams of murder and gore, acted against her better judgment or was overruled. Kelly was from Sunset, and those who followed the “Cross Creek Way” did not trust the “Sunset Way.” One ESE specialist on “Team Cross Creek” had taught Cruz in elementary school and was, along with Cruz’s mother, pushing for him to be mainstreamed.
For her part, Principal Stearn appears to have been eager to demonstrate leadership over a school whose dysfunction had become fodder for gossip across the district. (Tim Sternberg recalled his former principal at Whispering Pines telling stories about shouting matches over office space between the factions at Cross Creek.) On an official “school improvement plan” Stearn was required to submit to the district in September 2016, she justified her leadership as follows:
During the year of the initial merger of the two schools, trust and relationships had to be established with both staff and students. It was a struggle and we saw an increase in our suspension rates as inappropriate behaviors increased. We also did not see the learning gains in our students that we know they are capable of making.
In the two years since the merger, we have established stability that has resulted in a 67% reduction in our suspension rates and a substantial increase in the number of our students who participate in the general education setting in their neighborhood schools on either a part time or full time basis.…
The number of students who participate in a general education setting has increased by 50%.26
Principals of traditional schools often point to (at times artificially) decreased suspension rates as proof of successful leadership. Stearn pointed both to decreased suspension rates and to increased mainstreaming rates. Historically, Cross Creek had never used mainstreaming numbers as a metric of success. Decisions about student placement were always made based on the needs of the individual student.
It is difficult to believe that Cross Creek’s decision to not only mainstream a student with a history of disturbing behavior and murderous ideations and an obsession with guns, but also let him practice shooting with air guns as soon as he stepped foot on a traditional school was simply an instance of negligence. Instead, we believe it was either a conscious or subconscious response to explicit or implicit pressure to make Cross Creek appear orderly and successful.
1 Carol Marbin Miller and Nicholas Nehamas, “Nikolas Cruz’s Birth Mom Had a Violent, Criminal Past. Could It Help Keep Him Off Death Row?” Miami Herald, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/broward/article216909390.html.
2 Alan Weberman, The Miscreant: The Nikolas Cruz Story (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform: 2018).
3 Max Jaeger, “Alleged School Shooter’s Mom Paid $50K to Adopt Him from ‘Drug Addict,’” New York Post, February 27, 2018, https://nypost.com/2018/02/27/alleged-school-shooters-mom-paid-50k-to-adopt-him-from-drug-addict/.
4 Ibid.
5 This and all details about Cruz before middle school, as well as some details from his time at Cross Creek and MSD, are from a report commissioned by the Broward school district conducted by the Collaborative Educational Network Inc. The story of how the contents of this report became public is covered in chapter 12 and is accessible at Brittany Wallman and Paula McMahon, “Here’s What Broward Schools Knew about Parkland Shooter—Details Revealed by Mistake,” Sun Sentinel, August 3, 2018, https://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/parkland/florida-school-shooting/fl-florida-school-shooting-consultant-report-full-20180803-story.html.
6 Laura Italiano, “Accused Florida School Killer Watched His Father Die,” New York Post, February 25, 2018, https://nypost.com/2018/02/25/accused-florida-school-killer-watched-his-father-die/.
7 There is no clear evidence in his disciplinary record of Cruz being caught masturbating. There is, as will be discussed, plenty of evidence that his sexually charged statements and actions were regularly recorded as mere “profanity.”
8 Ibid.
9 The education records were provided to us by the Broward public defender’s office, which is representing Nikolas Cruz in his criminal trial.
10 Cruz’s grades in the first quarter of eighth grade: Intensive Reading: F; Language Arts: F; Pre-Algebra: F; Exp Wheel: F; Physical Science: F; US History: C+. His second-quarter grades were similar.
11 Another anecdote, recorded by another teacher, from October 28: “I asked him to stop cursing and interrupting other students while they work. He told me, ‘You are creepy. Just looking at me is creepy.’ I then asked him, ‘What would you rather be doing?’ His response was, ‘I would rather be on the street killing animals and setting fires.’”
12 Ibid.
13 Isabelle Robinson, “I Tried to Befriend Nikolas Cruz. He Still Killed My Friends,” New York Times, March 27, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/opinion/nikolas-cruz-shooting-florida.html.
14 Scott Travis, “Nikolas Cruz’s Record in PROMISE Program Is a Mystery,” Sun Sentinel, July 9, 2018, https://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/parkland/florida-school-shooting/fl-florida-school-shooting-cruz-promise-participation-20180709-story.html.
15 If Cruz had been arrested for vandalism, that would not have affected his ability to buy a firearm. But at an MSD Public Safety Commission meeting months later, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd pointed out to Robert Runcie that, “There is a multi-billion-dollar system in place across this country today to hold people accountable, to set checks and balances and responsibility and to be able to force people into mental health counseling, into probation checks, into curfews. And that’s the criminal justice system.” By preventing Cruz from being referred to the criminal justice system, the school district passed up another opportunity to help him.
16 Scott Travis, “Report Finds Flaws in Broward Special Ed Services,” Sun Sentinel, July 12, 2014, https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/education/higher-education/fl-broward-special-ed-report-20140711-story.html.
17 Advance Education, Inc., “Executive Summary: Cross Creek School,” September 29, 2016, http://www.broward.k12.fl.us/ospa/ospa-central2/_sip_plan_files/3222_10222018_3222_10032018_3222_09292016_EXECUTIVE_SUMMARY.pdf.
18 Henderson Clinic’s in-home therapist, however, counseled Lynda to allow Cruz to have a BB gun so long as she made it part of a plan of rewarding him for good behavior. So, he got one.
19 Michael Vasquez, “Parents Decry Closing of Two Broward Schools for Special-Needs Kids,” Miami Herald, February 16, 2013, https://www.miamiherald.com/latest-news/article1947381.html.
20 Michael Vasquez, “After Closing, Sunset School Campus Could Become Offices—Or Another School,” Miami Herald, April 22, 2013, https://www.miamiherald.com/latest-news/article1950591.html.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 E-mail correspondence with author.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Advance Education Inc., “Executive Summary: Cross Creek School,” September 29, 2016, http://www.broward.k12.fl.us/ospa/ospa-central2/_sip_plan_files/3222_10222018_3222_10032018_3222_09292016_EXECUTIVE_SUMMARY.pdf.