The Broward County School Board delayed its vote to end a controversial pre-arrest diversion program for students on Tuesday after top community leaders and elected officials cited the need for more public input.
The vote was moved to October 17, giving the board a bit more than a month to meet with law enforcement officials, the county Public Defender's Office, State Attorney, NAACP leaders and other stakeholders to come up with a plan to improve or replace the contentious PROMISE program.
“We are looking at making sure we're not reaching for handcuffs and we're reaching for a pen or an opportunity for students to be able to work through that system," said Peter Licata, who recently became the new superintendent of Broward County Public Schools. "We will not get there in a better place if we do not meet with the community.”
The PROMISE program — which stands for Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Supports and Education — offers students accused of certain misdemeanors an alternative to being arrested and prosecuted through the criminal justice system. The student receives civil citations from the school district and attends alternative schooling, and is given counseling and other services.
The arrest diversion program was hailed as a success following its inception in 2013, but came under scrutiny in 2018 after it was revealed that the gunman who killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High Schoolwas referred to the program but did not complete it.
School Board member Debbi Hixon said Tuesday that there shouldn’t be any connection between the shooter and the PROMISE program. Hixon lost her husband Chris in the mass shooting.
"It is disingenuous to try to connect the horrific tragedy that happened on Feb. 14, 2018, to the PROMISE program,” she said in a statement to WLRN.
The program began as a way for the district to help troubled students get help and avoid the criminal justice system. But after changes from the state required the district to report all student defendants to a state-wide database, and be given civil citations, school officials say the program has become a conduit to the justice system.
Public officials weigh in
At Tuesday's meeting, Broward State Attorney Harold Pryor told school board members discipling students who commit misdemeanors should be the job of the school district and not that of police or prosecutors.
“It shouldn't be decided by my office,” he said, voicing support for the PROMISE program or a similar program.
Broward Public Defender Gordon Weekes has been outspoken about his support for the program, saying it offered young defendants an “opportunity for grace.”
“We cannot lose a generation of children because we cast them away, because we don't have the forethought to support them, to recognize that they can become better. They can move in the right direction, if we give them that direction. That is the Promise program,” he said.
Weekes told school board members the program should be strengthened and supported instead of replaced because of what he called a “political issue.”
The program came under scrutiny in 2018 after it was revealed that the Parkland shooter had been referred to the program but failed to attend.
The Marjory Stoneman Douglas Public Safety Commission, formed to give the state recommendations for preventing more school shootings, criticized the program for allowing students off the hook without involving law enforcement.
READ MORE: Program aimed at keeping Broward students out of jail could be closed by school district
The Broward schools superintendent at the time, Robert Runcie, declined to put students into a state-wide database if they entered the program.
Vickie Cartwright, who replaced Runcie, reversed course in 2021 and agreed to post names of students into database, which allows law enforcement to see which children have attended the program.
Critics say it makes students targets for profiling and is against the initial purpose of PROMISE, which was to avoid children having a criminal record.
"A program that was originally designed to be an intervention and not enter children into the system, because it's now a pre-arrest diversion program, the school district is the conduit into the system," Jodi Washington, the school district’s Director of Equity, Diversity and School Climate, said last April during a meeting to discuss the program's future.
Civil Citations create juvenile justice record
In 2022, the school district was responsible for 76 percent of all civil citations in the county, issuing 1,213, compared to 108 by the Broward Sheriff’s Office, 51 by Hollywood police, 39 by Plantation police, 30 by Pembroke Pines and fewer than 30 each for 11 other law enforcement agencies in the county.
If the program ends, the school district will no longer issue citations, leaving it in the hands of law enforcement.
Civil citations, an alternative to arresting a young person accused of a misdemeanor, were never supposed to be used for students who commit misdemeanors in schools, according to Pryor.
“Civil citations address misdemeanor issues, crimes that a child commits off of campus. Civil citations were never created to be a part of the Promise program, nor it was never created to be included in any school board based disciplinary matrix,” Pryor told the school board members Tuesday.
The disciplinary matrix is an outline of responsibilities for school employees when responding to behavior from students that is tiered based on the severity of the behavior.
The citation processprovides children with services like mental health and substance abuse counseling, anger management classes and academic progress monitoring.
The PROMISE program was started in 2013 as an intervention program in response to an increasing number of students — especially Black and Latino boys — being arrested in Broward County schools. At the time, the names of children referred to the program were not put into any databases.
But today the program does require that the children be given civil citations by the school district and be entered into a statewide database accessible to law enforcement.
The district has to contact law enforcement before they issue a citation for the eligible misdemeanors that include alcohol sales, alcohol use, major disruption on campus, misdemeanor possession of drugs or drug paraphernalia, mutual combat fighting, petty theft, trespassing and vandalism.
Law enforcement makes a decision to prosecute the student, give them a citation or allow the school to handle disciplinary action. If they decide not to arrest the student or send them to court, the district will send the child to PROMISE and give them a civil citation.
