High school students headed to college will have their disciplinary records transferred to the institution they attend, a policy prompted by the Legislature’s post-Florida State University shootings higher education safety package.
The provision was part of HB 757, a package designed to prevent another tragedy such as the campus shootings at FSU in 2025, when two people were killed and more were injured. Most notably, that package arms trained college and university faculty.
Wednesday, the Florida Board of Education adopted a provision requiring the records transfer into administrative policy.
Under the language approved, when a student enrolls in a postsecondary institution, his or her school district must transfer disciplinary records for the student to the college. Those records include “verified reports of serious or recurrent behavior patterns, including all documentation and related information for reports of concerning behavior, concerning communication, or threats that are documented.”
Also, the report should include any “psychological evaluations, including therapeutic treatment plans and therapy progress notes created or maintained by district or charter school staff.”
“This builds on the system that we’ve developed over the past two or three years of providing a portal for our districts to be able to keep track of threats that are posed to the schools, and it just makes sense to be able to share that information more easily with other districts, because we have kids that move,” Board of Education Chair Ryan Petty said Wednesday at a meeting in Orlando.
Petty’s daughter, Alaina, was killed in the Parkland shootings in 2018. Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed Petty to the board following the 2018 mass shooting and he commonly advocates for school safety.
State law already required threat assessments to be transferred with a student from K-12 school to K-12 school.
Board member Layla Collins asked questions about the sequence of college applications and forwarding the behavior reports to the university. She voiced concern about keeping students safe from other students with intent to harm while balancing the unintended implications of forwarding a student’s juvenile record into his or her adult life as a college student.
Petty said the process is not meant to be “punitive,” but to “address the concerns or the grievances the student may have that’s causing them to think or plan some sort of violent activity.”
Petty conceded: “I can’t sit before you right now and say that a college that got this information couldn’t use that in some punitive way; perhaps they could. Maybe it could be a condition of admittance.”
Collins, a former military counterintelligence agent, said she is “all for the security aspect” but that the board might want to revisit the topic as it pertains to data collection.
“From my perspective as someone that was a collector that understands how things change, and perspective and so much is subjective, that at some point we say, ‘We might need to revisit that break between childhood and adulthood,’ to ensure that our students are not penalized for a rough patch that they had,” Collins said, offering a hypothetical of a young girl making comments about self harm affecting her as a college student.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Contact Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter.
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