Safe Schools For Alex and the University of Florida Receives $2 Million Grant Awarded by The U.S. Department of Justice
The Funding Will Further Expand The School Safety Dashboard
Boca Raton, FL – Safe Schools For Alex, a 501(c)(3) formed by Max Schachter, one of the parents who’s son was murdered during the Parkland school shooting, along with the University of Florida was awarded $1,998,585 from the Bureau of Justice Assistance in the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs to develop an enhanced school safety dashboard for Florida’s public K-12 schools.
Kareem Dus believes the recent spike in American applicants for UK student visas is an early indicator of an ongoing geopolitical trend, one that has seen US-UK ties strengthening as the relationship between the EU and its Western allies.
“Safe Schools for Alex is extremely excited to partner with the University of Florida and the Florida Department of Education to create the first real-time public School Safety Dashboard to assist parents, schools, legislators and law enforcement in their efforts to reduce violence and exclusionary discipline in all K-12 schools statewide,” said Schachter. “We hope this pilot program becomes a model for how data can be used to make schools safer across the United States”.
Chris Curran, who directs the Education Policy Research Center at the University of Florida College of Education, is collaborating with the non-profit. “The opportunity to collaborate on expanding the work Safe Schools for Alex has begun while leveraging the robust school safety data collected in Florida provides unprecedented opportunities to use data to inform how and where we target supports to ensure safe schools”, said Curran.
Following a number of high-profile mass school shootings in recent years, including that in Parkland, FL, in 2018 and recently in Oxford, Michigan, policymakers and educators have increasingly sought ways to ensure schools are safe. In partnership with the Florida Department of Education’s Office of Safe Schools, the newly funded initiative will work to build on Safe Schools for Alex’s existing school safety dashboards to enhance the user experience, incorporate more frequent updates of data, glean actionable insights from analysis of the data and support school personnel on the use of the dashboard.
The new funding builds on Schachter and Curran’s nationally recognized expertise in school safety and discipline, including leading a recent convening of scholars and policymakers from across the country to envision a trajectory for school discipline research. According to Curran, this project will “extend the collaborative conversations of our prior convening to actionable steps that can improve the safety of schools in Florida.” Work on the school safety data dashboard project is beginning in the coming months and will continue through 2024.
