ORLANDO, Fla. – Since the Parkland high school shooting, Florida’s elected leaders have pledged to implement proactive measures, making the state a “blueprint” for preventing mass shootings.
Their advocacy and legislative work was on display at the inaugural Florida National Summit on School Safety, where law enforcement and school officials from 20 different states came together with one goal – to share best practices in school safety.
Fox News Digital spoke with Ryan Petty, who lost his 14-year-old daughter Alaina in the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Petty shared how Florida is preventing mass shootings, and what other states can learn.
“We’ve had school safety bills now every year since the Parkland tragedy,” he said. “So we’re doing a lot of things right here in Florida, and we wanted to share that blueprint with the rest of the country. So we invited states from across the nation to come, and we’re all learning from each other. And hopefully, as a group, help each other solve this problem.”
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Alaina Petty was one of the 17 people who were killed on Feb. 14, 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The shooter, Nikolas Cruz, a 19-year-old former student at the school, opened fire on students and staff, killing 17 people and injuring 17 others. The victims included 14 students and three staff members.
“They say time heals all wounds, but it’s seven years now, and it’s still the first thing I think about in the morning when I wake up, and it’s often the last thing I think about before I go to sleep,” he said.
“Which is why this mission is so important. I know my daughter, Alaina, would be proud of me for advocating for other students to be protected from a danger that I didn’t understand was possible,” he said.
Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Díaz Jr. highlighted how the Parkland shooting brought attention to the U.S. Secret Service’s (USSS) research on “leakage,” or warning signs, preceding a mass shooting.
“The tragedy of Parkland is an example of where everything went wrong and where there were multi-agency failures up front,” he told Fox News Digital. “There was leakage multiple times that this could have been stopped the front. So it was a complete failure across the board, allowing us to learn from that incident.
“And we’ve been able to put in place not only these preemptive measures with the threat assessment, but we’ve now evolved into threat management, where when we take a student into that process, we monitor that student to make sure that they receive services to avoid a crisis,” he said.
WATCH: Florida Commissioner of Education discusses warning signs
He shared that Florida officials have “hardened” their schools by creating single entry points, updating technology and having police or additional guardians that are trained to prevent on-campus shootings.
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Díaz said that in all the past mass shootings across the U.S., there was always a crisis point.
“We know in all of these shootings that there was leakage, but there’s also the ability, if you have things right, to prevent it, even after everything else has failed,” he said.
Utah has taken notes on how Florida has risen from the Parkland tragedy. Matt Pennington, the Utah State Security Chief with the Department of Public Safety, said that they have “paralleled” Florida’s legislation.
Pennington told Fox News Digital that Utah’s legislative body is taking proactive steps to prevent a tragedy before it happens.
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“Several of the Parkland parents came to our legislative session and spoke to legislators about their experience, their impact and how it’s affected them in their lives,” he said. “And that really just drove it home when you have people coming that are victims and their children have lost their lives due to school violence.
“It’s really important that we get ahead of this in Utah and hopefully not have an attack.”
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