More than a year after last year’s Valentine’s Day shooting in Parkland that shocked the state and blurred party lines in the state Capitol, the Florida Senate passed a follow-up bill that has become increasingly partisan because of its expansion of a program that would allow classroom teachers to be armed.
It succeeded on a 22-17 vote. Although the vote count isn’t far off from last year’s 20-18 vote, Tuesday’s vote fell much more along party lines. Only one state senator, Anitere Flores, a Republican from Miami, kept it from being a complete party-line passage when she voted against the bill with all the Democrats.
The 54-page proposal, Senate Bill 7030, cleared the floor with its most contentious piece intact: an expansion of the “Guardian” program created last year that would allow teachers to volunteer to carry guns after undergoing screening and training by a sheriff’s office.
Under the current law, educators who “exclusively perform classroom duties” are not eligible to participate in the program — a carve-out that was added as a compromise to Democrats and then-Gov. Rick Scott, who opposed allowing teachers to have guns on campus.
In the Senate’s earlier hearing of the bill, Democrats unsuccessfully tried to amend the bill to get the teachers piece removed. “The (Parkland) kids came here to this Capitol … what resonated about their coming here was the fact that they said, ‘Do not arm my teacher.’ And here we are, creating a pathway to arming teachers,” said Democratic state Sen. Darryl Rouson of St. Petersburg.
Other than the piece related to arming teachers, the bill also includes a slew of other follow-ups to last year’s law, most of which are supported by lawmakers of both parties. Those include specifics on how schools should implement mental health services for their students and clarifies districts’ shared responsibility to help ensure charter schools have armed security. The bill also would create a standardized “threat assessment” tool for schools to keep records of students they feel may pose a “behavioral threat” to themselves or others
