The parents of four elementary school students and the League of Women Voters of Florida have filed a complaint in Circuit Court against Duval County Public Schools and the school board.
The lawsuit seeks to prohibit members of the county’s new School Safety Assistant program from carrying firearms in schools or on school property. The lawsuit contends that DCPS allowing the personnel recently hired to carry firearms on school property violates state law.
Duval County Public Schools cannot address pending litigation, spokeswoman Laureen Ricks said.
The SSA program was established in response to the state enacting in March the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act, named for the high school in Parkland where an armed man on Feb. 14 killed 17 students and staff.
One of the requirements of the act requires school districts to provide a “Safe-School Officer” at every school.
There are three options to fulfill the requirement.
The first two options are to use police officers employed by the sheriff’s department or police officers employed by the school district.
The third option is to commission school employees as “school guardians” who assume security functions in addition to their other duties.
The act does not require Safe-School Officers to carry guns and no provision allows school guardians to do so, the complaint says.
Florida law generally prohibits people other than law enforcement officers from carrying guns in schools or on school property.
Before the state safety act went into effect, DCPS employed law enforcement officers at middle and high schools, but did not hire officers for most elementary schools.
The school board concluded that since the Legislature did not include money for additional law enforcement officers, and the school board could not budget for them, the district would rely on the third option – guardians.
The lawsuit contends that the school board interpreted the act to require school guardians to carry guns, but the board did not want to require any existing employees to carry a firearm in school.
Instead, the board created the Safety Assistant Program to recruit people to serve as guardians and carry concealed weapons in the elementary schools.
Under the heading “Be a Hero,” the recruiting information at dcps.duvalschools.org/safetyassistant describes the job as “maintains calm, deters crime and ensures the safety, security and welfare of all students, faculty, staff and visitors in the assigned school.”
The page also lists qualifications: Guardians must be at least 21 years of age; possess a high school diploma or equivalent; some security experience or training preferred; read, write, speak and understand standard English; have or be able to obtain a Florida concealed weapons permit; and have a valid state driver license.
The lawsuit states that School Safety Assistants are not law enforcement officers because they lack the power of arrest, earn roughly half the salary of DCPS School Police Resource Officers and receive about one-fifth of the training that resource officers receive.
“The Board nonetheless adopted a policy that purports to authorize SSAs to carry guns in schools. That was illegal. Florida law expressly requires local governments to follow the state’s general ban on guns in schools and prohibits them from crafting an exception to that uniform law. Local officials are not free to rewrite these state laws,” the complaint states.
It also states: “The Legislature did not authorize public schools to put inadequately trained, armed individuals in elementary schools to perform vague ‘security’ functions, as the Board has done here.”
The plaintiffs seek a declaration from the court that it is unlawful for any School Safety Assistant to carry a firearm in a school or on school property and a permanent injunction to prohibit SSAs from carrying guns in schools or on school property.
The plaintiffs are represented by attorneys with Stearns, Weaver, Miller, Weissler, Alhadeff & Sitterson in Tallahassee; Southern Poverty Law Center in Miami and New Orleans; Gifford’s Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence in New York City and San Francisco; and Munger, Tolles & Olson in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
The case is assigned to Circuit Judge Robert Dees.