After allowing Jeff “riding my son’s coattails for fame” Kasky to publish his underwear skidmark of an OpEd, I guess someone at the Sun Sentinel decided to do something responsible.

Schools’ culture of tolerance lets students like Nikolas Cruz slide

Hold onto your butts, this is going to be good.

Broward Schools have grown so tolerant of misbehavior that students like Nikolas Cruz are able to slide by for years without strict punishment for conduct that could be criminal.

The culture of leniency allows children to engage in an endless loop of violations and second chances, creating a system where kids who commit the same offense for the 10th time may be treated like it’s the first, according to records and interviews with people familiar with the process.

You mean Coward County administrators lied to us immediately after the MDS shooting to cover their asses? I’m shocked, shocked to find that lying is going on in here.

Cruz was suspended at least 67 days over less than a year and a half at Westglades Middle School, and his problems continued at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, until he finally was forced to leave.

There are more waiving red flags here than the opening celebration at a North Korean sporting event.

The South Florida Sun Sentinel obtained Cruz’s discipline records, reviewed discipline policies and found:

— Students can be considered first-time offenders even if they commit the same offenses year after year.

— The district’s claim of reforming bad behavior is exaggerated.

— Lenient discipline has an added PR benefit for the district: lower suspensions, expulsions and arrests along with rising graduation rates.

So the school lets dangerous kids slide to keep the administration from being embarrassed?  Tell me how that isn’t a disaster waiting to happen.

Oh, it was.

The program, the pride of Superintendent Robert Runcie, was designed to use counseling and mentoring to help students avoid the school-to-prison pipeline. Under former zero-tolerance policies, black students ended up suspended, expelled and arrested at rates that were widely disproportionate to their peers.

The “school to prison pipeline” is bullshit.  Bad behavior is why people go to prison.  If the school doesn’t discipline bad kids, their bad behavior is reinforced and they get worse.  Meaning it is more likely they will go to prison.  School discipline doesn’t cause kids to go to prison, it is a predictor of who will go to prison.

Just like the self esteem and good academic performance issue, liberals are getting cause and effect reversed.  Good performance causes high self esteem, not the other way around.  Good self esteem without good performance just makes kids into entitled douche bags.

Desmond Blackburn, then Broward’s chief school performance and accountability officer, specifically instructed teachers and staff in a video years ago to challenge and nurture students, while using suspensions, expulsions and arrests as “absolute last resorts.”

Now, many teachers and parents say Broward has created a culture in which teachers are expressly told or subtly pressured not to send students to the administration for punishment so a school’s image is not tarnished.

That’s the Iron Law of Bureaucracy at work.  Protect the bureaucracy at all costs.  This time the cost was 17 lives.

Safety concerns at Sunrise were brought up at faculty meetings. “The message out there is that the students are untouchable. Habitual negative behavior means nothing anymore,” state the minutes of a Faculty Council meeting on Feb. 2, 2015.

Of course it does.  What other lesson could the bad kids learn?

“My principal basically would tell me it was his job to market the school. He was adamant about not looking bad,” Fitzgerald said.

The Iron Law strikes again.

So the schools ignore or bury minor offenses until the kid gets so out of control that it can’t be ignored any longer.  Then when the law comes down on the kid, it comes down hard.

Of course that kid is the victim.  Nobody in the district seems to give a shit about the kids who are bulled, robbed, beaten, or have their education interrupted by the bad kids.  They are just collateral damage in the war on common sense.

But Fitzgerald, the former Sunrise Middle school teacher, thinks discipline has become lax.

“A lot of principals are afraid,” she said. “You don’t report theft because reporting it makes your school look dangerous.

“There are a lot of things going on in the school that are being overlooked. Only when things are obvious and egregious will they arrest the child.”

So bad kids are not reformed when their infractions are still minor and there is time, and good kids end up in body bags because of it.

This seems like the worst possible way to run a school system.

It’s a good thing that CNN defended these administrators in a town hall and they were all Hillary Supporters, or they might actually have to be held accountable for their inaction.

Long live big government bureaucracy.  It doesn’t matter how many die because of it, those goverment pay checks still must be cashed.