How Seminole County Schools will start off threat-free
At her annual State of the Schools address Monday afternoon in Lake Mary, Seminole County Schools Superintendent Serita Beamon announced the district achieved yet another A-rating from the state of Florida and Seminole County is ranked No. 1 yet again amongst Central Florida school districts.
And all campuses – elementary, middle and high schools – are safe, Beamon said.
“Safety in schools is our number one priority,” Beamon said. “We have enjoyed, thankfully, a great relationship with our Seminole County Sheriff’s Office and with our local law enforcement agencies here in Seminole County.”
The 2024 school year, however, began with an unprecedented amount of threats of violence by students and arrests of students.
Seven students in seven days were arrested last September across Central Florida, two of them in two days in Seminole county.
In back-to-back incidents, a 15-year-old was arrested for threatening to shoot up Seminole High School and a 16-year-old was arrested for bringing a gun to Lake Brantley high.
Some parents even called for metal detectors to be installed at Lake Brantley.
Beamon took to Youtube last September to reassure parents and issue a warning: “Let me be very clear - there will never be a time that threatening behavior or weapons brought to a campus will be tolerated.”
How will Beamon prevent threats from snowballing this year?
“We start with our safety and security message that we have for all of our students to remind them of the appropriate way to behave and to react when they hear information – threats we need to know about,” Beamon said. “Those we need our families to let us know about, because as soon as we do, we are able to address them and investigate them. And by and large, they are unsubstantiated. We have gotten better over the years with our students letting us know that those things are happening. We want them to continue that.”
The threats subsided until March, when another teenager was arrested for threatening to shoot up Seminole High again and police said they found an arsenal of airsoft guns at his home.
Beamon said in every incident someone who saw something said something. And police got involved before any violence could happen.
“I don’t know that you stop it, what you do is you make sure you’re appropriately addressing it,” Beamon said. “And that’s what we did last year. That’s what we will continue to do. We have talked to our students about social media threats. We provided a number of opportunities last school year for parents and for students about the danger of that happening. And about the unintended consequences that some students may not really be thinking about. That can occur for what some might think of as a joke.”
Besides a deputy or officer in every school, there will be three police K-9s visiting potentially every classroom, trained to sniff out “contraband” - weapons, in particular. Altamonte Springs police will station one dog at Lake Brantley and the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office will randomly rotate the other two K9s through the other schools and classrooms.
In 2023, K-9 Dragus and his handler searched 550 Seminole County classrooms at all 66 Seminole County schools.
Beamon also said she wants students to know there is someone at every school they can trust to turn to for mental health help, if they need it.
As for the metal detector petition from parents, Beamon said that is still “not on the table.”
Erik von Ancken anchors and reports for News 6 and is a two-time Emmy award-winning journalist in the prestigious and coveted "On-Camera Talent" categories for both anchoring and reporting.