WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — About eight times a year, the Palm Beach County School Board meets to approve recommendations to expel students.
At an afternoon meeting Wednesday, nine students were expelled for one year. Seven of them brought weapons to campus.
Behind closed doors, school board members have access to the schools where it happened, the specific weapons and the reasons why students brought weapons to school.
Contact 5 crunched the numbers by looking at school board agendas over the past five years.
This school year, Palm Beach County Schools voted to expel 42 students for weapons violations. That figure is double more than any other year in the past five school years.
The numbers from the 2020-21 school year are artificially low because the COVID-19 pandemic kept students at home where they were taught online.
These numbers might worry parents with reports of school mass shootings around the U.S. televised into our living rooms almost weekly.
But an expert on school violence has a different opinion on children involved in school shootings.
"The majority of those were not planned attacks, like Sandy Hook or Parkland or Uvalde," David Riedman, the founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database, said. "They were fights that escalated into shootings because a student had a gun with them."
His research shows a dramatic rise in school shootings over the past five years, and with four and a half months of school left this year, another record could be set in 2023.
The rise in nationwide shootings parallels the rise in students expelled for weapons violations in Palm Beach County schools.
According to the limited information on some Palm Beach County School Board agendas, the weapons that students brought to campus include knives — apparently most common — followed by firearms and Tasers.
Palm Beach County School Officials were unavailable for comment, but as a preventive measure to stem the tide of weapons in school, the district is about to roll out a plan for metal detectors — first in select schools and then district-wide.
Contact 5 wanted to compare Palm Beach County Schools' weapons-related expulsions to those in similar-sized districts in Florida. However, Palm Beach County was the only one of Florida's seven largest school districts that has the transparency of listing expulsions, even though with limited details.
