The school that suffered a mass shooting on Feb. 14 had an armed officer but that officer never encountered the shooter.
The shooting at Marjory Stoneman High School left 17 people dead and others wounded.
Nikolas Cruz was identified as the shooter.
Cruz, 19, was expelled from the school prior to the shooting.
Eventually, Cruz surrendered to law enforcement officials outside a nearby apartment complex.
The officers, called resource officers, are in large part paid from a pool of money called Safe Schools that is earmarked each year.
The state’s 67 school districts share the $64.4 million dollars. The dollar amount has gone unchanged for seven years despite increasing costs.
“As long as you don’t have a catastrophic event, sometimes things like Safe Schools funding just have to take a back seat,” said Juhan Mixon, executive director of the Florida Association of School Administrators. “I guess the hope is we will continue to be safe.”
A number of groups have called for the money to be increased to try to prevent school shootings.
“The money … is nowhere near enough to do what’s necessary to keep schools safe,” Andy Tuck, a member of the state Board of Education, said at a July 17 meeting after a presentation from Mixon.
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