Parents, teachers and students are pushing back on a report released recently in Parkland, Florida — the site of a mass shooting at a high school last February — that recommends arming teachers to secure schools.

“I don’t agree we should arm teachers,” said Lori Alhadeff, whose 16-year-old daughter, Alyssa, was shot and killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

“We need to train our law enforcement to actively engage a threat! Our teachers should be armed with more resources and pay but definitely not guns!” Alhadeff, who now serves on Broward County’s school board, wrote in an email to VOA.

The shooter, a 20-year-old recent graduate of the high school, killed 17 people with a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle. While the massacre drew national attention to the larger question of gun control in the United States, it also prompted a months-long local investigation and subsequent report into how the shooter was able to perpetrate the mass shooting, and how similar events may be prevented in the future.

The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission released a more than 400-page report covering details of the shooting, identifying security problems and making recommendations.

Among the recommendations was the expansion of a program that allows teachers and staff members to carry concealed firearms to defend students in the event of an active shooter.

“School districts and charter schools should permit the most expansive use of the Guardian Program under existing law to allow personnel — who volunteer, are properly selected, thoroughly screened and extensively trained — to carry concealed firearms on campuses for self-protection and the protection of other staff and students,” the report read.

Alhadeff was not the only parent of one of the 16 students killed last year who disagreed with the recommendation to arm teachers. Max Schachter, one of two parents of victims on the commission board, voted against the recommendation to arm teachers, the Sun-Sentinel reported.

‘Absolutely not’

But the commission, which included sheriffs and state politicians, as well as two parents of the shooting victims, did not consult with any of Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s teachers.

“They’re not in the school. So, they’re making recommendations on how to make the school safe, make our kids safer going forward. But they didn’t ask any teachers, who are in the school, who would have a better idea of what’s practical,” Felicia Burgin, an English teacher, told VOA.

When asked if she agreed with the recommendation to arm teachers, Burgin said, “Absolutely not.”

Burgin and fellow teacher Sarah Lerner agree with Alhadeff’s suggestion that increasing the number of security personnel on campus is a more reasonable solution than arming teachers.

“To have a firearm at school — it just seems counterproductive. I’m here to teach, I’m not a police officer,” Lerner, who teaches journalism and English, told VOA.

Along with concerns about where the funding would come to arm and train teachers, Lerner, who was teaching on campus in a different building than where the shooting took place, does not think that being armed would have helped her.

“By the time I would have accessed my weapon, which would have been secured safely in a closet, I would have been dead,” she said.

Concerns about objectivity

A few days after the report was released, the leader of the commission, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, appeared on a television show of the National Rifle Association (NRA) — sparking outrage by some in the community who say that his appearance on a network that advocates for gun rights threatens the objectivity of the commission.

“Everyone should be disturbed by the leader of the School Safety Commission (which opened following the shooting at the high school) going on NRA TV,” David Hogg, a survivor of the Feb. 14 shooting, said on Twitter. “This is supposed to be a nonpartisan commission that looks at safety; it’s (sic) goal is supposed to be protecting students, not selling more guns.”

“There’s no reason for them to be involved or to be on NRA TV at all if they’re members of this nonpartisan committee,” Lerner said.

The existing Guardian Program, signed into law by outgoing Republican Gov. Rick Scott shortly after the shooting last year, only allows administrators or non-teaching staff to receive firearm training.

In April 2018, the Broward County School Board voted against adopting the program, which would have given Broward County schools over $67 million to train and arm teachers, according to The Eagle Eye, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School’s newspaper.

Sheriff suspended

The report was released earlier this month and also recommended a full internal investigation of the Broward County sheriff’s office, which responded first to the shooting, to “address all of the actions or inactions of personnel on February 14, 2018.”

Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel was suspended over the weekend by newly inaugurated Florida Gov.  Ron DeSantis.

“Effective immediately, I am officially suspending Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel for his repeated failures, incompetence and neglect of duty,” DeSantis wrote on Twitter Friday.

Israel has said he will contest his suspension, calling the move political and unjustified.

“This was about politics, not about Parkland,” he told reporters shortly after the suspension was announced Friday.

The commission first met in April 2018, setting January 2019 as the deadline to submit a preliminary report. During the second half of 2018, the commission held monthly meetings interviewing witnesses and reviewing “a massive amount of evidence,” according to the report.

 

The commission was formed by Scott, who has since become a U.S. senator for the state.

 
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Jonathan Nez delivered a message of hope, resilience and change Tuesday in his inaugural address as president of the Navajo Nation, drawing from the tribe’s history as a way to move forward.

He and Vice President Myron Lizer took the oath of office before a large crowd at an indoor sports arena in Fort Defiance, near the tribal capital, that dwindled as the ceremony ran longer than scheduled.

The two easily won November’s general election to lead the tribe on the nation’s largest Native American reservation for the next four years. They will have to confront a loss of about $40 million in annual revenue and hundreds of jobs held by Navajos if a coal-fired power plant and its supply mine close in December, as expected.

Nez and Lizer said they would support Navajo entrepreneurs and Navajo-owned businesses, eliminate redundancies in the tribal government and restore people’s trust in their leaders. They also vowed to work with tribal lawmakers.

“We have to begin to view the situation as an opportunity to re-evaluate ourselves on the way we do business,” said Nez, 43.

The inauguration was a mix of traditional Navajo elements and Christianity, which wasn’t received well among everyone in the audience, with speeches in Navajo and English. A traditional practitioner blessed the men, as did pastors. Nez quoted scripture in his address and highlighted the strength of Navajos who were forcibly marched off their homeland 150 years ago and of Navajo women.

He spoke about self-reliance, a healthy lifestyle, and returning to lessons learned in the sheep camp and rooting oneself in the Navajo language.

His words about instilling hope in Navajo youth facing adversity because of bullying, depression and rates of suicide among Native Americans that are higher than the general population were reassuring for Kathleen Bowman, who heads the tribe’s public defender office.

​”What I’d like to see is for our leaders to think in terms of helping our people overcome addiction to substance abuse, help them find ways to heal from what they’ve suffered from growing up,” she said. “There should be a message of hope because we certainly need change.” 

Nez proudly proclaimed he’s from Shonto, Arizona, and had leaders from the community and his own parents depicted in faint images over pictures of Shonto Canyon displayed behind the stage. Also in the backdrop were two large Navajo rugs woven in the Ganado style, symmetrical geometric designs that look like dazzling eyes in colors that aligned with Nez’s campaign. Two rugs featuring the Navajo Nation seal were on either side. 

More modern art was placed at the front of the stage showing vibrant corn stalks and moccasins around a basket, in what inauguration director Curtis Berry said was meant to honor youth.

“To me, the youth are our future, and the way they’re depicting our culture is different, is changing,” he said.

The Navajo Nation Council delegates took the oath of office together, picking items from a basket that’s referred to as their medicine bundle in blessing themselves.

Delegate Nathaniel Brown said the council should make the expected shortfall in revenue a priority, a sentiment echoed by his colleagues, and think well ahead in to the future. A Navajo energy company is studying the purchase of the Navajo Generating Station near the Arizona-Utah border and the Kayenta Mine, and the council would have some say if it moves forward.

“What are we going to leave for our children?” Brown said. “Are we going to preserve our language, our culture, our way of life? We need to look deep into the future and have a massive plan.”

Other leaders of Arizona tribes and past Navajo leaders attended the inauguration. But the Navajo Nation’s immediate past president, Russell Begaye, did not. He ran for re-election but didn’t make it beyond the tribe’s primary in August. 
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The partial government shutdown is slowing plans by some companies to issue stock to the public and potentially cutting off a key source of capital for the financial markets.

The shutdown, now in its fourth week, has all but darkened the Securities and Exchange Commission, the government agency that oversees the markets. Most of the SEC’s 4,400-person staff is furloughed, including lawyers and other staffers who must approve corporate paperwork for initial public offerings. This process typically takes two to three months.

Companies that have been moving toward issuing initial public offerings of stock in the coming months include such high-profile names as the ride hailing firms Uber and Lyft and the image-sharing platform Pinterest. Among the others are biotech and health sciences companies that depend on funding from the public markets that finance IPOs.

Billions of dollars are at stake for the companies as well as millions in fees for the Wall Street firms that facilitate the deals.

Brian Lane, a securities lawyer at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher who led the SEC’s corporation finance division in the late 1990s, said some IPOs planned for spring could be delayed until fall if the shutdown persists. For larger companies with ample cash reserves, the problem is manageable, Lane said. But smaller companies that lack deep sources of funding from the private credit markets or from venture capitalists could be hurt.

James Cox, a professor of securities law at Duke University, suggested that some IPOs eyed for the spring could end up being delayed as long as into 2020.

More than 800,000 federal employees, over half of them still on the job, missed their first paycheck Friday as the closure became the longest government shutdown of any kind in U.S. history. President Donald Trump has rejected suggestions that he agree to temporarily reopen the government while negotiating with Democrats on the wall along the Mexican border that he has demanded.

Here’s a closer look at how the shutdown is hampering the SEC’s work:

Agency staffing

Only a small SEC staff deemed essential is in place to monitor the markets and, in the agency’s words, “respond to emergency situations” involving market integrity and investor protection, including law enforcement. The SEC’s online financial reporting service for companies, known as Edgar and widely used by investors, continues to operate normally.

About 285 agency employees are still working, including around 110 in law enforcement, according to the SEC’s shutdown plan.

“Our staff continues to monitor the asset management space, track market activity, and watch for systems issues or other events that could disrupt the fair and orderly operation of the securities markets,” the SEC said in a statement.

Before the shutdown took effect late last month, the SEC had urged companies to request that paperwork for public stock offerings already in the pipeline be expedited. The agency said it approved roughly a dozen such registration statements.

Smaller companies hurt?

For the largest companies that were planning public stock offerings, “it’s not the end of the world,” said Alan Denenberg, a corporate lawyer who heads David Polk’s office in tech-centric Northern California. Companies with deep pockets, like Uber, Lyft and Pinterest, can ride out the delay, he said. That’s in contrast to perhaps dozens of smaller biotech and health sciences companies that hoped to launch IPOs within a few months. Their viability depends on access to the public capital markets.

“You’re suddenly thrown into a tailspin,” Denenberg said.

The consequences of these companies’ delayed access to capital can affect ordinary households, he noted. There may be clinical trials for drugs or devices that the companies won’t be able to help finance, a delay that would slow the public’s access to potential breakthroughs.

Open season for fraud?

With many SEC enforcement attorneys and staffers idled, some see warning lights flashing involving white-collar crime.

The shutdown is “essentially providing fraudsters and schemers with a free pass to swindle investors and small businesses,” said Rep. Maxine Waters, the California Democrat who now chairs the U.S. House Financial Services Committee, which oversees the securities industry.

With its depleted staff, the SEC can’t monitor the activities of the 26,000 investment firms, brokerages and stock exchanges that are registered with the agency, Waters said on the House floor recently. “Worse, the SEC is unable to hold bad actors accountable through most enforcement actions, preventing harmed investors from obtaining relief.”

Cox, the Duke University professor, doesn’t regard the problem as urgent — at least not yet.

“It’s smoldering, but it’s not flaming,” he said. A notable exception could be enforcement cases for which the statute of limitations will soon run out, thereby preventing the SEC staff from pursuing those cases, Cox noted.

In a case Tuesday, the SEC announced civil charges against a Ukrainian man and eight other individuals and companies in a scheme to profit by hacking into the Edgar computer system to steal companies’ earnings reports before their public release. They are accused of reaping $4.1 million from the scheme.

Shareholder proposals

The shutdown is preventing the SEC staff from processing or ruling on the hundreds of shareholder proposals that are challenged by companies each year. With the spring annual-meeting season a few months away, this means the agency can’t determine whether such proposals can be placed on the proxy ballots that companies issue to shareholders.

Investors typically try to place proposals on proxy ballots, for consideration in a vote at annual shareholder meetings, on issues ranging from executive pay to political spending to gender discrimination.

This year, for example, an activist shareholder wants to pre-emptively block the nation’s two largest private detention companies from housing immigrant children who have been separated from their parents. The companies, CoreCivic and GEO Group, want to bar the proposal from a vote. They say they have no intention of housing separated immigrant children or their parents, but they are fighting the activist’s attempt to require them to adopt explicit policies to that effect.

The companies have asked the SEC for permission to exclude the resolution by Alex Friedmann, associate director of the Human Rights Defense Center, from the ballots.
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A Colorado Springs woman who was among the first women to fly for the U.S. military during World War II has died at age 96.

Bill Young told The Gazette that his mother Millicent Young died Saturday of complications related to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

She was a member of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, known as WASPs.

They flew bombers and other warplanes in the U.S. to free up male pilots for combat service overseas.

In 2010, they were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, among the nation’s highest civilian honors.

Young was born near Lodgepole, Nebraska, and took flying lessons with money she earned growing wheat.

Her family says she mainly flew an AT-6 Texan single-engine plane, towing a target so male pilots could train for in-air combat.
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