RNC night 1: Freed hostages, Cuban immigrant and Parkland dad make case for Trump's reelection
4. Andrew Pollack: ‘The safety of our kids’ is at stake in the 2020 election
Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was one of the victims of the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, gave a speech slamming the school discipline policies championed by the Obama-Biden administration.
After sharing details about the heroism his daughter demonstrated on the day of the shooting, Pollack brought up a meeting he had with the president at the White House shortly after Meadow’s death. “I got to see who President Trump really is. He’s a good man and a great listener, and he cuts through the bs.”
“He formed a school safety commission that issued dozens of recommendations to make schools safer,” Pollack recalled. “But I’ll bet you never heard about that. Instead, the media turned my daughter’s murder into a coordinated attack on President Trump, Republicans, and our Second Amendment.”
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“After my daughter’s murder, the media didn’t seem interested in the facts so I found them myself,” he explained. “I learned that gun control laws didn’t fail my daughter, people did. The gunman had threatened to kill his classmates before. He had threatened to rape them; he had threatened to shoot up the school, every red flag you could imagine.”
“But the school didn’t just miss these red flags, they knowingly ignored them,” Pollack proclaimed. “Far-left Democrats in our school district made this shooting possible because they implemented something they called restorative justice.”
“Restorative justice,” he explained, “puts kids and teachers at risk and makes shootings more likely.”
As a Washington Examiner op-ed published in April 2018 noted, “restorative justice” was part of former President Barack Obama’s “Guiding Principles: A Resource Guide for Improving School Climate and Discipline.” This education framework, which Obama worked on in collaboration with then-Education Secretary Arne Duncan, worked to “reduce the number of suspensions and expulsions, particularly among students of color and students with disabilities.”
The implementation of so-called restorative justice in Parkland schools, the op-ed argued, allowed the school shooter to “commit crimes (including assaults, threats, (and) bringing weapons to school) without being arrested.”
“Had he been arrested, he might have undergone a mental health evaluation or been sentenced to a juvenile detention center and kept far away from his fellow students,” rendering him unable to carry out the mass shooting that killed Meadow Pollack and many others.
“I was just fine with the old approach to discipline and safety, it was called discipline and safety,” Pollack said. “But the Obama-Biden administration took Parkland’s bad policies and forced them into schools across America. When President Trump rescinded Obama’s guidance on restorative justice policies, he put an end to that and that meant the world to me.”
“It’s hard to tell how much Mr. Biden understands about what happened at Parkland,” he argued. “Mr. Biden has campaigned on bringing back restorative justice … as part of his unity platform with Bernie Sanders and has pledged to implement it in school districts across America.”
“I truly believe the safety of our kids depends on whether this man is reelected,” Pollack said of Trump as his speech concluded.
