Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has done more great things for American education in her first 100 days than has ever been done by any Secretary in the last 45 years. American moms and dads haven’t realized it yet.
Part of me can’t blame them. Why should they be paying any attention to what’s happening in a federal bureaucracy that shouldn’t exist? They have lives. They have kids.
But part of me can. Because so did I. And I didn’t pay attention. And maybe if I had, my daughter wouldn’t have been murdered in her high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. I sent her there because it was supposed to be the best school. The safest school. I worked hard, I made money, and I thought I had done my job as a father.
After she was murdered, I wanted to know why. I wanted to be the last father whose kid was murdered in a school shooting. But I felt almost all alone. The media didn’t care. They had written their story before it happened. The Democrat Party Line gave them all they needed. No matter how or why my daughter was murdered, the story would be: it’s the Republicans’ fault because guns exist.
I was mocked on the Internet because the day she was murdered, I was wearing a Trump t-shirt. I always knew I liked the guy. Never thought I’d meet him. When I did, he asked me a question: how do we fix this? I told him he could form a commission to study school shootings. I thought that would help figure out the problems, and therefore fix them. He liked that idea, and did it.
When President Trump published the report of the Federal School Safety Commission, other parents whose children were murdered in a school sat around the table to talk about policy solutions we’d learned about that could keep more parents from becoming like us. The moment the press was allowed to speak, they started asking him about the government shutdown.
He was disgusted and embarrassed. For a man who’s been on television his entire life, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen him so disgusted. He basically said to the media: “We have parents here whose children were murdered in school, and they’re trying to help stop other children from getting murdered in school, and you’re asking me about the shutdown?”
The media are sick, sick people. He said it from the start. A lot of parents still don’t get it.
The media will cover school shootings, then turn around and say that schools are safe. Teachers unions will say that schools are safe, then turn around and promote policies that get teachers assaulted. All these Democrats will say that everything is fine in America, except that Donald Trump is President. And why, they’ll ask in outrage, would the President want to shut down the Department of Education?
I’ll tell you why: because it’s a cancer.
And I’ll give you a little example. It has never cared enough about the basic safety of school children to do the simplest thing: mention a federal law that’s been on the books for at least a quarter century. A law that says that states have to do some pretty basic things to keep kids safe.
I’ve been focused on school safety policy ever since my daughter was murdered on February 14, 2018, and I never even heard about this law. Apparently, almost no one else ever had either. It’s pretty simple: if states want federal money, they have to establish a system to assess which schools are dangerous. And they have to let kids in dangerous schools, or kids who have been beat up in schools, have a chance to attend a safe school.
This is elementary stuff. Yet, apparently, only one single state in America is actually following this federal law. It’s sick. But not surprising. The Department of Education is supposed to have one job: make sure states that get federal money follow federal law. They never bothered to do that on the most basic, important thing: safety. Instead, you know what they did. They promoted DEI, and transgenderism, and the Common Core, and so, so much else.
It also didn’t surprise me when I learned that Arkansas was the only state following this federal law to keep kids safe. After my daughter was murdered, I worked with Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Governor Ron DeSantis to make Florida schools safer. We did amazing things. At no point did I, or I think they, wonder: “How could the federal government help?” This law had been on the books for decades, and no one even knew it existed so why would we think of it.
But one guy we worked with was Jacob Oliva. He led Florida public schools during and after the shooting. He was a big part of our effort to make schools safe in Florida. And then Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders hired him to be Secretary of Education for Arkansas. Right now, only Arkansas is complying with a law passed by Congress intended to keep kids safe. Maybe because only Jacob ever bothered to read it.
Now McMahon has put every state on notice. We didn’t need another school shooting. We don’t want more school shootings. At least, anyone who isn’t a sick Democrat or journalist doesn’t. These Democrats and journalists will never do anything on education except attack Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.
McMahon is the first Secretary of Education, apparently, who bothered to read and/or mention that there’s this federal law that states have to follow to keep kids safe. She’s just like Trump. She’s smart. She cares. She hasn’t gotten any credit. But she’s gonna do her job.
Your kids will be safer because of Trump and McMahon, whether you like these officials or not. They’re not the types of politicians who care what the media says about them. They both built fortunes in business. Then gave that up to serve the citizens of the United States of America. They’ll get the job done, whether they get credit in the media or not.
But they can only do their part. You have to do yours.
For years, when parents asked me what they could do to try to keep their kids safe in school, I’d try to give them answers. Policy ideas. Tell them to run for school board.
But after five years of constant school shootings, I stopped replying this way. Everything they needed to know was out there. The policies were all out there. The school shootings were happening all the time. I’d tell anyone: if you’re still sending your kid to a public school and asking me a question like this, you are rolling the dice every day that they come home safe.
Secretary McMahon is doing her job. States have to do theirs. And you have to do yours. That’s the only way. And maybe if states do their jobs, and parents do their jobs, it will be safe to send kids to a public school in America again.
Andrew Pollack is the author of Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies That Created The Parkland Shooter and Endanger America’s Students.
