VOLUSIA COUNTY, Fla. – R.J. Larizza, state attorney of the 7th Judicial Circuit, held a news conference Thursday morning in Bunnell with four county superintendents to announce an initiative focused on communicating to students the harms of violence and substance abuse, most specifically that of vaping.
“We want to be proactive. We want to do something together, the state attorney’s office with the districts, to try and address things like substance abuse and violence, and also not just to deal with what I call the ‘dark side,’ or issues or problems that come up in the school systems, but also to help on the positive side. The State Attorney’s Office wanted to be involved with offering internships or externships and also to come into the schools and communicate and talk to the students about the consequences for behavior, or criminal behavior, and also the opportunities that await them as they embark upon their journey to become adults and participate in our communities and in society,” Larizza said.
As part of the new approach the districts will be taking, all students will first go through new monthly educational programs about vaping, weapons and violence.
Roughly five hours of communication and curriculum on the consequences of substance abuse and violent behavior will be integrated into required “Life Skills and Resiliency” instruction for students in the 7th Circuit — Flagler, Putnam, St. Johns and Volusia counties — provided monthly to students in grades six through 12, St. Johns County School District Superintendent Tim Forson said.
Then, schools will hold assemblies for students and parents. The State Attorney’s Office is also rolling out a new Public Service Announcement featuring news clips of life-altering situations teens and kids found themselves to show, too.
“As we go forward, Attorney Larizza will create a video that talks about potential consequences for individuals who break the law, because we all know that students, they need to know all of it, they need to know the whole picture, what the risk of some of the behavior is and what the what the backside of that is, what those consequences are,” Forson said. “I really appreciate the forethought of our state attorney to bring superintendents together in District Seven to work on this particular issue.”
Larizza and Forson were joined at the Kim C. Hammond Justice Center by Flagler Schools Superintendent LaShakia Moore, Putnam County School District Superintendent Dr. Rick Surrency and Volusia County Schools Superintendent Dr. Carmen Balgobin.
Of the initiative’s three-pillar system — involving education, awareness and accountability — Dr. Balgobin focused on the pillar of awareness in her statements Thursday.
“It’s really important, as we’re ensuring that our community is truly aware of the dangers and the risk and consequences, that we engage all of the key stakeholders. We need to make sure that our parents, our students, our community members, our staff members; that they’re truly engaged in the work and they’re aware of the work that we’re doing,” Balgobin said. “We want to make sure that we’re educating them through PSAs, with public service announcements created by students for our students, created from our parents for our parents. We want to make sure that they understand truly what are some of the resources that are available to them. We can talk about counseling, we can talk about mental health and some of the additional resources that are available in our communities, and how we can bring those resources together and have at our fingertips so that we can be preventative, but also, if we need to react, that we have the right interventions in place.”
Just in Volusia schools last year — which is the largest of the districts — 30 vapes were confiscated that were laced with drugs. Several of those were fentanyl-laced.
The Volusia Sheriff’s Office told News 6 that one student each week was taken to the emergency room by ambulance for vaping incidents last year, too.
That is on top of the 50 weapons confiscated from Volusia campuses.
Moore addressed the next pillar, accountability. This was after a video played during the news conference that said all four school districts would implement “circuit-wide consequences for students who engage in substance use and violence.” Specifics on said consequences were not immediately available.
“With accountability, all four school districts, we work together to identify circuit-wide consequences and education that will be provided in each of our schools so that, again, as we together address a common issue, we address it with common consequences as well as common educational opportunities for our students. So, this isn’t about just providing a consequence, but really around — as Dr. B stated — around the awareness of the resources that are available and how we educate our students, as well as their families and this community, around the resources that we have available within our schools to help our students overcome these issues that we have identified,” Moore said.
Florida House Speaker Paul Renner, R-District 19, said at the news conference that the initiative should be seen as a pilot program that could potentially be taken statewide.
“The goal, I hope here, is to make those smaller problems today remain small and go away and not become large problems of addiction, gun violence and other things, and, God forbid, a school shooting,” Renner said. “This is what we need to see and I expect over the coming years that we’ll see all of these things start to go down, and we’ll measure and hopefully see less violence, less threats, less guns on campus, less substance abuse.”
Watch the news conference again in the video player below or by clicking here.
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