Can schools flag students who raised red flags in other districts?

The suspect in Wednesday’s deadly shooting at a Georgia school raised red flags in the past — they rose to the level of a visit from FBI agents last year — when he was a student in a different school district.

The visit did not result in criminal charges after the suspect, then 13, denied having a Discord account that threatened to cause harm at a high school.

We don’t yet know if the teen’s current school district in Georgia knew about that information, but WPTV Chief Investigator Jamie Ostroff looked into Florida statutes to see what, if any, information follows a student from one school district to the next.

Under Florida’s Early Education Code, school districts must “require each student, at the time of initial enrollment in the school district’s school, to report any prior school expulsions, arrests resulting in a charge, juvenile justice actions, and any appropriate referrals for mental health services by the school district.”

Under this law, school districts can expel a student if he or she has previously been expelled from a school that is not in the district.

“I don’t think that’s enough, because it relies on the perpetrator filing his own reports,” said Todd Michaels, an attorney who represented some of the families of the Parkland school shooting victims. “In cases where the perpetrators themselves file their own reports, that’s where you typically get the fewest actual reports.”

Michaels is calling for a nonpublic state database that school districts can access to see if a student is raising red flags.

On Thursday morning, a communications staff member from the Florida Department of Education contacted us by phone and told us to email our questions. As of Thursday evening, no one had responded to our email.