School Safety Dashboard helps parents easily see data for public schools in Florida
TAMPA, Fla. - A Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School parent is hoping to make schools safer with new technology.
It's called the school safety dashboard and this week the organization released an updated version giving parents a comprehensive, one-stop shop tool to figure out how safe your child's school is.
"Alex was 14. He was in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Eagle Regiment marching band, and he went to English class one day and I thought that Alex would come home to me like he has every other day," Alex Schachter's dad, Max Schachter said.
That day was Valentine's Day 2018. Alex Schachter was among one of the 17 people killed.
READ: 'Living wax museum' comes to life with Bay Area students portraying famous figures
In the six years since the shooting, Max Schachter says hiccups and errors in school safety have come to the forefront especially when it comes to data collection and the tracking of safety issues inside Florida schools like fights, suicide rates, Baker Act rates and other data sets.
Pictured: Alex Schachter and Max Schachter
It turns out Schachter learned many schools, including MSJ were underreporting the data to the Department of Education and in some cases not reporting it at all.
"I have three other kids and I wanted to see what was happening in their schools and when I went to go look at the data that every school is reporting to the state, it was in an Excel spreadsheet with millions of cells of data, which made it very, very difficult for me to understand it," Schachter said.
READ: Education leaders, lawmakers look to solve the problem of chronic absenteeism
Schachter created the School Safety Dashboard which includes comprehensive data sets on the more than 4,200 public schools in Florida.
"You can take a look at funding. If you want to find out how much your pupil expenditure in your school, how much is the safe school allocation, mental health allocation in your school. If you want to find out how many teachers are in your school, what's the teacher to student ratio? What's the student to nurse ratio in school counselor and psychologist ratio?," Schachter explained.
All of it can be found with just a few clicks on schoolsafetydashboard.org. Schachter hopes the data puts pressure on the state and on schools districts to be more upfront about reporting issues and be more inclined to find solutions so something like what happened at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School doesn't happen again.
"Find out what's happening in your schools so that you can be part of the of the solution to make school safer," Schachter said.
For more information, click here.
SIGN UP: Click here to sign up for the FOX 13 daily newsletter
WATCH FOX 13 NEWS