The man turned out to be a stridently pro-Israel, Messianic Jewish hip hop rapper from Florida’s East Coast. His group’s social media accounts include anti-Muslim memes and comments, according to an investigation by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications. “We are zealous for Israel,” one post said.

Another showed photos of Israelis killed by Hamas at a music festival on Oct. 7 under the caption, “They will not be forgotten and they will be avenged.” Others said Muslims were “waiting for Allah to destroy Israel” and equated pro-Palestinian protesters against Israel’s war in Gaza with supporting Hamas.

In emails, texts and in personal conversations, the man with a fit build, mustache and closely cropped haircut initially identified himself in recent weeks as “Ali Hafez” or “Omar Hafez.” He said he was in his mid-30s and a registered Democrat with a background in the music industry. He said he was a “revert” to Islam, born in Morocco, having lived in New York and owned property in Sarasota.

He also variously said he was a graduate student, affiliated with the College of Education, and the parent of a daughter named Aisha, also Muslim, attending UF. This week, he said she was so distraught she was prepared to drop out of UF, home to the largest number of Jewish students at any public university.

It wasn’t true.

Judge releases 8 of 9 pro-Palestinian protesters arrested at UF; one held on bond over felony charge

No one with those names is enrolled at UF, according to university records. A search of national court files, voter registrations, and property and other records found no one fitting the man’s names and descriptions of himself.

The mysterious man is Anthony Damon Wray, 46, of Melbourne, Florida, south of the Kennedy Space Center. He is a registered Republican and part of a Messianic Jewish hip hop group called Hazakim — one that is strongly pro-Israel — with his older brother, Michael Kenneth Wray, 48, of nearby Rockledge. Anthony Wray has a 20-year-old son, not a daughter, and his son also is not a student at UF, according to university records.

In a tense face-to-face meeting Wednesday at a coffee shop near campus with a journalist investigating the mystery and one of the Muslim professors he tried to fool, Wray — whose identity at that moment was still unknown — said his name was actually “Ali Omar Maldonado.” That wasn’t true, either.

He acknowledged he had repeatedly lied about himself during earlier conversations with the UF professors. He said he was trying to uncover what he described as anti-Muslim sentiment on UF’s campus to protect his daughter and said Palestinians had historical rights to land that is the modern state of Israel. He said Democrats were becoming as untrustworthy as Republicans toward Muslims, and said Florida’s political institutions and national news organizations were controlled by what he called Zionists.

“I’m not Mossad,” he said, referring to the Israeli spy agency. “I’m not recording you guys.”

Wray left the meeting abruptly amid persistent questions about his identity and said he felt he was being interrogated. He sped off in a silver 2021 Kia Soul — which helped solve the mystery since the car was registered under his own name and address in Melbourne. A photograph of Wray at the coffee shop matches promotional images and videos of him performing as Hazakim.

After he drove away, he texted, “I can’t believe what just happened.”

Wray’s motives and professional affiliation, if any, remain unclear. Some conservative activist groups have used undercover provocateurs to secretly record conversations in efforts to expose them later and embarrass their targets. Such operations in Florida would be hampered by laws against surreptitiously recording someone without their permission.

Conservative politicians have denounced pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. They have accused higher education professors of trying to indoctrinate students with progressive ideologies, undermining conservative beliefs in classrooms. On Florida’s campus, a small group of protesters has been active for more than three weeks.

“A lot of these people that are just spouting nonsense, they don’t know what they’re talking about,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a news conference at UF on May 8 as pro-Palestinian protesters chanted nearby. “And it’s very concerning, some of these elite institutions around the country, you know, are they just graduating a bunch of imbeciles? I think, unfortunately, that’s the case.”

A UF spokesman, Steve Orlando, did not immediately answer questions about how the university would respond to the subterfuge discovered on its campus.

UF threatens student protesters with suspension, banishment from campus for 3 years

Wray is well known in his hometown’s Messianic Jewish community for his conservative politics and activism, said Jeffery “J.D.” Gallop, the senior criminal justice reporter at the Florida Today newspaper there. Gallop is Jewish and has lived in the area for nearly 30 years.

He said he met Wray — who he described as having strong pro-Zionist and anti-abortion beliefs — at a rally in 2018 supporting DeSantis during his campaign for governor. He said he has occasionally interacted with Wray on social media.

“If there was something, I could see him at the center,” Gallop said in an interview. “It sounds like he’s either doing a private investigation of the Muslim community, or there’s something else going on. It would be something to watch.”

The central tenet of Messianic Judaism includes the belief that Jesus, who practitioners call Yeshua, is the divine savior. Its members generally adhere to conventional Christian beliefs but consider themselves Jewish. In contrast, mainstream Jews are still waiting for the arrival of the Messiah, who is called Moshiach in Hebrew.

In earlier emails and texts to one of the UF professors, Iman Zawahry, Wray wrote under his pseudonym that he was “very upset and concerned” about statements he didn’t specify by UF President Ben Sasse, and he called DeSantis “f***ing disgusting.”

Zawahry was named UF’s Undergraduate Teacher of the Year on April 30 and is an award-winning filmmaker who teaches media production. She responded to Wray that she agreed with his baiting assessment of the governor. She is among at least 177 faculty, staff and administrators in the journalism college. Zawahry, who met with the man she believed was Hafez on May 6 off-campus for a conversation, also was at the meeting at the coffee shop this week that exposed Wray.

A member of the group Faculty for Justice in Palestine, Zawahry had told Wray in earlier conversations about efforts to provide meals and advice to pro-Palestinian students protesting, and said she personally protested at the county courthouse after police arrested others on UF’s campus.

“No one is backing down,” Zawahry texted Wray about the campus protests, before she knew his real name and doubted his motives. Wray had been texting from a phone number traced to a T-Mobile account set up in New York and emailing from a Gmail address that included the name Hafez. She invited the man who turned out to be Wray and his daughter to join the protests on campus, and he replied that his daughter — who turned out not to exist — already was among the protesters.

Wray did not immediately respond to texts Thursday or Friday to the T-Mobile number, which was not configured to accept voice calls, or an email to his Gmail address. Someone who did not identify themselves responded, “wrong number,” to texts sent to two other mobile phone numbers listed for Wray on his Florida fishing license and voter registration records. His brother, Michael, also did not respond to a phone message or text.

“You hear about these things happening to other people,” Zawahry said. “You never think it’s going to happen to you.”

Judge: Florida official overstepped authority in DeSantis effort to stop pro-Palestinian group

DeSantis has harshly criticized pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses and praised crackdowns against them in Florida. His administration also sought unsuccessfully last year to ban a pro-Palestinian group, Students for Justice in Palestine, from UF and the University of South Florida in Tampa by asserting they were providing support to overseas terrorists.

“We will not let the inmates run the asylum in the Sunshine State,” DeSantis said at his campus news conference.

Under Sasse, the former Republican U.S. senator from Nebraska, UF opposed the administration’s efforts to dismantle Students for Justice in Palestine on campus amid First Amendment concerns.

Last month, UF issued new rules that promised to allow protest activities that included “speech,” “expressing viewpoints” and “holding signs in hands.” The new rules prohibited unspecified disruptions, sleeping, tents, sleeping bags, pillows or permanent structures.

Police arrested nine protesters at UF on April 29, including one student facing a felony battery charge because police said he spit on an officer’s arm. Another, a former UF student, was arrested on three misdemeanor charges for what police described as sitting in a lawn chair on the university’s Plaza of the Americas, wearing a medical mask and refusing to move when ordered. Sasse said students arrested in such protests would be suspended and banned from campus for three years, and professors would be fired.

“This is the most Jewish university in the country,” Sasse said at the news conference this month with the governor. “And it is great to be a Jewish Gator. I want all of our students to feel safe, but more than the subjective feeling I want our students to be safe.”

Wray told Zawahry while using his pseudonym that he was concerned about “the intense levels of Islamophobia, speech suppression, and Zionist propaganda on campus.” He wrote in an email to her April 18 he had heard that, “pro-occupation organizations freely ĂÛÍĂֱȄ their literature and lies while Muslim staff and orgs must remain silent.”

In his exchanges with Zawahry, Wray praised her activism, encouraged her to “keep doing an amazing job for us,” and said, “You looked great at the ceremony” where she was named Teacher of the Year. He called her critics “disgusting Islamophobes.”

“Haters are just jealous. Keep doing the damn thing, sister Iman,” he wrote.

This week, convinced that the self-described Muslim had been lying, Zawahry notified the journalism dean, filed a report with Gainesville police, talked with campus police and asked for help investigating the matter. A Gainesville police spokesman, Brandon Hatzel, said the agencies will coordinate their investigation with the FBI and Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

“Many Muslim and Arab students have come to me expressing concern for their safety and feeling unheard,” Zawahry said in an interview. “This atmosphere is what breeds people like Anthony Wray.”

In an unscheduled face-to-face visit weeks ago with another professor, Ali Altaf Mian, Wray had said he was affiliated with UF’s College of Education. He launched into a conversation about conservative leaders like DeSantis and whether Muslims felt their rights were suppressed on campus. That meeting also happened on April 18, a few hours after his first email to Zawahry.

“I remained silent hearing his statements,” said Mian, an assistant professor of religion in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, in an email he sent to his supervisor the same day that described the bizarre encounter in Mian’s campus office. “I also felt uncomfortable that someone I do not know is jumping right into very politicized territory.”

Mian confirmed the man who came to his office was the same person who had met with Zawahry, based on a photograph of Wray. He said the encounter lasted about 10 minutes.

“The event left me with the impression that something was out of joint given the fact that he went straight into political questions without first breaking the ice,” Mian said. “What also struck me as artificial was that the questions felt so rehearsed, almost as if someone was there to collect information from me and not to have a genuine conversation.”

Mian said Wray had come into his office and began pressing him on a range of political issues and “suppression of free speech.” Wray also said he met with a third professor he did not identify.

“I felt like he was trying to intimidate or frame me,” Mian said. “I just hope he’s not doing this to students.”

This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at vivienneserret@ufl.edu. You can donate to support our students .

The Florida Department of Education on Thursday told Reviver Academy that it has a week to explain its relationship with Fadi Kablawi, an imam at the Golden Glades mosque who in a religious ceremony last month referred to Israeli soldiers as “worse than the Nazis.” His remarks, some of which were made in Arabic, were posted online by the Middle East Media Research Institute, whose translation included Kablawi characterizing Jews as “apes and pigs” and praying to “annihilate” them.

“In Florida, we will not tolerate calls for genocide,” Cathy Russell, the deputy executive director of the office that oversees the state’s school choice program, wrote in a letter to the school.

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These campuses could get a second life as a charter school, due to a state law that gives charter schools access to surplus properties as well as zoning restrictions that could a restrict a school site from being used for non-educational reasons.

A that hasn’t been discussed during the district’s “Redefining Our Schools” efforts would give charter schools access to facilities the district no longer needs. The statute has been in effect for more than 25 years but has rarely been used, experts say.

But at least one operator of charter schools, the city of Pembroke Pines, is discussing the possibility of using that law to acquire district schools. “The state statute is very, very important to us,” Thomas Good, vice mayor of Pembroke Pines, told the City Commission at a May 1 meeting.

The law states “if a district school board facility or property is available because it is surplus, marked for disposal, or otherwise unused, it shall be provided for a charter school’s use on the same basis as it is made available to other public schools in the district.”

The district would still own the property and would serve as the landlord to the charter school, which would be required “to maintain the facility in a manner similar to district school board standards.”

The law could hinder the district’s ability to sell school sites to deal with budget problems. The district also risks losing more state money if a charter school were to replace an existing school, since funding for any students enrolled would go to the charter school.

“I think that’s why you see there’s not a whole lot of closures,” School Board member Debbi Hixon told the South Florida ĂÛÍĂֱȄ earlier this month.

Zoning restrictions could also require properties to remain schools, even if they are no longer owned by the school district.

Earlier this month, the district proposed closing Oakridge Elementary in Hollywood and making that space available for affordable housing, but the Hollywood City Commission opposed that idea. The Oakridge site is currently zoned for government use, but city commissioners said at a May 1 meeting the property could be zoned so that it can only be used for a school, even if the district were to dispose of the site.

“We have land use and zoning authority in our city, and if educational land use is the use we want, we don’t need to own the property to ensure the one and only use is that,” Hollywood Mayor Josh Levy said at a May 1 meeting.

The district’s initial plan also proposed closing two other schools in the 2025-26 school year: Olsen Middle in Dania Beach and Broward Estates Elementary in Lauderhill.

Schools Superintendent Howard Hepburn decided — after two weeks of town halls — not to recommend any school closures for the 2025-26 school year. However, the School Board on Tuesday rejected that plan and asked Hepburn to bring back options for closing eight schools either in the fall of 2025 or the fall of 2026, depending on how quickly the district can get community input.

Although the district has proposed no school closures in Pembroke Pines, Good said the statute could be useful to the city in the future. “If they decide to surplus one of their schools, because we’re a charter school, we can actually take possession of one of those schools by statute,” Good told the commission.

Some board members have expressed an interest in closing up to 42 schools within the next few years so that the capacity of district schools matches actual enrollment. The district has about 54,000 empty seats, disproportionately located in the south part of the county.

Good told the ĂÛÍĂֱȄ the city is not trying to take over these schools, and most city commissioners have voiced opposition to the district closing schools. But if the district were to close them anyways, “we’d like to continue to provide education for our neighborhoods. We don’t want those schools to go away.”

The A-rated Pembroke Pines charter school system is a popular option for students in the south end of of the county, serving about 6,000 students with a waiting list of about 5,000. It was created in the late 1990s after the school district was slow to build new schools to accommodate explosive growth in Pembroke Pines area.

The school district caught up in the 2000s, but then many other charter schools started opening the area, including Franklin Academy, Somerset Academy and Renaissance Charter School at Pines. That’s resulted in many district-run schools in the city being underenrolled. The district-run Pines Middle is the lowest enrolled school in the county at 34.5%.

Lynn Norman-Teck, executive director of the Florida Charter School Alliance, a membership group, didn’t respond to requests either in February or this week asking whether charter schools are interested in schools vacated by the district. But she expressed interest in 2020, when the district was also discussing whether to close schools.

“Charter schools would happily lease that facility, where the community is happy and the district is happy. It’s a win-win,” Norman-Teck said in February 2020. “A parent doesn’t really care who is running the school. They just want a great school.”

Board member Torey Alston, one of the more charter-school-friendly members on the School Board, said he’s open to this use for district property that may not be needed.

“District surplus property is just that. Surplus items should be available to the business community if the district expresses the need to remove the property from our inventory,” he told the ĂÛÍĂֱȄ. “If there was an opportunity for the City of Pembroke Pines or anyone else, that shows a level playing field.”

Hepburn told the ĂÛÍĂֱȄ on May 9 the possibility of charter schools taking over district schools did not factor into his initial recommendations. He said he proposed keeping all Pembroke Pines schools open because there are a large and growing number of students in the area who are choosing other options.

He has recommended changing several schools in the area, including turning Pines Middle into a 6-12 collegiate academy and converting Silver Shores Elementary in nearby Miramar to a K-8 school.

“It would not be wise of us to close schools in the area when there are so many students in the area,” Hepburn said. “It’s better for us to offer more innovative programs where we’re considered an option for parents to choose us instead of the competition.”

Isabella Rosario Blum was wrapping up medical school and considering residency programs to become a family practice physician when she got some frank advice: If she wanted to be trained to provide abortions, she shouldn’t stay in Arizona.

Blum turned to programs mostly in states where abortion access — and, by extension, abortion training — is likely to remain protected, like California, Colorado, and New Mexico. Arizona has enacted a law banning most abortions after 15 weeks.

“I would really like to have all the training possible,” she said, “so of course that would have still been a limitation.”

In June, she will start her residency at Swedish Cherry Hill hospital in Seattle.

According to new statistics from the Association of American Medical Colleges, for the second year in a row, students graduating from U.S. medical schools were less likely to apply this year for residency positions in states with abortion bans and other significant abortion restrictions.

Since the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, state fights over abortion access have created plenty of uncertainty for pregnant patients and their doctors. But that uncertainty has also bled into the world of medical education, forcing some new doctors to factor state abortion laws into their decisions about where to begin their careers.

Fourteen states, primarily in the Midwest and South, have banned nearly all abortions.  — a preliminary copy of which was exclusively reviewed by KFF Health News before its public release — found that the number of applicants to residency programs in states with near-total abortion bans declined by 4.2%, compared with a 0.6% drop in states where abortion remains legal.

Notably, the AAMC’s findings illuminate the broader problems abortion bans can create for a state’s medical community, particularly in an era of provider shortages: The organization tracked a larger decrease in interest in residencies in states with abortion restrictions not only among those in specialties most likely to treat pregnant patients, like OB-GYNs and emergency room doctors, but also among aspiring doctors in other specialties.

“It should be concerning for states with severe restrictions on reproductive rights that so many new physicians — across specialties — are choosing to apply to other states for training instead,” wrote Atul Grover, executive director of the AAMC’s Research and Action Institute.

The AAMC analysis found the number of applicants to OB-GYN residency programs in abortion ban states dropped by 6.7%, compared with a 0.4% increase in states where abortion remains legal. For internal medicine, the drop observed in abortion ban states was over five times as much as in states where abortion is legal.

In its analysis, the AAMC said an ongoing decline in interest in ban states among new doctors ultimately “may negatively affect access to care in those states.”

Jack Resneck Jr., immediate past president of the American Medical Association, said the data demonstrates yet another consequence of the post-Roe v. Wade era.

The AAMC analysis notes that even in states with abortion bans, residency programs are filling their positions — mostly because there are more graduating medical students in the U.S. and abroad than there are residency slots.

Still, Resneck said, “we’re extraordinarily worried.” For example, physicians without adequate abortion training may not be able to manage miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, or potential complications such as infection or hemorrhaging that could stem from pregnancy loss.

Those who work with students and residents say their observations support the AAMC’s findings. “People don’t want to go to a place where evidence-based practice and human rights in general are curtailed,” said Beverly Gray, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke University School of Medicine.

Abortion in North Carolina is banned in nearly all cases after 12 weeks. Women who experience unexpected complications or discover their baby has potentially fatal birth defects later in pregnancy may not be able to receive care there.

Gray said she worries that even though Duke is a highly sought training destination for medical residents, the abortion ban “impacts whether we have the best and brightest coming to North Carolina.”

Rohini Kousalya Siva will start her obstetrics and gynecology residency at MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C., this year. She said she did not consider programs in states that have banned or severely restricted abortion, applying instead to programs in Maryland, New Hampshire, New York, and Washington, D.C.

“We’re physicians,” said Kousalya Siva, who attended medical school in Virginia and was previously president of the American Medical Student Association. “We’re supposed to be giving the best evidence-based care to our patients, and we can’t do that if we haven’t been given abortion training.”

Another consideration: Most graduating medical students are in their 20s, “the age when people are starting to think about putting down roots and starting families,” said Gray, who added that she is noticing many more students ask about politics during their residency interviews.

And because most young doctors make their careers in the state where they do their residencies, “people don’t feel safe potentially having their own pregnancies living in those states” with severe restrictions, said Debra Stulberg, chair of the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Chicago.

Stulberg and others worry that this self-selection away from states with abortion restrictions will exacerbate the shortages of physicians in rural and underserved areas.

“The geographic misalignment between where the needs are and where people are choosing to go is really problematic,” she said. “We don’t need people further concentrating in urban areas where there’s already good access.”

After attending medical school in Tennessee, which has adopted one of the most sweeping abortion bans in the nation, Hannah Light-Olson will start her OB-GYN residency at the University of California-San Francisco this summer.

It was not an easy decision, she said. “I feel some guilt and sadness leaving a situation where I feel like I could be of some help,” she said. “I feel deeply indebted to the program that trained me, and to the patients of Tennessee.”

Light-Olson said some of her fellow students applied to programs in abortion ban states “because they think we need pro-choice providers in restrictive states now more than ever.” In fact, she said, she also applied to programs in ban states when she was confident the program had a way to provide abortion training.

“I felt like there was no perfect, 100% guarantee; we’ve seen how fast things can change,” she said. “I don’t feel particularly confident that California and New York aren’t going to be under threat, too.”

As a condition of a scholarship she received for medical school, Blum said, she will have to return to Arizona to practice, and it is unclear what abortion access will look like then. But she is worried about long-term impacts.

“Residents, if they can’t get the training in the state, then they’re probably less likely to settle down and work in the state as well,” she said.

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School Board members decided at the end of a five-hour meeting Tuesday night to direct Superintendent Howard Hepburn to bring back options on May 29 for possibly closing seven to eight schools during the 2025-26 year or delaying school closures until the 2026-27 school year. Hepburn is not expected to bring back any names of schools until a later date.

Board members said they want to ensure there is adequate time for community feedback, which they said was inadequate in recent proposals.

“It’s important that this process starts and ends with the community,” Board member Sarah Leonardi said.

But board members were divided about how quickly community input could happen.

Board Chairwoman Lori Alhadeff suggested that the School Board could get community input over the next months and have a school closure plan for 2025-26 ready by November, when families apply for magnet and choice programs and reassignments as the district starts redrawing boundaries.

Some other board members said that might be rushing the process, since many groups don’t meet during the summer months. They proposed delaying any closures until 2026-27. Board member Allen Zeman appeared to change his mind during the meeting, first naming five possible schools he wanted closed 2025-26 before deciding it might be better to wait.

“If it’s a tradeoff between community involvement and speed to get to the new steady state where we need to get to in Broward County, I’d rather get to the community conversation,” Zeman said. “Better to do what’s right than do it quickly.”

Most board members agreed that some schools should close but differed as to where they should be be concentrated. Some wanted the closures to touch every School Board member district in the county while others wanted to focus on areas where there’s a large number of underenrolled schools, primarily Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, Miramar and Pembroke Pines.

The school district was largely panned for a proposal that Hepburn brought to the seven town halls, which would have closed three schools and overhauled nine others.

The School Board had tasked former Superintendent Peter Licata to recommend closing or repurposing at least five schools by June. The district has lost numerous students to charter, private and home schools and now has space for about 54,000 more students than it has enrolled.

After Licata abruptly resigned last month, Hepburn inherited the initiative and Licata’s plan, known as “Redefining Broward County Public Schools.”

The plan initially presented to the public proposed closing Olsen Middle in Dania Beach, Oakridge Elementary in Hollywood and Broward Estates Elementary in Lauderhill.

After fierce opposition at seven town halls, Hepburn withdrew school closures from his plan, recommending instead to change programs or the grade configurations of a few schools, hoping the efforts would attract more students and state revenue.

“I honestly see that it’s not your plan. Take it and make it your own, because I see that you can do better. What you have now is trash,” Narnike Pierre Grant, a Parkland parent and chairwoman of the district’s Diversity Committee, said at Tuesday’s meeting.

Several board members were also critical of Hepburn’s proposal.

“This plan is not bold enough. It’s not transformative enough for what I know Broward County Public Schools can be,” Board member Torey Alston said.

Board member Daniel Foganholi questioned how realistic that idea was to base a plan entirely on trying to recruit students who left.

“How do you expect families to put their children back in public schools if we didn’t fix what they left for in the first place?” he asked.

Foganholi, who had advocated for an aggressive plan to make necessary changes at once, which he described as “ripping the Band-Aid off” in recent meetings.

“I want to see a solution. This is not a solution,” he said. “It’s not ripping the Band-Aid off. It feels like you’re pouring Neosporin on top of the Band-Aid and hoping it will work.”

The Florida High School Athletic Association held a discussion Tuesday about a potential change to the organization’s bylaws that would allow student-athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness under what is commonly known as an NIL policy. The 13-member board, which includes eight members appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in August, is slated to vote on the proposal during a June 4 meeting.

The proposal would overhaul a part of the FHSAA’s bylaws that govern “amateurism” in athletics. Schools and districts would have to remain on the sidelines in the deals, according to the plan.

“Student-athletes and their parents/guardians will be required to negotiate any NIL activities independent of their school, school district, or the FHSAA (Florida High School Athletic Association),” the proposal says.

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Business deals allowed under the policy would include, but not be limited to, commercial endorsements, promotional activities, social media presence, and product or service advertisements.

The potential change at the high-school level follows a seismic shift in collegiate sports over the past several years that allows college athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness. An initial NIL law went into effect in Florida in July 2021, and last year DeSantis approved changes that essentially expanded the law to allow universities to become more involved in the process.

Under Florida’s collegiate NIL law, colleges and universities are required to offer financial literacy workshops for student-athletes before they graduate. The high-school NIL policy discussed Thursday also seeks to promote financial education for athletes.

“By providing student-athletes with knowledge about potential legal and financial drawbacks associated with NIL activities, high schools can contribute to the overall welfare of their student-athletes,” the proposal says. “The FHSAA stands ready to help its student-athletes succeed in this new sports and business landscape.”

Board members did not decide during Tuesday’s discussion how high-school financial education would be addressed or whether districts would be responsible for providing it.

Tuesday’s discussion also touched off a debate about whether student-athletes should be allowed to hire agents to assist them in navigating NIL deals.

New Florida name, image, likeness bill, poised to become law, could drastically affect state athletic programs

A draft of the proposal posted on the FHSAA’s website prior to Tuesday’s meeting included an existing rule that prohibits high-school athletes from hiring agents “to manage his/her athletic” career.

Part of the policy also says that student-athletes and their families are “encouraged to seek legal counsel and tax advice when considering NIL activity.”

Paul Selvidio, a member of the FHSAA board who also is chief financial officer for Community School of Naples, argued that agents could be experts in NIL issues that would be a help to student-athletes.

“I think we have to be careful there, if we’re asking people to get advice on their NIL opportunities, this seems to be a gray area that needs further clarification,” Selvidio said.

Selvidio contended that agents would be an important part of educating athletes and families.

“I certainly know what an agent is, but an agent does a lot of different things. Which would include, I’d imagine, once NIL gets adopted here, they’ll be the local NIL experts,” Selvidio added.

Members of the board agreed to a change in the proposed policy that would ease the prohibition against hiring agents. The revised plan would restrict the hiring of agents “for all other activities other than advising on NIL related matters.”

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High-school athletes also would face various other restrictions when negotiating endorsement deals.

For example, student-athletes would not be allowed to use their school’s logos, mascots or uniforms when promoting businesses or products “unless granted authorization by prior written consent from the school, district or (Florida High School Athletic) Association, respectively,” according to the proposal.

Athletes looking to cash in from NIL deals also would be prohibited from endorsing certain products and services. Alcohol, tobacco, vaping, gambling, cannabis, prescription drugs and weapons are among the products and services that are not allowed under the proposal.

The proposal also would prohibit NIL business agreements from being used to recruit student-athletes.

“NIL activities shall not be used to pressure, urge, or entice a student-athlete to attend a school for the purpose of participating in interscholastic athletics. The NIL agreement shall not be used as a guise for athletic recruiting,” the proposal says, in part.

Superintendent Howard Hepburn has dropped his proposals to close three schools in 2025 and to remove the Montessori magnet program from Virginia Shuman Young in Fort Lauderdale, to the relief of those who fought against those changes.

His latest proposal would change or reconfigure four schools in hopes of winning back students who have left for charter, private or home school options. District schools have about 54,000 more seats than students due to years of declining enrollment.

The School Board plans to discuss the ideas at a workshop scheduled for 5 p.m. Tuesday.

Hepburn’s could generate up to $6.7 million in state funds if the district is able to recapture students from four low-enrolled schools that are proposed for major changes. The proposals were included in the earlier plan, but no dollars figure were associated with them until Hepburn released the newest plan Friday.

Among the ideas still being considered:

— Convert Pines Middle in Pembroke Pines into a 6-12 collegiate academy similar to the successful Millennium 6-12 in Tamarac. The proposal seeks to increase enrollment by 123 students, which could increase revenues by $1.1 million.

— Change Silver Shores Elementary in Miramar from a neighborhood boundary school to a full-choice school with a yet-to-be-determined theme where students would apply to get in. Recapturing 205 students from charter, private or home schools would net $1.85 million.

— Convert Hollywood Central Elementary into a K-8 school. If the district can attract 278 students from non-district schools, that would mean $2.5 million.

— Change North Fork Elementary in Fort Lauderdale from a neighborhood boundary school to a full-choice “commuter school” where parents drop off and pick up their kids before and after work. If the school can increase enrollment by 143 students, it would add nearly $1.3 million in state funds.

“When we bring more students back into our schools it equates to recurring revenues every year, versus trying to close a school when we have an abundance of students we can recapture,” Hepburn said at a town hall last week.

The new proposal doesn’t give any dollar figures related to attracting students back to the low-enrolled Bennett Elementary in Fort Lauderdale.

Hepburn initially proposed moving the Virginia Shuman Young Montessori program there since Bennett is adjacent to Sunrise Middle in Fort Lauderdale, which also has a Montessori program. That idea faced vocal opposition from about 200 parents at a Fort Lauderdale town hall last week and is no longer being recommended.

The district is still considering a program addition to Bennett but hasn’t provided any details on what that might be.

“I absolutely think with the right program and the right resources and support from the district it’s entirely possible” to attract more students to Bennett and other underenrolled schools, said Erin Gohl, a member of the Fort Lauderdale Education Advisory Board and president of the Virginia Shuman Young PTA.

The superintendent is no longer recommending closing Oakridge Elementary in Hollywood, Olsen Middle in Dania Beach or Broward Estates Elementary in Lauderhill for the 2025-26 school year, although the School Board can make any changes it wants.

The proposals for Olsen and Oakridge drew fierce opposition from parents and elected officials in the area.

They noted that Oakridge is 76% full and didn’t meet the district’s definition of being underenrolled, while Olsen has increased enrollment by about 100 students this year, and 10,000 new housing units have been approved for Dania Beach.

“I am thankful that the School District created opportunity for community feedback, and pivoted once city leadership and the community highlighted factors about Olsen Middle and Oakridge Elementary that the new superintendent may not have been aware of,” Hollywood Mayor Josh Levy told the South Florida ĂÛÍĂֱȄ.

Levy said he supports converting Hollywood Central into a K-8.

“In Hollywood, K-8’s are very popular,” he said. “The charters have brought them in very successfully and we have been urging the school district to think about that for our public schools as well.”

Still, School Board member Allen Zeman told the ĂÛÍĂֱȄ he has concerns about agreeing to only select parts of Hepburn’s initial proposal.

He said he opposes turning Hollywood Central into a K-8 without also reducing middle school enrollment elsewhere, and now closing Olsen Middle isn’t a recommendation. Zeman said he thinks some schools will still need to close to deal with the district’s enrollment problem.

“I would have preferred the superintendent bring us a handful of options with the pros and cons of each one,” he said. “The School Board has the statutory authority to close schools or shift programs or repurpose schools. Had we had that information, we could make those decisions on a case-by-case basis that makes greater sense to our community.”

However, Zeman, who is not up for reelection this year, acknowledged Thursday night at a meeting in Hollywood that School Board elections for five seats may make it difficult for the board to close schools.

“It’s difficult to make real big changes at a time when everyone is out campaigning, so it may make sense to take two years of change and do it all next year,” he said Thursday night.

Then will come the next effort: Deciding what will go in that place at Marjory Stoneman ĂÛÍĂֱȄ High, “where the spirit of a lot of people are,” says Broward School Board member Debra “Debbi” Hixon, who lost her husband, Chris Hixon, ĂÛÍĂֱȄ’ wrestling coach and athletic director, in the shooting.

For years, many community members have wanted the fenced-off building gone, no longer wanting to see a reminder of the killings at the school. Then last year, the Broward school district announced it would be demolished this summer, after the school year ends. And the district recently confirmed the 1200 building is still on track to be razed next month, likely by mid-month.

“I will be personally glad to not drive up to MSD and see the building,” Hixon said.

She and many others want it to endure as a place to always honor the 17: Alyssa Alhadeff, Scott Beigel, Martin Duque Anguiano, Nicholas Dworet, Aaron Feis, Jaime Guttenberg, Christopher Hixon, Luke Hoyer, Cara Loughran, Gina Montalto, Joaquin Oliver, Alaina Petty, Meadow Pollack, Helena Ramsay, Alex Schachter, Carmen Schentrup and Peter Wang.

“It’s really important whatever we put in that space reminds us of those amazing lives,” Debbi Hixon said. “I want it to be a place where people remember to live life well.”

Regardless of what is chosen, she wants it to remain a “place with life, the place of 17, they were vibrant people who loved life.”

Readying the building

With the demolition of any building, hazardous materials can be a concern. There are many requirements.

The school district received full control of the three-story building last year, and clearing out the structure became a priority.

“We understand the urgency of this matter, but it is essential to prioritize safety above all else,” the district announced last year. “In preparation for the demolition, crews will clean and clear the building, adhering to state and the Environmental Protection Agency’s landfill disposal regulations.”

In a recent statement, the school district confirmed that hazardous chemicals and electronics were removed in April. In an email that month, former Broward Schools Superintendent Peter Licata detailed some of the preparations, also noting that “the 1200 building of MSD has been cleaned (all floors).”

Items left inside on the day of the shooting, on Valentine’s Day 2018, have been returned to students and staff, for “any items they desired,” according to Keyla ConcepciĂłn, district spokesperson. “Families of victims also had some items returned to them.”

ConcepciĂłn said the building will be taken down by pieces, there will be no implosion; nothing else on campus will be damaged or impacted.

Aware that the 1200 building would be removed this year, a select number of people, including some Congressional members and federal officials, have been inside the building in recent months. They walked past abandoned teddy bears, shattered glass, posters, yearbooks.

“It’s a life-changing experience to walk through that building,” Max Schachter, who lost his 14-year-old son, Alex, told the South Florida ĂÛÍĂֱȄ in February. “The stories it tells, no one else can tell.”

°Âłó±đČÔÌęVice President Kamala Harris toured the building in March, she said she felt the building was “frozen in time.” She saw classrooms where outdated laptops were left open, and the doors that didn’t stop the shooter’s bullets.

Hixon acknowledged the building is still scheduled to be razed mid-June, and noted the planning that remains ahead.

There will be discussions on what will be on the site, but they haven’t yet started on the School Board level. “We just know we want something there, something reflective of the lives that were lost,” Hixon said.

Off site, the Parkland 17 Memorial Foundation is still deciding what kind of memorial will go on a 1-acre site on the border of Parkland and Coral Springs at the former Heron Bay Golf Club. “What’s going there, we’re still working on,” said Tony Montalto, vice chair of the foundation, on Friday. His daughter, Gina, was 14 when she was killed at Stoneman ĂÛÍĂֱȄ.

Lisa J. Huriash can be reached at lhuriash@sunsentinel.com. Follow on X, formerly Twitter, @LisaHuriash

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas could soon offer up to $5 million in grants for schools to outfit surveillance cameras with artificial intelligence systems that can spot people carrying guns. But the governor needs to approve the expenditures and the schools must meet some very specific criteria.

The AI software must be patented, “designated as qualified anti-terrorism technology,” in compliance with certain security industry standards, already in use in at least 30 states and capable of detecting “three broad firearm classifications with a minimum of 300 subclassifications” and “at least 2,000 permutations,” among other things.

Only one company currently meets all those criteria: the same organization that touted them to Kansas lawmakers crafting the state budget. That company, ZeroEyes, is a rapidly growing firm founded by military veterans after the fatal in Florida.

pending before Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly highlights two things. After , school security has become a multibillion-dollar industry. And in state capitols, some companies are successfully persuading policymakers to write their particular corporate solutions into state law.

ZeroEyes also appears to be the only firm qualified for state firearms detection programs under laws enacted last year in Michigan and Utah, bills passed earlier this year in Florida and Iowa and legislation proposed in Colorado, Louisiana and Wisconsin.

On Friday, Missouri became the latest state to pass legislation geared toward ZeroEyes, offering $2.5 million in matching grants for schools to buy firearms detection software designated as “qualified anti-terrorism technology.”

“We’re not paying legislators to write us into their bills,” ZeroEyes co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer Sam Alaimo said. But “if they’re doing that, it means I think they’re doing their homework, and they’re making sure they’re getting a vetted technology.”

ZeroEyes uses artificial intelligence with surveillance cameras to identify visible guns, then flashes an alert to an operations center staffed around the clock by former law enforcement officers and military veterans. If verified as a legitimate threat by ZeroEyes personnel, an alert is sent to school officials and local authorities.

The goal is to “get that gun before that trigger’s squeezed, or before that gun gets to the door,” Alaimo said.

Few question the technology. But some do question the legislative tactics.

The super-specific Kansas bill — particularly the requirement that a company have its product in at least 30 states — is “probably the most egregious thing that I have ever read” in legislation, said Jason Stoddard, director of school safety and security for Charles County Public Schools in Maryland.

Stoddard is chairperson of the newly launched National Council of School Safety Directors, which formed to set standards for school safety officials and push back against vendors who are increasingly .

When states allot millions of dollars for certain products, it often leaves less money for other important school safety efforts, such as electronic door locks, shatter-resistant windows, communication systems and security staff, he said.

“The artificial-intelligence-driven weapons detection is absolutely wonderful,” Stoddard said. “But it’s probably not the priority that 95% of the schools in the United States need right now.”

The technology also can be costly, which is why some states are establishing grant programs. In Florida, legislation to implement ZeroEyes technology in schools in just two counties cost a total of about $929,000.

ZeroEyes is not the only company using surveillance systems with artificial intelligence to spot guns. One competitor, Omnilert, pivoted from emergency alert systems to firearms detection several years ago and also offers around-the-clock monitoring centers to quickly review AI-detected guns and pass alerts onto local officials.

But Omnilert does not yet have a patent for its technology. And it has not yet been designated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as an anti-terrorism technology under a 2002 federal law providing liability protections for companies. It has applied for both.

Though Omnilert is in hundreds of schools, its products aren’t in 30 states, said Mark Franken, Omnilert’s vice president of marketing. But he said that shouldn’t disqualify his company from state grants.

Franken has contacted the Kansas governor’s office in hopes she will line-item veto the specific criteria, which he said “create a kind of anti-competitive environment.”

In Iowa, legislation requiring schools to install firearms detection software was amended to give companies providing the technology until July 1, 2025, to receive federal designation as an anti-terrorism technology. But Democratic state Rep. Ross Wilburn said that designation was originally intended as an incentive for companies to develop technology.

“It was not put in place to provide, promote any type of advantage to one particular company or another,” Wilburn said during House debate.

In Kansas, ZeroEyes’ chief strategy officer presented an overview of its technology in February to the House K-12 Education Budget Committee. It included a live demonstration of its AI gun detection and numerous actual surveillance photos spotting guns at schools, parking lots and transit stations. The presentation also noted authorities arrested about a dozen people last year directly as a result of ZeroEyes alerts.

Kansas state Rep. Adam Thomas, a Republican, initially proposed to specifically name ZeroEyes in the funding legislation. The final version removed the company’s name but kept the criteria that essentially limits it to ZeroEyes.

House K-12 Budget Committee Chair Kristey Williams, a Republican, vigorously defended that provision. She argued during a negotiating meeting with senators that because of student safety, the state couldn’t afford the delays of a standard bidding process. She also touted the company’s technology as unique.

”We do not feel that there was another alternative,” Williams said last month.

The $5 million appropriation won’t cover every school, but Thomas said the amount could later increase once people see how well ZeroEyes technology works.

“I’m hopeful that it does exactly what we saw it do and prevents gun violence in the schools,” Thomas told The Associated Press, “and we can eventually get it in every school.”

___

Lieb reported from Jefferson City, Missouri. Associated Press writer Hannah Fingerhut contributed from Des Moines, Iowa.

The from Superintendent Howard Hepburn, released Friday evening, will keep open three schools he had previously considered for closure: Oakridge Elementary in Hollywood, Olsen Middle in Dania Beach and Broward Estates Elementary.

Hepburn has also decided against converting the popular Virginia Shuman Young Elementary in Fort Lauderdale from a Montessori magnet school to a neighborhood school, following a large organized effort to oppose it during a Monday night town hall at Fort Lauderdale High.

Hepburn is still keeping some less controversial recommendations in his “Redefining Broward Schools” plan, including converting the low-enrolled Pines Middle in Pembroke Pines into a collegiate 6-12 academy and turning Hollywood Central Elementary into a K-8 school.

“School closures are no longer proposed at this stage,” district spokesman John Sullivan said. Instead Hepburn “will recommend grade and program reconfigurations, explore partnerships, and sell property to regain students and bolster capital reserves.

“He will continue assessing BCPS with community feedback to shape the next phase of redefining our schools,” Sullivan said.

The School Board will discuss these proposals at a workshop at 5 p.m. Tuesday at Plantation High.

School Board member Allen Zeman anticipated the changes and attributed them to a flawed process and upcoming elections.

Zeman has been a top advocate for closing low-enrolled schools and investing that money into the remaining schools to improve student achievement. But during a meeting Thursday night with Hollywood residents, he appeared ready to admit defeat — at least for now. He said the district may have greater success if it postpones the plan until next year.

“There’s a chance, and I’d give it more than a 50-50 chance, that we decide the process we followed wasn’t sufficient to satisfy the public demand for information, nor was it sufficient to give us the right data so we can make data-informed decisions,” Zeman said at the meeting, which was by Hollywood Beach TV.

He also noted that this is an election year, with five School Board seats up. Zeman is not one of them; his term expires in 2026.

“It’s difficult to make real big changes at a time when everyone is out campaigning, so it may make sense to take two years of change and do it all next year,” he said.

The School Board agreed last summer to make plans to close or repurpose at least five schools for the 2025-26 school year, with any final decisions made next month. But the process has been wrought with challenges, including the chief architects of the district’s plans, Superintendent Peter Licata and Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer Zoie Saunders, both stepping down unexpectedly.

Board members also have complained district administrators have been slow to release information, and then once they did, used data and logic that many found to be flawed and targeted at only a few communities.

— While the process had focused on schools that were underenrolled, one of the schools considered for closure, Oakridge Elementary, is 76% full, well above the district’s stated threshold.

— Another school considered for closure, Olsen Middle, had a 102-student growth this school year, and more than 10,000 new housing units have been approved in the city.

— The district’s closures focused on low-income schools in the east part of the county, while leaving all schools in Pembroke Pines open, despite severe underenrollment, including one school that’s two-thirds empty.

— Administrators proposed converting Virginia Shuman Young Elementary from a Montessori magnet school to a neighborhood school, arguing residents in the Victoria Park neighborhood couldn’t get in. But the district has assigned 150 neighborhood seats, and they’re not all being used, and the homeowners association opposed the change.

Parents, students, teachers and supporters of the school packed the Fort Lauderdale High auditorium Monday night to oppose the proposed change.

Hepburn “had to sit in front of 200 people with VSY shirts on. Who thinks VSY is going to be on his recommendation list?” Zeman asked the Hollywood audience Thursday night.

Zeman agreed to hold the meeting at Hollywood City Hall on Monday night after complaints from area residents about seven district town halls around the county. In those meetings, district staff and School Board members did not answer questions from audience members. Attendees were allowed to speak for a minute or two, with their microphones sometimes being shut off if they went over.

The district refused to release its proposed plan until the first town hall at Hollywood Hills High on April 29, giving attendees no advance notice that two schools in their area may be closed.

“That was a process foul on behalf of Broward County Public Schools,” Zeman told attendees Thursday night. “I’ll apologize to the whole community for that. You should have had it way ahead of time. You’re welcome to beat me up over that, even though it was the superintendent’s actions.”