PARKLAND, Fla. – A Parkland father who turned tragedy into action is set to unveil a new tool designed to help parents across the country keep their children safe at school.
On Thursday, Max Schachter and his nonprofit Safe Schools for Alex officially will launch the School Safety Dashboard — the first national online resource of its kind, offering user-friendly, transparent safety data for every public school and school district in America, where information is available.
Schachter founded Safe Schools for Alex after his 14-year-old son, Alex, was killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Since then, he’s been on a mission to prevent similar tragedies —and he believes this dashboard is a major step forward.
He spoke with Local 10’s Christina Vazquez about the dashboard on Tuesday.
“(I) made the dashboard so that they (parents) can be advocates for school safety and they can work with their schools to make their schools safer but it is not only parents, it is for school board members. School board members don’t have access to dashboards as they should, so on Thursday, we are launching a first-of-its-kind school safety dashboard in every state in the country so we are really excited,” he said.
That experience inspired him to build a platform that translates complex public data into a user-friendly format. The dashboard also allows users to view incidents of violence, suspensions, expulsions and other safety-related metrics — not just within schools, but across districts and states.
“I will be able to look at different schools and compare them,” Schachter said during a demonstration of the platform.
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The idea was born out of Schachter’s own experience trying to understand what went wrong after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. What he found, he said, was a mess of complicated spreadsheets and inaccessible data.
“When I went to go look at the data, it was just in a massive Excel spreadsheet, with millions of cells of data. It was very hard to understand,” he said. “School safety data should be transparent. It should not be a secret, and every parent should have access to this information.”
The platform was built with support from the University of Florida and Cleartelligence, and received funding from the Bureau of Justice Assistance for its Florida-based pilot program.
Schachter said that the dashboard gives families the tools to ask questions, demand change, and make informed decisions about where their children learn.
“It is not consistent across the country. In Florida, after Parkland, we take this very very seriously, but unfortunately as I travel around the country, there is still a lot of complacency, they can still go on with their lives and think this will not happen here,” Schachter added.
The site — SchoolSafetyDashboard.org — aims to go beyond numbers. It’s meant to spark conversations and encourage collaboration between families, educators, and lawmakers to reduce school violence and create supportive learning environments.
The official launch of the school safety dashboard is set for Thursday, with a related fundraiser being held that day from 4 to 10 p.m. at a pickleball complex in Coconut Creek.
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