PACKING HEAT: SCHOOL SHOOTING PREPAREDNESS, SAFETY INVESTMENT, AND EVERYDAY THREATS IN SOUTH FLORIDA SCHOOLS

This dissertation examines how “school safety” is understood, practiced, and contested in south Florida following the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (MSDHS). Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Miami-Dade and Broward County public schools—two of the nation’s largest and most unequal districts—the project analyzes how administrators, teachers, students, parents, security guards, and support staff interpret and implement the school-shooting preparedness mandates introduced under Florida Senate Bill 7026 (SB 7026). Rather than treating “safety” as self-evident, the dissertation approaches it as a historically contingent and socially differentiated value shaped by racialized experiences of gun violence, unequal resource landscapes, and the neoliberal logics of preparedness.Preparedness—expressed through school-hardening initiatives, lockdown drills, surveillance technologies, and parent-funded protective devices—has become the dominant idiom through which safety is made actionable. Yet preparedness presumes the inevitability of catastrophe and orients school communities toward a statistically rare threat. Its implementation is uneven, refracted through profound socioeconomic and racial disparities embedded in Florida’s property-tax-based school funding system. These inequalities shape not only the tools schools can acquire but the very meaning of preparedness across communities.Drawing on interviews and observations, the dissertation shows that school community members diverge sharply in their assessments of risk and the utility of safety measures. Black educators and families, whose everyday experiences with gun violence differ markedly from those of white and Latino counterparts, often view post-Parkland reforms as misaligned with the more pervasive forms of harm shaping their lives. At the same time, parents in wealthier communities marshal private resources to enhance school security, further widening disparities. Across contexts, the affective experience of preparedness—anxiety, resignation, skepticism, humor—reveals the emotional labor required to inhabit an anticipatory stance toward violence that may never materialize.Integrating anthropological scholarship on risk, security, affect, and neoliberal governance, the dissertation argues that school-shooting preparedness is less a technical solution than a cultural project that magnifies longstanding U.S. contradictions around safety and gun violence. Ultimately, it reframes school safety as a contested social terrain shaped by unequal histories of violence, divergent threat imaginaries, and the enduring American ethos of individualized self-protection.