TAMPA -- Thursday is opening day of the 2017 Florida State Fair, and on Friday, hundreds, perhaps thousands of students will participate in Student Day at the fairgrounds.
There are several safety enhancements in place this year - improvements which officials started making after a student was killed three years ago during the same event. Student Day 2014.
On that day, the crowd got out of control. Several teenagers were ordered to leave the fairgrounds. One of them, 14-year-old Andrew Joseph III, was struck and killed by a vehicle as he tried to run across nearby I-4.
Since then, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office has installed several eyes in the sky. There are monitoring stations. More lights. A public address system. The midway is wider. Rules and policies have been changed to increase adult supervision and assure juveniles are not removed from the property without parental notification.
“Those are common sense things that should've been in place from the beginning. No one should have to die to make that better,” said Andrew Joseph, the teen’s father.
Since 2014, Joseph's parents have made it their mission to convince families not to send their kids to Student Day at the fair.
This year is no different.
“I would prefer parents take their kids someplace else,” said Joseph, “And not send spend a dollar with these people until they have it 100 percent correct.”
Despite the apparent improvements, the Josephs say more could and should be done.
For instance, they’d like to see firearms kept off fairgrounds property.
"You can't put guns and alcohol and kids in the same environment and feed it to the community as if it's safe. It's a nuclear bomb waiting to happen,” Joseph said.
The family, which plans to protest at the fairgrounds Friday, also wants mandatory adult supervision throughout Student Day - not just after 6 p.m., a change that was instituted in 2015.
“You can't go to Chuck E. Cheese or Publix and get a cookie without a parent,” said Joseph, “But you can come to this fair without your parent.”
Fair officials say they will continue to work on enhancing security measures.
There will be a raised police platform on Student Day. There will also be more cameras this year, they say.
There will also be a community action team, made up in part of civilians who will continue to pass along ideas to make as safe an environment as possible for students going forward.
Joseph says that at some point he wants the fair’s midway or some other part of the event to be re-named in his son’s memory - a way to acknowledge that it was his death that led to many of the improvements aimed at keeping other students safe.
