This month two Georgia legislators from different sides of the aisle have made waves by attaching their names to high-profile school safety bills in the House and Senate.
Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) on Monday, alongside Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL), introduced the School Safety Clearinghouse Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation that would establish a federally-funded and housed information database detailing best practices for school security and design. The bill comes as part of a series of school safety legislation introduced in recent years in response to school shootings, most notably the STOP School Violence Act which gave schools access to state and federal funding to improve security.
In this year’s state budget Gov. Brian Kemp included a one-time $30,000 school security grant for every public school in the state. Likewise in 2018 it was announced that state schools would receive an additional $2.5 million of federal funding for school safety. That’s a lot of money – and Perdue along with the bill’s other cosponsors want to make sure administrators have access to the best possible resources on how to spend it.
“Every student deserves access to a safe learning environment and a quality education,” said Perdue. “As a father and a grandfather, keeping children safe is my top priority. When a parent brings a child into a public school, there is an implicit agreement that their child will be kept safe. My mom and dad were schoolteachers, and they talked about school safety all the time. As an engineer by trade, I believe the first step to improving school security is addressing the structural safety of schools. Our bill would simply create a resource where state and local officials can find best practices for school security and design. Ultimately, it will allow parents, teachers, and administrators to make informed decisions about the best ways to keep their schools and communities safe.”
Meanwhile in the lower chamber, Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA-06) co-sponsored H.R. 4301, the School Shooting Safety and Preparedness Act, alongside fellow Democrat Reps. Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02) and Jahana Hayes (CT-05). The bill would create a standardized definition for “mass shooting” and “school shooting” and instruct the Departments of Education, Justice, and Health and Human Services to annually report uniform data on indicators of school crime as it pertains to school shootings.
These reports would track school shootings alongside the safety measures (or absence thereof) in place at those schools, such as building designs, communications and response plans, and more. They would also collect information on shootings themselves, from the types of firearms used to the motivations and backgrounds of the shooters. In essence it would create a uniform way for the government to track and understand school shootings – why they happen and how they might be prevented in the future.
The bill passed out of the House Education and Labor Committee last week by a 27 – 22 margin and will head to the House floor for a full vote.
