Georgia lawmakers agree on school safety bill after Apalachee High School shooting

ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia lawmakers said repeatedly that a student-tracking database had been removed from a school safety bill, but parts of that plan survive.

The Senate and House gave final approval to House Bill 268 on Monday, sending the response to September’s deadly shooting at Apalachee High School to Gov. Brian Kemp for his signature or veto.

“It’s been a long hard road since Sept. 4,” Republican Rep. Holt Persinger of Winder, the bill’s sponsor, told reporters with tears in his eyes after the bill passed. “We’ve been working on this almost every single day.”

The push to share information was driven by the belief among many that the Barrow County school system didn’t have a full picture of the warning signs displayed by the 14-year-old accused in the fatal shootings of two students and two teachers at the school.

But there was loud opposition from both Democratic and Republican constituencies that a database kept by the Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency would create a permanent blacklist with no due process that could treat racial and religious minorities unfairly.

“If that is your concern with the bill, it has been removed from the bill,” Republican Sen. Bill Cowsert of Athens told senators Monday. “There will not be a database kept with GEMA or anybody else. Students still have their school record, but there’s not going to be some amorphous database that can haunt a child, even when they’ve really never acted on their immature comments.”

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The original database envisioned including not only school records and law enforcement reports, but information from juvenile courts and child welfare authorities. Those elements are absent from the final bill. But the measure does direct GEMA to create a “statewide alert system” that would include the names of students who an investigation has found threatened violence or committed violence at schools.

The measure directs GEMA to make rules about when names would be included and how someone could petition to be removed. Selected people from schools statewide could access the information.

Persinger told The Associated Press that the final bill has “components” of the original database.

“We’ve got to communicate if there’s a threat,” Persinger said.

The system would only be built if lawmakers provide money. The House proposed spending $25 million in the budget beginning July 1, but senators refused to spend any money. A final decision on spending will be made in coming days as the chambers negotiate their differences on the budget.

The ability to track threats from school district to school district was one of the key goals that officials raised following the Apalachee shooting. School officials never became aware that a sheriff’s deputy in Jackson County had interviewed Colt Gray in May 2023 after the FBI passed along a tip that Gray might have posted a shooting threat online. That report would have been forwarded to middle school officials in Jackson County under the bill, but wouldn’t have followed Gray when he enrolled as a freshman in nearby Barrow County after skipping eighth grade entirely.

The bill requires police agencies to report to schools when officers learn that a child has threatened death or injury to someone at a school. It also mandates quicker transfers of records when a student enters a new school, creates at least one new position to help coordinate mental health treatment for students in each of Georgia’s 180 school districts and sets up an anonymous reporting system statewide.

Public schools would have to provide wearable panic buttons to employees and would be required to submit electronic maps of their campuses to local, state and federal agencies once a year.

The bill would also make adult prosecution the default when children aged 13 to 16 are charged with terroristic acts at school, any aggravated assault with a gun, or attempted murder.

“This wasn’t a ‘we can turn around and run away from this’ bill. This was a must-do bill, and we had to secure our environments for our children,” said House Education Committee Chairman Chris Erwin, a Republican from Banks.