Atlanta – Georgia’s legislators are abandoning the creation of a database throughout the country to collect information about students who can commit violence, even when they run other parts of the school safety bill aimed at preventing school shooting like this in September in the High School of Appalachi.
The legislators of the Chamber and the Senate presented a compromise version of the Bill 268 of the House, which then unanimously accepted the Senate Judicial Committee. This created it for the final transition to the final days of Georgia’s legislative session in 2025.
The pressing of sharing information was conditioned by the belief among many that Barrow’s school system has no complete picture of the warning signs shown by the 14-year-old, accused of the fatal shooting of two students and two teachers. But there was a strong opposition to both democratic and republican constituencies that the database would create a permanent black list without a proper process that could treat unfairly racial and religious minorities unjust.
“The reason that he would not fly was the discount of all points of the political spectrum, who worry about the fact that their child was only branded for accusation or incorrect complaint,” says Senator Bill Cosart, a Republican in Athens, representing parts of Barrow County.
The compromise version also eliminated the requirement for all school systems to set up official threat management teams to evaluate whether students could commit violence. This approach is highly recommended by many national experts, and the Emergency Management Agency in Georgia and the Homeland Security Agency is already offering training. The chairman of the Home Education Committee Chris Erwin, a Republican from Homer, said he hoped the schools would voluntarily accept the model.
“I think there is knowledge about the importance of planning and preparation already in schools,” Erwin said. “So having a complete structure of the model for the state is not as important as we may have ever thought it is.”
The measure will still require police agencies to report to schools when employees learn that a child has threatened death or injury to someone at school. But these reports are not authorized to become part of the student’s educational records and would not travel with a student if they were transferred to another area.
This raises questions about whether the bill addresses one of the key criticism that followed Apalachee’s shooting. School employees have never realized that the sheriff’s deputy in Jackson has interviewed Colt Gray in May 2023 after the FBI passed a council that Gray may have posted a threat to shooting online. This report would have been sent to high school employees in Jackson County on the bill, but he would not follow Gray when he enrolled as a freshman in the nearby Barrow County after fully skipping eighth grade.
The bill also necessitates faster entry transfers when a student enters a new school, creates at least one new position to support the coordination of mental health for students in each of the 180 school areas of Georgia and creates an anonymous reporting system across the country.
The legislators on Thursday added the characteristics of the individual Senate bills they had adopted. They would require all state schools in Georgia to provide wearer of staff to employees. Public schools will also be obliged to submit electronic maps to their campuses in local, state and federal agencies once a year.
The amended bill will also make the default prosecution when children aged 13 to 16 are accused of terrorist actions at school, any aggravated attack with a gun or attempted murder. Initially, the Senate suggested a broader spectrum of crimes when the pursuit of adults would be a default. The chamber’s leaders had said they no longer wanted to submit adults to pursue adults.
