ATLANTA — Some parents and organizations are worried about a provision of a new, massive school safety bill working its way through the General Assembly.
This bill does a lot of things for student safety that everyone likes. But it also creates a student threat database that has a lot of people worried about things like mistakes and can your child ever get off it.
Winder Republican Holt Persinger represents the area around Apalachee High School, so the tragedy there hit home hard.
“This comes out of the tragedy at Apalachee on Sept. 4,” Persinger said.
He and House Speaker Jon Burns came up with this massive 65-page bill to try to stop what happened there from happening again.
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On Monday, a Senate subcommittee heard the bill which would do a number of things.
It would create the Office of Safe Schools under GEMA and that office would create a database of student threats and help schools address them.
It would set up student training for suicide and violence prevention for sixth through 12th grades. It would also create and fund a behavioral health coordinator for school districts and would elevate making school threats a felony.
Most of the attention was on the creation of that database.
Critics worried there was no way to get off of it if there was a mistake -- or ever.
“Parents can see the records, but they can’t appeal if there’s something in there that seems incorrect to them. And also, kids don’t roll off as they grow up. If a fifth grader makes a mistake, they’re on it as a 12th grader,” Gordon said.
But GEMA-Homeland Security deputy director Linda Criblez insisted that the database would remain separate from a student’s educational and criminal records and insisted it was necessary to stop violence before it starts.
“If people had put together information, the signs that these at-risk kids had the potential for violence, there was a possibility of prevention of the acts they committed,” Criblez said.
Lawmakers saying they want to strike a balance between safety and privacy when creating that database, but Senators indicated there may be more work they want to do on this bill.
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