ATHENS, Ga. — Every school in Georgia is not only required to submit a safety plan to the state, but they also have to hold regular intruder drills, alongside fire and tornado drills.
Channel 2′s Richard Elliot was with school officials when they met with law enforcement around the state Monday to talk about those plans.
Students, teachers and administrators are usually gone during the summertime at Apalachee High School in Barrow County.
But the school resource officers there are still hard at work.
“One of the greatest things you need to do in the school is to get the know the kids. That’s what we did in Walton County,” said Sgt. James Vaughn, a veteran Walton County sheriff’s deputy who specializes in school safety.
He joined hundreds of others at the annual Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security school safety conference in Athens.
This is the first year a new Georgia law requires every public school in Georgia to file its safety plan, digitally, with GEMA.
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Every plan on the same template can then be easily updated with school maps, room numbers, contact information, and even teacher assignments.
GEMA director Chris Stallings hopes this kind of information available at the tip of a finger will prevent what happened in Uvalde, Texas where so much confusion between multiple law enforcement agencies led to delays going in to stop the shooter as dozens of students and teachers died.
“If we had a response where multijurisdictional showed up, maybe even partners with the MOU’s from other counties, so we have an indictment on a county line, everybody knew how to response essentially the same way,” Stallings said.
This year, every school must also conduct regular intruder drills, not just for active shooters, but for anyone entering a school who’s not supposed to be there.
Vaughn told Elliot that those drills could save lives.
“We deal with fire drills. I understand that in the years of fire drills, we never had a kid burn up in a fire. So, I think we need to practice,” Vaughn said.
The conference also explained that ransomware attacks targeting schools are now the No. 1 target for those attacks across the nation.
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