School Safety Bill

 

Senate Bill 1 passed the 2019 General Assembly to applause and standing ovations in both the House and Senate. 

The bill, lauded as a bipartisan, comprehensive effort to improve school safety, was the outcome of a working group tasked by the legislature with listening to students, mental health professionals, law enforcement, school administrators and others on how to best protect Kentucky’s public school students in the wake of a 2018 school shooting in Marshall County. 

“We want this bill to be there to help communities so that they never have to experience that again,” said Sen. Max Wise (R-Campbellsville) who led the working group. “I can’t say that this bill will stop acts of evil from occurring, but I think we’ve taken the right steps to be proactive in this endeavor.” 

Now that the bill is law, having gone into effect when Gov. Matt Bevin signed it March 11, the work to implement it begins. 

The bill includes new requirements for suicide prevention and active shooter training, sets the goal of a school resource officer in every school and calls for increased supports for student mental health, including a goal of one guidance counselor for every 250 students. It also creates a statewide school safety marshal and requires districts appoint school safety coordinators. 

While many of the bill’s provisions are contingent on funding, the bill requires schools to have secure entrances, classroom door locks and other security improvements by July 2022. 

 

Though SB1 did not contain funding, lawmakers have pledged to fund the bill in the 2020 budget session which begins in January. As the Senate voted unanimously for the bill’s final passage, Senate President Robert Stivers acknowledged that lawmakers had been criticized for the bill’s lack of funding but noted that no one knows how much money will be needed. 

“There’s going to have to be an assessment, a lot of school districts already have some of these things in place,” Stivers said. 

Some of the costs will be one-time expenditures, such as building improvements, others will be recurring costs including salaries of school resource officers, counselors and other mental health professionals, he said. 

“As one of the representatives from the Kentucky School Boards Association said we are already starting on that process so that we will know come the 2020 General Assembly what we will need to appropriate,” Stivers said. “You cannot appropriate something when you don’t know what the price tag is yet and what the need is and who can participate from the respective school systems.” 

This summer KSBA will work with school board chairs and superintendents to determine how much funding will be needed, said Eric Kennedy, KSBA’s director of governmental relations. 

KSBA has never made a specific budget request on behalf of districts, relying instead on the Kentucky Department of Education and Kentucky Board of Education to let the legislature know what districts need. 

“This year we hope to essentially make a budget request that complements and coincides with the KDE budget request, that really targets school safety,” he said. 

KSBA will gather information from the districts about which aspects of the law they need funded. Because of required building improvements, districts will have to assess their buildings much like they do for KDE’s Kentucky Facilities Inventory and Classification System, which assess the condition of public school buildings. 

Kennedy urged districts to begin examining the bill’s requirements and determine what improvements must be made to comply. Districts should get estimates of the costs in preparation for a KSBA survey this summer. 

KSBA will compile the information and “we will have a budget request that we can go to the legislature with in January to show what the need is,” Kennedy said. 

The request will prioritize facility funding to meet the 2020 deadline and then add in the cost to fully implement the bill, including training, and personnel such as school resource officers, counselors and other mental health professionals. 

“We all very openly acknowledge that right now even if we had all the money in the world, there are not enough qualified and certified school counselors to hire right now,” he said. 

Kennedy noted that the legislature has done its part in passing the bill, now it’s up to the districts to determine the implementation costs. 

“Telling them what we need with good accurate numbers is our part in this,” he said. 

Stivers, in his floor speech, noted that even without a bottom line, the legislature plans to follow through on its promise to secure the money to improve school safety. 

“There is a commitment once the analysis and the assessment is done to fund what is needed to protect our schools, our teachers and our children,” he said.