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Amid the recent mass shooting at a Texas elementary school, Georgia schools are beginning to open their doors for the fall, with school safety a top priority for parents and teachers.
Every Georgia public school must have a school safety plan and conduct drills on that plan, the state Department of Education (DOE) said in July.
Safety plans cover training to prevent violence in schools, mental health awareness, safety measures in schools and partnerships with public safety officials.
In July, the DOE and the Georgia Emergency Management Agency (GEMA) announced a new school safety clearinghouse website that will distribute school safety resources and updated training to Georgian schools and community partners.
The Uvalde, Texas, shooting has prompted law enforcement to work more closely with schools to plan for emergency response, Gainesville Police Chief Jay Parrish said.
“Our school resource officers have been working all summer to get a better understanding [schools’] Safety plans for different situations,” Parrish said. “By understanding the behavior of school staff and students in response to various emergencies, we have a better idea of what type of scene we are responding to.”
School officials don’t typically share full details of safety plans, and the plans are not subject to open record requests, said Angela Palm, director of policies for the Georgia School Boards Association.
According to Palm, school boards must balance the need to keep plans private with the need to let the community know about their plans.
Gwinnett County Public Schools, the state’s largest county, has its own licensed and accredited police department with 98 school resource officers, said Bernard Watson, the county’s director of community and media relations.
Gwinnett is retrofitting 19 schools with security vestibules — a feature that 15 already have — to help administrators control access to the building, Watson said. The county has other measures to collect tips on troubling behavior in schools, he added.
Another major metro-Atlanta district — Clayton — requires all students to wear clear backpacks this school year. The school district provides backpacks for students.
But these measures do not necessarily address the concerns of the students.
“Safety in our schools has been a concern since I was in kindergarten,” said Lily Littrell, who recently graduated from Parkview High School in Gwinnett County and is a member of the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition, an advocacy group of high school and college students.
“Adding police and other school-hardening measures will not make our schools safer or solve the systemic problem,” Littrell said. “[Schools should] invest in counselors, social workers and restorative justice that will actually make our schools safer and reduce violence.”
In stark contrast, others advocate arming teachers or other school personnel.
The General Assembly passed legislation in 2014 that allows school boards to permit certain employees to carry weapons on school property.
In July, the Cobb County Board of Education voted to allow certain school staff to carry guns on campus.
The policy prohibits teachers from carrying weapons, but authorizes the superintendent, after approved training, to select other personnel who may carry weapons at school or at school events.
“I think it’s a great policy,” said Jerry Henry, executive director of Georgia Second Amendment (GA2A), a gun rights group.
“Schools are a soft target. … [But] As soon as people understand that someone is armed there, nobody will go in there [and shoot]. … Had one of these teachers [in Uvalde] had been armed, they could have intervened.”
But some teachers think such suggestions go too far.
“No educator should be armed,” said Lisa Morgan, president of the Georgia Association of Educators.
“The problem of gun violence is much bigger than our schools. You can’t solve the problem of someone walking into a school armed with a gun…until you solve the gun violence problem that we have throughout our society.”
This story is available through a news partnership with the Capitol Beat News Service, a Georgia Press Educational Foundation project.
