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Georgia Senate unanimously passes bill requiring panic buttons in all schools

Published

4 months ago

March 9, 2025

Staff Editor

georgiarecorder.com – Chris Pae – 2025-03-09 01:00:00

Georgia Senate unanimously passes bill requiring panic buttons in all schools

by Chris Pae, Georgia Recorder
March 9, 2025

Last September, the Barrow County Sheriff’s Office was bombarded with alerts of a shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder.

The school had issued panic buttons to its teachers a week earlier, which allowed them to alert officers within minutes after a 14-year-old gunman first opened fire.

“(The panic button) was extremely helpful in what we did that day of the incident,” Sheriff Jud Smith said in an interview. “I think there were over 20 alerts from people in that general area that was able to help us (get to) where we needed to go.”

The panic buttons were tested at a different school just a few hours before the shooting.

“It had been implemented about a week prior but that was the first day we tested it,” Smith said. “7:30 a.m. that morning is when the first test of it had gone off to let us know that it was, in fact, working.”

Even with the quick response, two teachers and two students were killed in the shooting. Nine others were injured.

In the wake of the shooting, Senate Bill 17, called “Ricky and Alyssa’s Law”, unanimously passed the state Senate on Thursday. The bill seeks to put panic buttons in every public and private school across Georgia, as well as provide location data to emergency services.

The bill is partly named after Richard “Ricky” Aspinwall, a football coach and math teacher at Apalachee, who was fatally shot during the shooting. His name is commemorated alongside Alyssa Alhadeff, who was killed in the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Since her passing, legislation bearing the name Alyssa’s Law has been implemented in 10 other states with Georgia following close behind.

Georgia’s legislation intends to establish faster contact between emergency services and schools by requiring schools adopt panic buttons.

“The goal is to increase coordination, reduce response times and, when a medical emergency or an active shooter type event is happening, basically get people quicker to the assailant, quicker to the incident that’s happening and cut time off the clock to save lives,” said the bill’s sponsor, Dallas Republican Sen. Jason Anavitarte.

The bill would also provide first responders with digital mapping data of schools, such as main entrances or first aid kit locations. In a committee meeting, Aleisha Rucker-Wright, director at Georgia Emergency Communications Authority, highlighted the “disparate technology” in 911 centers.

“Our current 911 (mapping) infrastructure is still the same infrastructure that was installed in the 1960s,” she said. “We have some 911 centers that if you were to enter and ask them to show you their mapping data, it’s literally a printed map on the wall or it may be a Google map.”

Anavitarte said “over half the school districts in Georgia” already use similar panic button systems. CENTEGIX, a tech safety company, said it already provides such systems to several school districts, including Douglas, Clayton and Cherokee counties.

Some gun safety advocates say implementing the bill would face challenges, and they argue the measure doesn’t address the underlying issues of gun violence.

“In my estimation, we have so many schools and it would be a very hard job to implement all of the safety features that would prevent against these terrible tragedies,” said Heather Hallett, organizer of Georgia Majority for Gun Safety.

Hallett said she isn’t against these measures but maintains that regulating gun access would have a greater impact than school panic buttons.

“(School shootings) are horrific and they are attention grabbing and I think that it makes people feel very unsettled,” she said. “But the truth of the matter is unintentional injuries, suicide and regular violence are much bigger components of the problem, and that’s the much bigger percentage of childhood death and injury from firearms.

“I just think it’s missing the mark. The most logical approach to this is that states that control for access have much lower rates of gun violence,” she said.

The bill’s efforts would be funded by the $108.9 million in school security grants allocated in this year’s state budget, averaging around $41,000 for each K-12 school. With the additional $50 million for school safety proposed in the amended 2026 budget, this adds another $21,000 per school.

Lt. Gov. Burt Jones backed the passing of SB 17, along with two other bills – Senate Bill 61 and Senate Bill 179 – related to school safety. In addition, House lawmakers passed House Bill 268, which aims to improve school safety and threat management.

All of the bills have until April 4 to make it to the governor’s desk before they can become law.

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Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com.

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Lithuanian president honors 4 fallen Fort Stewart soldiers

Published

9 hours ago

July 10, 2025

Staff Editor

www.wsav.com – Natasha Young – 2025-07-10 22:57:00

SUMMARY: Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda posthumously awarded the Order of the Cross of Vytis to four 3rd Infantry Division soldiers who died in Lithuania during a mission earlier this year. Staff Sergeants Jose Duenez Jr., Edvin F. Franco, Troy S. Knutson-Collins, and Pfc. Dante D. Taitano were found deceased near Pabradė after repairing and towing an immobilized armored vehicle. Their M88A2 Hercules was recovered from a peat bog. The ceremony honored their sacrifice during NATO exercises, highlighting U.S.-Lithuania partnership and commitment to freedom. The soldiers were deployed for Operation Atlantic Resolve but stationed at Fort Stewart.

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The post Lithuanian president honors 4 fallen Fort Stewart soldiers appeared first on www.wsav.com

News from the South - Georgia News Feed

History voter purge in Georgia: What you need to know | FOX 5 News

Published

9 hours ago

July 10, 2025

Staff Editor

www.youtube.com – FOX 5 Atlanta – 2025-07-10 22:48:03

SUMMARY: Georgia is canceling nearly half a million voter registrations as part of a routine cleanup to maintain accurate voter rolls. The Secretary of State’s office began mailing letters to 478,000 inactive voters, who have 40 days to respond or risk removal. This is required by federal and state law and targets those inactive for over four years due to reasons like moving out of state or returned mail. Voting rights groups, including the ACLU, call it a purge, warning it could disenfranchise eligible voters, particularly younger, lower-income, or mobile residents. Georgia currently has about 8.25 million registered voters.

Nearly half a million voter registrations in Georgia are about to be cancelled. The Georgia Secretary of the state’s office began mailing out letters to hundreds of thousands of voters. If you get one the clock is ticking to stay on the voter rolls. It’s one of the largest cancellations of voter registrations in history.

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News from the South - Georgia News Feed

Georgia lags far behind other states in the number of journalists, says new report

Published

12 hours ago

July 10, 2025

Staff Editor

georgiarecorder.com – Amber Roldan – 2025-07-10 20:05:00

by Amber Roldan, Georgia Recorder
July 10, 2025

The decline of local news continues on the national level and here at home in Georgia. A new local journalism report from Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack reveals a 75% decline in local journalists across the country since 2002.

“The goals of this new report and project is to try to create a measure of journalists per population and an index that could be recreated each year down to the county level,” Rebuild Local Journalism Founder Steve Waldman said during a webinar Thursday. “The reason that we all felt that that was important is that at the heart of the local news crisis is the lack of coverage and the lack of reporters in communities.”

The report, which was released Thursday, found that the shortage of local journalists is both severe and widespread. This shortage is measured by a new metric called Local Journalist Equivalents (LJEs), which uses a formula to evaluate the strength of local journalism. LJEs were determined by outlet types, verifiable bylines and reporting capacity based on factors like publishing frequency. This data was then used to show nationwide trends and state specific metrics.

In 2002, there was a national average of about 40 local journalists per 100,000 people. Today, that figure has dropped to an average of 8.2 Local Journalist Equivalents. Georgia’s average currently sits well below that number, landing Georgia at No. 46 on this year’s ranking.

With a statewide population of 11 million people, Georgia has an average of 5.8 Local Journalist Equivalents per 100,000 people. This average was significantly less than the No. 1 ranked state of Vermont that has an average of 27.5. Nevada trailed four places behind Georgia with the lowest ranked average of 4.8 local journalists.

While the decline of local news is not a new phenomenon, the report confirms that rural areas are not the only communities underserved by local news. Many fast growing areas including Los Angeles and Las Vegas also scored below the national average.

Richard T. Griffiths, a retired reporter and president emeritus of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, said continued decline of local journalism goes beyond local journalists.

“It’s not the industry that is the future casualty of this, it’s democracy itself,” Griffiths said. “If you have a populace that doesn’t understand what’s going on in its community because there are no reporters able to go to the meetings to figure out what’s going on, then you have a collapse of the institutions that underpin our society and our democracy.”

Griffiths cited waning advertising dollars and the rise of social media as notable factors behind the demise of local news. In a world of subscriptions and paywalls, Griffiths said he believes that the business model of local journalism needs to be re-evaluated. He points to nonprofit models like The Current on the Georgia coast and The Macon Melody as potential ways to revitalize local news.

While the new report may not identify clear-cut solutions, the creators behind the report hope their findings can help improve the viability and sustainability of local journalism.

“We think we made a real significant contribution here, and that this really gives a very meaningful picture of the sort of journalistic horsepower in counties across America and will help all of us to better understand both the crisis and how to solve it,” Waldman said.

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Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

The content presents a factual report on the decline of local journalism in the United States, particularly highlighting statistical data and expert commentary without partisan language or ideological framing. It focuses on the democratic importance of local news and explores potential nonprofit models as solutions, showing concern for community engagement and transparency. Given the balanced presentation of information and absence of overt political viewpoints, the content leans toward a centrist perspective.