Prevention mandate cut from new Georgia school safety law
New state law that passed committees unanimously fails to establish a system for prevention while mandating schools buy more products like wearable panic buttons and digital maps of the campus.
Last fall, six Georgia police agencies, five child services agencies, and school administrators in multiple counties failed to document and act on the warning signs before a student opened fire inside Apalachee High School. In the aftermath, state lawmakers proposed a bill mandating school-based threat assessments and a statewide system for sharing student records to make sure they spot the red flags before the next school shooting.
But...the school security industry lobby won again. The final bill doesn’t mandate threat assessment teams, make police agencies sharing threat info with school administrators, or create a database of student records. Instead of preventing the next attack, Georgia schools are now mandated to buy wearable panic alarms and pay a vendor to draw digital floor plans of the school every year.
These products would not change the outcome of any school shooting that I've studied since the 1960s. Meanwhile, poorly designed alarms that accidentally go off can make a campus less safe!
The bill also allows prosecutors to charge students who are 13-17 years old as adults if they make a threat. Research shows that zero tolerance discipline and referring teens into the adult criminal justice system increases their likelihood to become adult criminal offenders. Just like Parkland, nothing stops an expelled student from coming back to campus with a gun. Preventing violence requires us to address the root causes of a crisis while an arrest usually makes a crisis even worse!
The really sad part of this is that most school shootings can be prevented by spotting the warning signs of a kid in crisis before you need to press a panic button or look at digital maps of a school campus. The millions of dollars that Georgia schools will spend each year on these security products could go to mental health services, violence interruption programs, mentoring, and after school activities.
But commercial products have a profit margin that can be used to lobby and sell more products. Making government agencies share information or having adult mentors on campus to stop conflicts from escalating into shootings doesn't generate a tangible profit for a company. There's nobody with a corporate account to buy steak dinners for everyone who needs to sign a violence prevention or information sharing mandate into law.
Taking a Look Back at Apalachee High
Three days after the attack, I wrote about Seven systemic failures before the school shooting at Apalachee High. Success in any one of these areas could have prevented the attack before anyone was murdered or wounded on the campus.
FBI and Georgia law enforcement failed to act on obvious red flags.
Lack of an emergency action plan and training at Apalachee High for how to deal with a phone call about an imminent threat.
School officials wasted 30 minutes after a warning phone call instead of taking immediate action to protect students.
Staff spent time searching for the wrong student because they lacked resources, training, knowledge about enrolled students, or didn’t have systems to figure out where students are on campus.
In a resource constrained environment, new security tech like panic button badges may have distracted administrators from critical tasks like planning and training for an imminent threat (instead of pushing a button when it’s already too late because 13 students and staff have already been shot).
School resource officers can respond quickly to a shooting but their presence on a large campus does not prevent attacks from occurring.
While Georgia has spent +$104M into school security tech, it appears that the state lacks a system to transfer education records and information about prior threats.
In a resource constrained environment, new security tech like panic button badges and digital campus maps may have distracted administrators from critical tasks like planning and training for an imminent threat. It’s clear that during the 30 minutes after the mother called the school, staff didn’t have a plan or training for what to do.
When shots were fired and staff started pushing the panic buttons, it was already too late for the 13 students and staff struck by bullets.
Questionable Usefulness of Panic Buttons at Schools
As more details started to come out, I wrote an article the week after the shooting—Apalachee High school shooting timeline prompts four big questions. If every second counts during a school shooting (the exact language of the product pitch for a standalone alarm button), why did it take 2 minutes longer to process a panic button alert than the 911 calls?
Following the Parkland shooting, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Tennessee, and Utah have passed Alyssa’s Law to mandate panic buttons in schools. There are Alyssa’s Law bills to mandate panic buttons proposed in 10 more states right now.
Alyssa’s Law is legislation to improve the response time of law enforcement during emergencies in public schools. It mandates that all public elementary and secondary school buildings be equipped with silent panic alarms that directly notify law enforcement.
To my knowledge, there have never been experiments conducted or published reports/data to test and measure if a panic button generates a faster alert than a 911 call. Buildings across the country have been equipped with automatic fire alarms since the 1970s. When most fire alerts are false alarms, fire departments classify these calls as a lower priority and respond with fewer units to an automatic alarm compared to a 911 call from a person. Based on a study in Chicago, the police response is slower to automatic ShotSpotter alerts than traditional 911 calls.
The panic button laws for schools were created after the Parkland shooting. This is a strange incident to be the reason for mandating these products because there was a school police officer present who immediately radioed for help. It was the officer’s inaction—not a lack of alerts to the 911 center—that has drawn scrutiny.
Ironically, the Parkland SRO’s civil defense was based on blaming faulty Motorola radios for his inaction. Motorola spent millions of dollars lobbying post-9/11 to gain a near monopoly on the public safety market while selling products that perform worse than pre-9/11 radios inside block construction buildings like schools.
A gunshot can be heard from a mile away and there are hundreds—or thousands—of people in and around a school campus who have cellphones. When a school shooting starts, there is not a lack of information being shared externally (e.g., people calling 911 to get police), there often is a lack of information being broadcast internally to student and staff. Police were on campus just as the shooting started at Uvalde, it was the students and staff inside the school that didn’t get the warnings (see: Three Key Findings Every School Should Know from DOJ Report on Uvalde).
For school shooting scenarios, panic buttons often duplicate information that is already being shared with police without doing anything to filling the unmet need for students and staff inside the school to get notifications and information.
On the flip side, when panic buttons go off by accident at schools this creates a real emergency for students and staff who jump out of windows and run from the campus when a false alarm rings.
If panic button alerts are processed more slowly than 911 calls and they cost ~$8,000/year per school while a 911 call is free, what’s the point?
Georgia’s institutions failed, and now they might fail again
The 14-year-old kid was not a monster until the second that he pulled the trigger inside Apalachee High killing 2 classmates, 2 teachers, and wounding at least 9 others.
For at least a year prior to the attack, this kid cried for help and was ignored by police, teachers, school administrators, community members, and his own family. Committing a school shooting is a final act of violent public suicide when a kid feels like society has forgotten him (or her) and there is no other option.
These are not excuses that justify a school shooting. To prevent the next attack, we need to understand why they happen and take meaningful action to stop them. Panic buttons and digital maps aren’t going to stop anyone from opening fire inside a school.
Ep 14. Society, institutions, & communities have failed when a 14-year-old takes an AR-15 into Apalachee High
The 14-year-old kid was not a monster until the second that he pulled the trigger inside Apalachee High killing 2 classmates, 2 teachers, and wounding at least 9 others. For at least a year prior to the attack, this kid cried for help and was ignored by police, teachers, school administrators, community members, and his own family. Committing a school s…
Just like the months before Apalachee High when multiple agencies could have stopped the attack before it happened, there will be chances to prevent the next school shooting in Georgia. But this new law missed an opportunity to fix some glaring holes in the current system that failed students and teachers last September.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.