Alabama Department of Education likely to request money for school safety and security

The Alabama State Board of Education during its regular meeting on February 9, 2023. The state superintendent said Thursday that they were likely to request money for school safety. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector)

The Alabama State Department of Education could request more money for school safety and security in their upcoming budget request.

State Superintendent Eric Mackey told the board members at a work session Thursday that they were going to request money to fund a bill that passed last session addressing school safety. The board had discussed the issue at a recent retreat.

In documents handed out at the meeting, the requested increase for “School Safety, Security and Climate” is $52.9 million or around $51 million more than last year. But in the meeting, Mackey said the money was more likely to come out of the supplemental budget. The supplemental budget is money outside of the state Education Trust Fund (ETF), the main source of funding for public schools, and is not recurring by default but would be available immediately.

“We technically don’t do a supplemental budget request, but I think it would be good between now and the session, if we really worked on that,” he said.

SB 98, sponsored by Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, the chair of the Alabama Senate’s education budget committee, includes requirements for school safety audits and mapping.

Mackey said that Orr’s part is bifurcated, so the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA) and the Department of Education both have parts. The state this year only provided money for a mapping portion overseen by ALEA.

“(Orr) told us that he would make sure we got funded in this upcoming budget cycle for repairing locks and those kinds of things, plus our safety inspectors,” he said. “I can’t speak for him, but in the past, he has preferred to do that out of supplemental and that was our discussion back in the spring, that he would probably do that in the supplemental budget.” 

Orr wrote in a text message Thursday that the evaluation process needs to be started and personnel must be hired. He believes that a request for proposals (RFP) for the mapping component will go out next month; $4 million has been appropriated for it, Orr said.

Mackey also brought up the loss of COVID federal funds in a discussion about reading scores. The superintendent said they have received over $3 billion since 2021, and that they will not be able to make up the funds that will expire.

According to the state department’s tracker, there was $3.28 billion for the total allocated budget across the state.

“I have to remind myself that’s a billion is 1,000 million, 1,000 million,” he said. “So that’s 3,000 million dollars that’s gone. It’s gone, end of this month.”

He said some checks will still be written over the next few months but the money will be gone.

“There’s no way the state is going to raise the funds to replace that,” he said. “So I don’t want to paint a fairy tale scene like, ‘Oh, there’s plenty of money to provide all the services,’ because a lot of the services that districts have been providing are not going to be there,” he said.