Students wait to be picked up by their parents after a school shooting took place on September 4, 2024 in Winder. Two teachers and two students were killed and multiple students were injured. Megan Varner/Getty Images
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.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.