A bill requiring panic buttons in all Georgia schools unanimously passed the state Senate on Thursday.
Senate Bill 17, also known as “Ricky and Alyssa’s Law,” would require both public and private schools to implement mobile panic alert systems, Online Athens reports. It would also provide first responders with digital mapping data of schools. During a committee meeting, Aleisha Rucker-Wright, director at Georgia Emergency Communications Authority, highlighted how outdated the technology is in the state’s 911 centers.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.”
RELATED: Will Alyssa’s Law Become Federal Legislation?
The bill is named after Alyssa Alhadeff, a student who was killed in the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting in Parkland, Florida, and Richard Aspinwall, a math teacher and assistant football coach who was among those killed in the Sept. 2024 shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.
“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 Dallas Republican Senator Jason Anavitarte, the bill’s sponsor.
To become law, the House would have to approve the bill by the scheduled end of the legislative session on April 4.
Just one week before the Apalachee High School shooting, the school had implemented panic buttons, which they used to alert police within minutes of the attack.
“(The panic button) was extremely helpful in what we did that day of the incident,” said Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith. “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 also tested for the first time 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.”
According to the Georgia Recorder, the bill would be funded by the $108.9 million in school security grants allocated in this year’s state budget, averaging $41,000 for each K-12 school. An additional $50 million for school safety is proposed in the amended 2026 budget, which would add another $21,000 per school.
Alyssa’s Law Continues Gaining Momentum Across the U.S.
Alyssa’s Law first became legislation in 2020 in New Jersey, Alyssa’s home state. Six more states have since followed suit, including Florida (2020), New York (2022), Texas (2023), Tennessee (2023), Utah (2024), and Oklahoma (2024).
Versions of the legislation are also currently pending in 12 other states: Nebraska, Arizona, Virginia, Oregon, Michigan, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Ohio, Illinois, South Carolina, and Washington.
According to WVNews, West Virginia Education Committee also recently advanced its version of Alyssa’s Law, Senate Bill 434 (SB 434).
