What has Kentucky done to improve school security?

FRANKFORT, Ky. ( FOX 56 ) — It’s natural after a tragedy as awful as a school shooting to ask, “Could that happen here?”

It may sound like a simple thing, but for the past five years, Kentucky law has held schools to a higher standard when it comes to who can even access the building, requiring layers of locked doors and having a defined plan for if the worst ever happened.

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“Simply locking a door could be the matter between someone saving a life or someone not coming home that day,” Sen. Max Wise (R-Campbellsville) told FOX 56. Wise led the effort to pass Kentucky’s current school safety law in 2019 following the 2018 shooting at Marshall County High School.

“We had, you know, maybe school districts talked about school safety, but they had not put together maybe a school employee that is a contact that works with school guidance counselors, that’s working with school resource officers, because you’ve got to have a multilayered approach,” Wise said.

Unannounced inspections happen each year by the State School Security Marshal and this year it found 99.81% of Kentucky’s 1,325 schools are meeting the law’s requirements. In some cases, only 1 school may not have met a requirement, like electronically controlling the main entrance. The weakest area of compliance: 13 schools that didn’t close and lock its classrooms during the day. Wise said more than half the country has looked to Kentucky as a model for school security to avoid what happened Wednesday in Georgia.

“It’s pure evil to see situations like this that have occurred. And we know that a lot of times you may have the best fortress in place, and we still can question how did something like that happen? But I also look at areas like communication,” Wise said.

He suggested improving responses to anonymous tips and the communication happening between counselors, teachers, administrators, and parents. The report also found a 28% increase in school resource officers from last year to 790 across the state. It’s not enough for every campus which is why this year Wise passed a bill for districts to optionally hire retired police or ex-military “guardians” as a stopgap starting next year. The bill also created a mapping program for law enforcement to use in emergencies.

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“If something were to happen, all of our interoperability between local, state, and federal law enforcement would know the active room. They would know the dynamics of the school in terms of the diagrams, the layouts,” Wise said.

Wise said he also wants to continue pushing for the availability of more mental health services to avoid future tragedies.

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