The new legislation requires schools to implement mobile-based panic alert systems capable of directly notifying first responders
Georgia has become the latest US state to require schools to install mobile panic button systems in an effort to improve emergency response times during incidents such as school shootings or medical emergencies.
Governor Brian Kemp signed Senate Bill 268 into law this week, making Georgia the eighth state to adopt Alyssa’s Law, which mandates panic alert technology across public and private K-12 schools. The law, passed unanimously in the state Senate in March, will take effect from 1 July.
The new legislation requires schools to implement mobile-based panic alert systems capable of directly notifying first responders. It also mandates the integration of digital mapping data to help emergency services better locate threats or incidents within school premises.
During a committee meeting, Aleisha Rucker-Wright, director at the Georgia Emergency Communications Authority, said many of the state’s 911 centres were still operating with outdated infrastructure. “Our current 911 infrastructure is still the same infrastructure that was installed in the 1960s,” she said. “We have some 911 centres 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.”
Alyssa’s Law is named in memory of Alyssa Alhadeff, one of 17 victims of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. In Georgia, the bill also commemorates Richard Aspinwall, a teacher and assistant football coach who was killed in a school shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder in September 2024.
Speaking in support of the bill, Senator Jason Anavitarte, a Republican from Dallas and the bill’s sponsor, said: “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.”
Apalachee High had installed panic buttons just a week before the attack in which Aspinwall was killed. Sheriff Jud Smith of Barrow County said the alert system proved critical during the emergency. “It was extremely helpful in what we did that day of the incident,” he said. “I think there were over 20 alerts from people in that general area that helped us get to where we needed to go.”
Smith added that the system had only been tested for the first time earlier that same day. “7:30am that morning is when the first test of it had gone off to let us know that it was, in fact, working,” he said.
The state’s implementation of the law will be supported by USD 108.9m in school security grants allocated in the current budget cycle, averaging around USD 41,000 per school. A further USD 50m in funding has been proposed in the amended 2026 budget, which would add approximately USD 21,000 per school.
First introduced in New Jersey in 2020, Alyssa’s Law has since been adopted in Florida, New York, Texas, Tennessee, Utah and Oklahoma. Legislation based on the law is currently under consideration in 12 other states, including Michigan, Arizona, Virginia and Illinois.
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