News

Rubio: We’re Investing in What Works to Reduce School Shootings and Make Schools Safer
By Senator Marco Rubio
April 6, 2018
USA Today
 
Just five weeks after the tragedy in Parkland, Congress passed a spending bill that authorizes $1 billion over the next decade to improve the safety of our schools. The STOP School Violence Act is set to immediately provide resources to schools and their communities to prevent violence before it ever begins. Here is why that matters.
 
The law reauthorizes and improves the Secure our Schools program, and immediately provides $75 million for the rest of this year and authorizes $100 million for each of the next 10 years to states, local governments and communities for the express purpose of financing school safety efforts. This is double the amount previously available to schools, and better targets the spending to evidence-based approaches that identify threats to students’ safety.
 
The new money would be available to local governments and schools to implement programs like Los Angeles County’s successful School Threat Assessment Response Team, which coordinates the efforts of law enforcement, schools and mental health professionals to make sure nobody slips through the cracks. It will fund anonymous reporting systems like the Safe UT app, and help school districts create and train intervention teams to seek out the troubled students most likely to pose risks like what happened in Parkland.
 
School safety programs that had previously been subject to budget cuts or staff turnover will have additional resources for operations and for investments in improvements. Local government officials, and the parents and families they represent, will be able to use the money for solutions that work best for their communities based on tried and true approaches.
 
Read the rest here.