In sweeping school safety bills filed this week in the Georgia Legislature, Republican lawmakers are poised to make good on earlier promises to strengthen penalties for those who threaten schools.
Parents could be criminally charged for aiding and abetting their child who made a threat, if provisions in House Bill 268 pass. That bill and another, Senate Bill 61, would also require felony charges for anyone who threatens to kill people at a school.
More than 100 students across the state were charged with crimes related to making threats of violence against schools in the two weeks after the September shooting at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And education and law enforcement officials investigated even more than that. Law enforcement officials said the threats drained resources and sowed fear in communities worried they could be next.
“We cannot allow these irresponsible and unsubstantiated threats to divert valuable time and resources from local law enforcement and school resource officers,” Georgia House Speaker Jon Burns, R-Newington, said in a letter shortly after the shooting.
Neither bill requires the expulsion or suspension of students who make threats — an approach adopted by Tennessee lawmakers after six people were killed at The Covenant School in Nashville in March 2023.
Instead, the bills filed by Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Alpharetta, and Rep. Holt Persinger, R-Winder, both require that anyone who threatens the death of someone at a school be charged with a felony. The House bill also requires prosecutors to treat any threats of serious injury to anyone at a school as a felony.
Currently, people convicted of threatening a school face a fine up to $1,000 and jail time between one and five years; where someone is seriously injured as a result of a threat, the fine can be up to $250,000 and jail time between five and 40 years.
The House bill adds that a parent or legal guardian who “intentionally advises, counsels, encourages, aids or abets his or her minor child” in threatening a school could face the same charges and punishments. In the case of the Apalachee shooting, the father of the 14-year-old accused shooter is facing dozens of charges for providing his son with the gun.
Laws in other states have made parents accountable for the actions of their children who commit school shootings. The parents of a Michigan teenager convicted in a 2021 school shooting that killed four students were sentenced last year to at least 10 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter charges for not securing the gun at home and acting indifferently to signs of their son’s deteriorating mental health.
Staff writer Michelle Baruchman contributed to this report.
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