The school safety task force report to enhance the safety of Pennsylvania schools was on target in its call for more funding and recognition there is not a one-size-fits-all solution to keeping kids safe at school, according to the Pennsylvania School Boards Association CEO.
In a statement about the report released on Monday, Nathan Mains, who leads the organization representing the state's 4,500 elected school directors, said he values the many recommendations that the task force put forth for local school boards to consider in their ongoing school safety discussions.
"We are appreciative that the task force recognized that many of their recommendations will require additional resources for effective implementation," Mains said.
He offered two suggestions not included in the report that he would like state lawmakers to consider to address that need.
Mains is calling on them to include school safety as a component of state reimbursement for school construction projects and to allow school districts to increase property taxes above their state-set cap without going to voters for approval to pay for school safety improvements.
The 2018-19 state budget includes $60 million for school and community safety initiatives as well as $10 million for grants that can help schools pay for school resource or school police officers.
Mains commended the task force for recognizing the widely varying needs and resources of Pennsylvania's 500 school districts to keep students, staff and visitors safe.
"We trust that schools boards will take these recommendations and utilize them in the ongoing school safety discussions in their school districts," Mains said.
The report stressed the need to provide better access to mental health services for students as well as suggested such measures as having trained armed professionals in schools and making building enhancements as classroom door locks, surveillance cameras, and metal detectors to improve student safety.
It also suggested pursuing ways to allow for more information sharing about student discipline, health and education records between schools, law enforcement agencies, and social services.
Absent from it was a recommendation to allow school personnel to be armed, which state Auditor General Eugene Depasquale who helped lead the task force said was opposed by the majority of those who spoke to the task force.
A spokesman for Sen. Mike Regan, R-Cumberland County, who is helping to spearhead the Senate's school safety efforts, said both funding ideas that Mains suggested are already part of the discussion inside that chamber.
However, neither draws Senate Education Committee Chairman John Eichelberger's support.
During a phone interview on Tuesday, Eichelberger, R-Blair County, said the process in place for providing state reimbursement for school construction projects includes a requirement for a security review. He said he has learned that those reviews haven't been taken seriously or are given only cursory review by architects.
He also doesn't think it is wise to give school districts the unfettered ability to raise taxes in the name of school safety.
"Schools can do a lot of security enhancements in their building without spending any money," Eichelberger said. He suggested staffing changes as one way to accomplish that.
"We need to see what the costs are going to be before we would allow them without any accountability measures to say we need to spend money on school safety," the senator said. "That's not a good way to do business."
He said that's why he opposed legislation that was enacted in June that, in part, addressed school safety because it didn't require schools to have a vulnerability assessment performed before spending any money on security improvements.