Kim Reynolds announces $100M school shooting prevention plan

Iowa will spend $100 million of federal funding to forestall college shootings, Gov. Kim Reynolds introduced Tuesday.

The funds will likely be used to conduct vulnerability assessments on colleges, present lively shooter coaching, rent further workers on the Division of Public Security and create new pathways to report and monitor threats of violence. Colleges will even be eligible for as much as $50,000 every to enhance the security of their buildings.

“Each household ought to be capable of confidently ship their kids to highschool, realizing that they are going to be protected,” Reynolds stated at a information convention in Des Moines. “And because the governor of Iowa and a grandmother of school-aged kids, I wish to guarantee dad and mom that your kids’s security at college is simply as necessary to me.”

The announcement comes three weeks after a gunman killed 19 elementary college college students and two lecturers in a Uvalde, Texas college. Gun violence has additionally touched Iowa in latest months, as a shooter killed two Iowa State college students after which himself exterior an Ames church, and one teenager died in a capturing exterior East Excessive Faculty in Des Moines.

“There is a sense of urgency, simply with the elevated acts of violence that we see happening each single day,” Reynolds stated.

Extra:Gov. Kim Reynolds requires psychological well being, police coaching in wake of Texas capturing

A number of of the initiatives introduced Tuesday have been proposed earlier than in Iowa. Reynolds first proposed the Governor’s Faculty Security Bureau in early 2020. Below her preliminary proposal, the Division of Public Security could be charged with instructing college officers how to answer armed intruders and different threats. The Bureau additionally deliberate to launch an nameless reporting device and rent cybersecurity specialists. 

Reynolds estimated it will value $2 million to create the company, and $1.5 million to fund it annually. However the Iowa Legislature, disrupted by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, by no means funded this system.

Reynolds stated the Division of Public Security had begun work on college security regardless. She anticipates the Legislature will fund this system with roughly $1.5 million yearly when the federal funding runs out in 2026.

Lawmakers handed a regulation in 2018 requiring Iowa colleges to have plans in place for emergency occasions, together with lively shooters. The regulation handed shortly after 17 folks have been killed in a college capturing in Parkland, Florida. 

Extra:Lively shooter drills are required in Iowa colleges: What does that imply for college kids?

Katie Akin is a politics reporter for the Register. Attain her at kakin@registermedia.com or at 410-340-3440. Comply with her on Twitter at @katie_akin.