ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - Last year, just five months after a deadly shooting at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, lawmakers returned to the State Capitol for the new legislative session. Standing high above the much-talked-about policies they planned to implement was the question of school safety, and how to prevent another deadly act in a Georgia school.

Legislators got right to work. Before the session had ended, several high-profile bills had made their way to Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk for his signature.

With the exception of civil lawsuit reform, no other legislative topic was as talked about as school safety.

Chief among the new laws to harden schools was House Bill 268, a comprehensive set of new measures that aimed to not just stop violence as it happens, but prevent it altogether.

Led by Rep. Holt Persinger, the lawmaker representing the district that contains Apalachee, the bill included a mandate that every Georgia school utilize mobile emergency systems – panic buttons – for quick response in the case of an emergency. Many schools already had systems like that in place.

Barrow County, in fact, had tested their panic buttons at a middle school neighboring Apalachee at 7:15 the morning of the Sept. 4 shooting. At 10:15, just a few hours later, 47 alerts from teachers and administrators helped lead police to the shooter’s exact location inside the building.

HB 268 also included a much-debated provision that would allow school systems to share information on new students, including their disciplinary records, and criminal records if applicable.

Those opposed to the provision said it amounted to surveillance of students, but people in support noted it may have led to a different outcome at Apalachee. The accused shooter, 14-year-old Colt Gray, had been interviewed by the FBI about a school threat in a separate district just months before he transferred to Apalachee.

“Our (alleged) shooter bounced around from four different, five different school systems and nobody knew anything about him,” said Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith. “That one miss, that one crack in the armor – chink in the armor – this may happen.”

Smith still vividly remembers the day of the shooting. His deputies and school resource officers were able to stop Gray in 38 seconds after arriving on the scene.

“But he did a lot of damage,” Smith said. “As bad as it is for us to replay it in our minds, it’s good therapy for us to figure out what helped and what didn’t.”

Smith worked with Persinger to craft HB 268 and pushed for many of the provisions that ended up in the final draft. Apalachee also implemented a weapons detection system and is currently working to bolster its school resource officer presence inside all its chool buildings.

It’s not just officials working to ensure school safety.

Layla Renee Contreras, a lead organizer for the group Change for Chee, also lobbied lawmakers at the state and local level to do more. She’s a graduate of Apalachee – her sister is a student there, and her mom is a substitute teacher.

“I’m still angry and I think a lot of parents are, a lot of family members are,” she said. “These are my teachers, this is my administration, and I just want to do what I can to protect them.”

Contreras was a fixture at the state Capitol during the most recent legislative session, standing front and center at press conferences calling for change. She’s happy with what lawmakers did, but doesn’t want the already-passed legislation to be the end of their efforts.

“More can be done,” Contreras said. “And more can always be done.”

Lawmakers also passed a bill that would ban cell phone use at most Georgia schools. Pegging them as a distraction, Contreras instead feels the measure makes schools less safe. She tracked her sister’s and mom’s iPhones the day of the shooting and communicated with them to make sure they were safe.

“Having that technological access and just knowing where your family members are is super critical,” she said. “Everyone was flocking to our school, just because we wanted to get in contact with our loved ones and now that avenue has been kind of disconnected.”

In the wake of the shooting, Many Democratic lawmakers also called for more gun control, including measures that mandated safe storage of firearms and even offered tax rebates for the purchase of gun safes and locks. Neither bill passed, and lawmakers behind both attempted measures say they’ll continue to push for stricter gun laws that could cut down on school violence.

Apalachee students return to class this week, and Smith said his officers and deputies will be ready, having learned a great deal from the tragedy that still isn’t even a year old.

“I go back to Sept. 3, someone asked me the question, ‘Do you think you were ready?’ You’re never ready for this,” Smith said. “Let’s get past the first day. Let’s get past the first week. Let’s get past Sept. 4. Let’s get to Thanksgiving and Christmas and all those holidays and kind of knock those little notches down, if you will, and check the boxes off.”

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