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This year West Virginia became one of a dozen states to pass Alyssa’s Law, which allows teachers to wear a “mobile alert button” for emergency situations.
It’s named after 14-year-old Alyssa Alhadeff who was one of the 17 students killed in the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Del. Jonathan Pinson, a Republican from Mason County, was the lead sponsor of House Bill 4798.
“A wearable panic button around a faculty member’s neck that can trigger a lockdown in seconds for the entire school campus, can notify police officers in seconds, can automatically dial 911, that’s where that wearable panic button is so necessary,” Pinson said.
Monday, he joined students from Morgantown High School’s Make Our Schools Safe (MOSS) chapter to accept the first donation of $48,888 from the organization for the state’s Alyssa Alhadeff School Safety fund.
Alyssa wore #8 on her volleyball team.
The MOSS nonprofit was created by Alyssa’s parents, Lori and Ilan Alhadeff, to promote Alyssa’s law and fund school safety initiatives.
“We realize that there are some counties that are not going to be able to afford this, and they would have to save for a really long time or seek some funding mechanism. That’s where the Alyssa Alhadeff School Safety fund comes into play,” Pinson said.
In recent years West Virginia schools have collectively asked for $250 million from the state to address security upgrades to their buildings.
Pinson said he recognizes those areas of school safety still need to be addressed. But Alyssa’s Law can be part of a broader approach to school safety.
“We realize that this thought of school safety is not going to be addressed with one piece of legislation, or with one stroke of the pen, but it’s a multi-layered approach to making students and staff safe inside our schools,” he said. “So when we place a wearable panic button around every faculty member’s neck and with the touch of a button, they can alert the front office, or they can call 911. That is one tool in the toolbox to make sure that students and staff are safe.”
Monday evening at a School Safety Summit in Jackson County, Drew McClanahan, legislative policy officer for the West Virginia Department of Education, announced the department would allocate close to $348,888 for the purchase of mobile alert buttons. He said the buttons complimented perfectly the state’s recently completed efforts to map the layout of every school building.
“I’m excited to announce that our counties and districts around the state have completed the mapping and done so very prudently, and so they’ve left us with some additional funds,” McClanahan said. “The State Department of Education stands ready to support you in anything that we can do to make sure that this fund comes to fruition, and that schools have access.”
Pinson says he wants to fundraise at least half of the $10 million needed to provide every teacher in the state with a mobile alert button from private donations before bringing any request for funding to the legislature.