Ky. Law Mandates School Safety Plans
By: Curtis McNeely
Updated: December 15, 2012
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) -- Kentucky has the misfortune of being a state whose residents know the horror of a deadly school shooting.
Since the 1997 Heath High School shootings in Paducah in which three students were killed and five wounded, state law mandates that every public school have a safety plan. Those plans deal with endless possibilities from a fire to an armed intruder to an earthquake to a train derailment to an angry parent.
Jon Akers, director of the Kentucky Center for School Safety, says more than 600 of the state's 1,245 schools have voluntarily undergone school safety assessments from a panel of experts to make their plans even stronger.
Yet Akers said no plan can prevent a tragedy such as the shootings that killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Friday.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.
