Tennessee 28th District Capitol Hill Week in Review with Senator Joey Hensley

Recent efforts are enhancing safety in schools

With the new school year underway, Gov. Bill Lee this week announced recent efforts to enhance school safety. The announcement follows a June executive order that directed state agencies to engage parents, increase transparency and collaborate with local law enforcement and school districts. I applaud the Governor’s efforts, some of which I’ll summarize below, and I’m confident they’ll enhance safety at Tennessee schools.

More than 10,000 Tennesseans are using the SAFE TN app, a free resource to quickly and confidentially report safety concerns at a child’s school. I urge all parents to download the app, which saw a record 2,000 downloads in August, to take an active role in ensuring our schools are safe.

Every Tennessee school for a total of 1,838 schools has completed a physical school security assessment, and more than two-thirds of school districts have participated in school safety training. Frequent, unannounced checks are being prioritized to ensure school doors latch and precautions are in place, and every school district has received an updated School Safety Plan Template.

Proven, hands-on active shooter training courses are being provided in each Grand Division, and updated training has been given to more than 600 School Resource Officers. These are just a few recent efforts to enhance school security, and more are in the works. Tennessee parents and schools will soon have access to a new School Safety Resource and Engagement Guide, school districts will soon receive updated building security standards, and additional improvements to law enforcement recruitment and training efforts are coming.

Safety is the top priority at our schools, and it will certainly be enhanced by these and other recent actions. My colleagues and I in the Legislature will continue searching for ways to make our schools as safe and productive as possible, and I urge anyone with thoughts on the topic to reach out.

On a different topic, I want to address a new law that has received media attention of late. Passed in 2021 and now in effect, the Tennessee Learning Loss Remediation and Student Acceleration Act requires school districts to offer additional academic supports to third graders struggling to read. One aspect of the law would require students to be retained in the third grade if they don’t test at grade level or above on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) test. This aspect of the law in intended to be the last resort in intervening for such students.

Interventions to help students struggling to read start as early as kindergarten when students are given a universal reading screener three times annually until they finish third grade. Students identified as having a deficiency in reading are given several interventions, including an individualized reading plan that is provided to parents and outlines the steps to be taken to get the student back on track along with access to additional instruction and tutoring.

If, after all these interventions, a student still scores “approaching” on the third grade English Language Arts portion of the student’s most recent TCAP test, they may still be promoted if they attend a learning loss bridge camp before the beginning of the upcoming school year or get a tutor through the Tennessee Accelerating Literacy and Learning Corps (TALLC) to provide the student with tutoring services for the entirety of their fourth-grade year.

If a student scores “below” on their third grade ELA TCAP, they may still be promoted if they attend a learning loss bridge camp before the beginning of the upcoming school year and get a tutor through TALLC for the entirety of their fourth-grade year. Students with disabilities, and students previously retained can be exempted from this retention requirement.