FRANKFORT, Ky. — A mental health clinic, a nurse practitioner and an app to communicate emergency information.
"A lot of what came out with Senate Bill 1 we were already doing, thank goodness," Director of Risk Management and Safety of Fayette County Public Schools, Joe Isaacs said.
Those are three things some public schools have put in place since passing Senate Bill 1.
But funding those items and more is becoming a very difficult math problem for lawmakers to calculate.
Some of what's about to be required of Kentucky public schools is going to cost a lot of money.
How much? No one around the capitol seems to know.
"A lot of these things we're talking about are assets like cameras and scanning equipment and computers but then there's the reoccuring costs because these mental health counselors they're going to reoccur ever year on your payroll so to put a dollar figure on that… I'm scared to even go there," Directer of Security Operations of Owensboro Independent Schools, Dr. Chris Gaddis.
The testimony at this hearing included impressive improvements, all three use an app called CrisisGo that helps communicate during any emergency, there are new cameras and sound devices that can detect bullying and fighting even without recording words and in Paducah Independent Schools there are Mental Health clinics.
"The nurse practitioner can even prescribe some medications, send those into the pharmacy, tell the parent your child's prescription is ready to pick up just take them home and be well," Director of Pupil Personnel at Paducah Independent Schools, Tony Brock said.
Still SB1 sounds like the Cadillac plan at a time when many schools are struggling just to get wheels on their car.
"We need additional finances, mainly for a lot of the upgrades we'll be doing within our district although we are very modern in the approach of how we handle working with families and students, what we do lack is the infrastructure or the buildings, " Brock said.
Which will almost surely be a universal concern when the budget dollars are announced.
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