Arkansas Department of Ed seeks another $50M in school safety funding

• It's the third-highest number of incidents on record.

State of play: The Arkansas Legislative Council will review the request for funds at its next meeting scheduled for Friday.

• The money can't be allocated until the council approves its use from the restricted reserve fund.

Thirty-five million of the $50 million requested would be allocated based on the total size of each school district and an amount for each student, Courtney Salas-Ford, chief of staff for the state Department of Education, told lawmakers.

• The remaining $15 million would go toward helping schools meet the state's recommended tier 1 and 2 school safety priorities.
• The top-tier recommendations largely focus on locks, visitor management systems, communications and physical barriers.

Flashback: As of August, the education department distributed more than $42 million in grants of a $50 million earmark to state schools to increase and modernize security according to recommendations from Arkansas' 2022 School Safety Commission Report.

• That $50 million was originally pledged by former Gov. Asa Hutchinson following the 2022 mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

• Under Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders' administration, each school district was initially allocated an amount based on its size and number of students.

The remaining roughly $7.5 million was to be used to help districts meet the priority recommendations, a Department of Education spokesperson told Axios at the time.

The big picture: The "hardening" of schools by increasing security is seen as the best way to keep kids safe in the classroom — tactics largely noted in the School Safety Report — even as state lawmakers expanded access to firearms in 2023.

Go deeper: Northwest Arkansas schools ace safety and security exam