LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – House Republicans are calling on the legislature to consider a package of bills that would help address school safety concerns guided by a report about the Oxford School Shooting that left four students murdered.

In the aftermath of the shooting, a House Bipartisan School Safety Task Force was assembled to meet and hear from a variety of contributors including law enforcement, school officials, and counselors, as they prepared recommendations for the legislature to consider.

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The group released its report in December 2022, which featured numerous recommendations as the group focused on prevention, mitigation, and response to further incidents. Under the new session, many of the previous policy bill recommendations were proposed in the form of a bill package with 13 bills, HB 4088-4100.

The bills were sent to the House Education Committee last February but still have not received a hearing. Last week, Minority Leader Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) sent a letter to the Speaker of the House, Joe Tate (D-Detroit), drawing attention to a variety of issues that the chamber has yet to address, including the school safety bill package stating, “now is the time to act on these bills.”

“Please take special note of the school safety legislation that is awaiting House action,” Hall said in the letter. “The tragic shooting on Michigan State University’s campus last year ended three lives and irreparably changed countless more.”

State Rep. Hall also attempted to discharge the bills from the Committee on Education, where they have remained for more than a year, for a floor vote but was refused.

Democrat Legislators Oppose Discussion of Bills:

State Rep. Kelly Breen (D-Novi), a member of the bipartisan taskforce, emailed a multi-page letter to Rep. Hall sharing her thoughts about his motion to discharge the bills from committee.

“I am both dismayed and angered at your effort to discharge from the Education Committee House Bills 4088-4100,” she said in the letter. “This package of bills, commonly referred to as the “school safety package,” is a bipartisan effort to improve the safety and security of our schools and your blatant attempt to turn it into a political football is beyond the pale.”
She also criticized Rep. Hall’s letters for discharge and his motivations for doing so.

“If you were truly interested in the work being done by your colleagues, you would know that kids cannot learn unless they feel physically and mentally secure,” she said in the letter, “You might also learn that social emotional learning is recognized by many as the key to mitigating violence in schools. Children deserve our best effort to help support them in learning to cope with everything life throws at them.”

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State Representative Matt Koleszar (D-Plymouth), who also is the Chair for the Education Committee, criticized the attempts to discharge the bills from committee and shared that he, Rep. Breen, Rep. Luke Meerman (R-Coopersville) and others had been “working on the bipartisan school safety package for months this session,” on social media.

“This attempt to discharge the bills without so much as a committee hearing is reckless and is playing politics with kids’ lives,” Rep. Kolszar said on X (formerly Twitter).

He also defended the committee process on social media, suggesting that the committee would be hosting hearings on the bills in the near future.

“The committee process is an open forum where bills can be discussed, questions can be answered and ensures that everyone-not just Lansing stakeholders-have the opportunity to weigh in,” he said on social media. “I look forward to sharing the dates for our committee hearings on school safety soon.”

Republican Legislators Weigh on Bill Package:

Rep. Donni Steele (R-Orion) whose district is adjacent to Oxford, has been involved in the bill package since she took office.

“We took this whole package of bills that was created in a bipartisan package and went to committee, and it’s as one of my colleagues calls it, ‘death by committee,’ it’s just sits there, it’s not even brought up or discussed in education, it hasn’t even been gone through,” she said in an interview with Michigan News Source. “That’s over a year and it’s just disappointing.”

Rep. Steele shared why she thought that things have not been addressed in committee or discharged from committee.

“In Lansing it’s first about politics and then about getting things done,” she said. “So this to me is a political ploy to delay it, to either take credit for it, to add things of their own agenda to it.”

House Bill 4093, sponsored by Rep. Steele, would expand access for students to use the state’s OK2SAY confidential reporting program for potentially harmful or criminal activities.

She also supported bills to further training and implementation of school liaison officers, who have historically been law enforcement officers and have served in the Orion school districts.

“They were counselors, police officers,” Rep. Steele said describing the roles of liaison officers, “They had really good people in those positions to be able to forge through where a teacher would call in and say ‘I’m concerned about this,’ the liaisons would be a part of the counseling of the teachers and check out the lockers and make sure the situation was safe.”

Rep. Mike Harris (R-Clarkston), former law enforcement officer and school liaison officer, was drafted to help advise the task force as they finalized the bills.

“At the end of 2022, everybody that I had talked to that had been on the bipartisan task force seemed to be in support of these moving forward and then the election happened the gavel got passed over to the other side, we had initially controlled the process and now being in the minority we do not,” Rep. Harris said in an interview with Michigan News Source. “The bills have sat for the past year.”

HB 4090, sponsored by Harris, would make some training standardized across the state, and is partially informed by southeast Michigan.

“What we’re finding is there is more standardized training in some of these areas, than other parts of the state,” he said in the interview, “Making sure that curriculum and resources are there so we have some standardized training for all school resource officers.”

Rep. Harris also addressed what he hopes the next steps are with the bill package.

“The committee process is a public transparent process, or it should be, and this is where we can work through some of the finer points if there are disagreements or changes that need to be made,” he said. “But to hold them back for a year is not acceptable.”

It started off as a bipartisan workable issue according to Rep. Harris, who expressed “for the sake of our kids,” hopes it continues that way.