every New Jersey school is required to have a threat assessment team prepared to respond to school threats like ones that circulated online last month following a mass school shooting in Georgia and today lawmakers heard from school administrators about school security concerns and how to address them including needs that fall outside the typical definition of security as senior correspondent Joanna gagas reports increased safety measures also come with the price tag we've heard so many times about mass shootings and and school shootings which hit us hard education leaders testified today during a virtual legislative hearing of the joint committee on the public schools to talk about school safety sharing best practices and identifying weaknesses it used to be we needed secur security arm or armed officers to be at school during the school day now there's a public expectation we want them at a concert we want them at the you know the uh open house we want to at everything in which the school is open that has driven up costs it didn't take long for the focus to shift to the costs of security measures from security Personnel to system upgrades when we do Implement and have things like cameras in our schools those cameras have to be replaced and they are replaced at a higher volume there are is software there are software costs that continue to go up every year there's a great component of AI that actually works with our school cameras and it detects a weapon within a school um within seconds we had a priced out at our district $100,000 I'm already in S2 District that lost lots of funding um I want to have this and once I've seen it how do I tell the parents I can't afford it assemblywoman Verina Reynolds Jackson told speakers that the Joint Committee would ask the Department of Education about increasing funding for security measures even though school funding overall is one of the most challenging areas of the state budget as bety gin Ginsburg with the Garden State Coalition of schools says there's no real security without um uh student and sometimes family mental health and so we've taken the position that we're going to uh work with the student and the family here in Trenton Trenton superintendent James Earl listed a number of steps they've taken from using calming Corners to trauma-informed care even working with Community Street teams to deescalate situations they've also deployed teams to investigate causes behind chronic student absenteeism been tremendous we've been able to uh uh get information about a student about the family about the home about their true intentions around comments or actions that have taken place uh in the school and then we were fortunate to be able to keep school-based Youth Services which is having clinicians on site the care team meetings have given us more information and we believe has really assisted Us in being uh proactive in the approach that we take to reducing some of those Safety and Security concerns former superintendent of milville Tony trongone shared how the district provided self assessments for students and found several in or near crisis even referring some of them directly to hospital intervention that was a sobering moment for me as a superintendent that uh this is something that was not on our radar but through the universal screening this is what popped up again funding came up this time for more Mental Health Services there needs to be support funds for those families because once once an event is investigated a lot of times there's referrals to families for mental health supports and those families do not have the um capacity of or the insurance to cover that um so that would be an area where we could really get some support on but one expert testified that school shootings can't be the only focus of school safety measures because they're only about 5 to 7% of the actual safety concerns that teachers and staffle face they are also equally paralyzed and concerned by violent aggressive student Behavior violent and aggressive parent Behavior mental health crises the things that are occurring every single day that do not involve a gun and they have not been trained and given adequate support to be able to respond to that and summaries concerns that they haven't seen any progress on the Governor's School Safety task force that was signed into law in January but has yet to announce any members who could begin tackling these issues head on for NJ Spotlight news I'm Joanna gagas