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Senate committee sends House Bill 224 to the floor with due-pass recommendation
Summary
House Bill 224, a housekeeping bill that clarifies district background checks and school emergency plan requirements, was sent to the Senate floor with a due-pass recommendation after committee discussion.
The Senate Education Committee voted to send House Bill 224 to the Senate floor with a due-pass recommendation after a discussion about clarifying background-check requirements and emergency operations plans for schools.
Representative Chris Mathias, R-District 19, told the committee the bill is "a much simpler bill" and described it as a cleanup of existing subsection 16; it would clarify that school districts must have a system of background checks for any person with unsupervised access to students, require each school's emergency operations plan be approved by its board and developed in coordination with local emergency-response agencies and school staff, and add training requirements for new hires and annual training for all staff in conformity with guidelines from the Idaho School Safety and Security Advisory Board.
Senator Kelly Zito asked whether the bill would prevent a person on the *** offender registry from doing occasional work in a school; Representative Mathias said existing board policies should already prevent unsupervised access but that the bill would make district policies explicit and would cover any person with unsupervised access to children.
Senator Ward Engelking moved that the committee send House Bill 224 to the floor with a due-pass recommendation. The motion was seconded and adopted by voice vote; the chair announced the motion carries.
The committee did not record roll-call vote counts in the transcript.
