A new Pennsylvania law requiring parental notification of weapons found in schools went into effect this month.<\/p>\n
The law, known as Act 44<\/a>, requires public and private schools to notify parents within 24 hours of when a weapon is found in a school.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is broad agreement<\/a> from Republicans and Democrats that schools must be forthcoming when dangerous incidents take place,\u201d said bill sponsor Jarrett Coleman<\/a>, a Republican who represents parts of Lehigh and Bucks counties in the state Senate.<\/p>\n Easton Area School District Superintendent Tracy Piazza said she agrees that school districts should be transparent when students are put in danger by a found weapon.<\/p>\n But Piazza doesn\u2019t want to alarm parents if it\u2019s not necessary.<\/p>\n She\u2019s been advised that school administrators can make a \u201clocal decision\u201d on whether the object found in the school should be reported as a weapon.<\/p>\n For instance, if a student is using a butter knife to cut the crust off a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and another student reports the knife to a lunchroom monitor, she\u2019d advise not reporting it to parents.<\/p>\n \u201cHowever, if that same knife is being \u2018jabbed around\u2019 \u2026 then I probably would report that as a weapon,\u201d she said at the school board meeting<\/a> Jan. 13.<\/p>\n Since the law went into effect this month, the school district reported an instance to parents when a student brought in an X-Acto knife for an art class. Another student saw the knife and reported it. Although no one was threatened by the knife, the district decided to report it rather than risk breaking the new law. <\/p>\n The Easton Area School District posted answers<\/a> to questions about the new law on the district\u2019s website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new Pennsylvania law requiring parental notification of weapons found in schools went into effect this month. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":98910,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[153,155,154],"class_list":{"0":"post-98909","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bethlehem","8":"tag-bethlehem","9":"tag-bethlehem-headlines","10":"tag-bethlehem-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98909\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}