ATLANTA – Legislation designed to avert another school shooting like the one that left four dead at Apalachee High School last fall got a hearing in a Senate subcommittee Monday, where many expressed concerns about a database that would be built to track children deemed to be suspicious.

House Bill 268 passed the Georgia House of Representatives with wide bipartisan support earlier this month. The priority for House Speaker Jon Burns, a Republican from Newington, comes to the Senate as the House encounters several school safety bills that were passed by the Senate.

The bills share some things in common, such as heightened criminality for students who make threats of bodily harm.

But HB 268 is unique in its breadth. The 65-page measure would make it a felony to threaten someone with death at a school. It would add behavioral health coordinators to school staff. And it would require school systems to create threat assessment teams, calling for better information sharing among school administrators, law enforcement and mental health counselors when a student could pose a threat to themselves or others.

The measure also would require the timely transfer of pertinent information when students transfer between schools. The 14-year-old student at Apalachee High who was arrested for the murders, Colt Gray, had just transferred from another school. It would also establish a statewide information-sharing database to track students whose behavior has raised suspicion.

It’s this last part, a multimillion-dollar behavioral threat assessment management system, to be called the School and Student Safety Database or S3 Database, that has generated the most concern.

“Big Brother surveillance of our children,” is how Sen. Shawn Still, R-Johns Creek, characterized the messages he has been getting from constituents about the bill.

Still and Sen. Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, asked most of the questions during Monday’s meeting of the subcommittee, which heard from more than a dozen speakers over more than two hours, but took no action on SB 268.

Teacher advocates praised the measure, welcoming the support that additional counselors could provide.

Others were critical of the S3 database, worrying that it would archive dumb things kids do, creating a record that could haunt them into adulthood. They feared the data would be hacked.

It “criminalizes student speech,” said Rhonda Thomas of Truth in Education, a Christian advocacy group focused on parental rights. “It’s guilty before proven innocent.”

Mazie Lynn Causey, from the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, was concerned about enhanced penalties for threats made on campus, an idea that she said was more punitive in a measure now in the House, Senate Bill 61.

Terroristic threats can be predicated on reckless conduct, she said.

“And of course children are going to act impulsively,” she said. “They can’t really help it. Their brains are not fully developed.”

Officials from the Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency (GEMHSA) minimized the impact the S3 database would have on children if they didn’t intend to do harm.

It’s meant to be preventative, they said, leading school and police personnel to intervene before a student acts.

It would be built with top security protocols to make hacking unlikely, they said. Only select personnel — school administrators, mental health specialists and police — would have access to the information. The system would likely cost more than $10 million a year, with GEMHSA recommending that data be maintained until former students reach age 25.