The one-year spending plan includes $18.2 million in bonding capacity for school districts to secure their facilities, $13 million for the Kentucky Center for School Safety to fund pieces of the School Safety and Resiliency Act and $7.4 million for districts to hire more mental health counselors.

Senate Bill 8 passed the House Education Committee on a 16-5-1 vote Tuesday.

Officials from several school districts testified Wednesday before the House’s budget review subcommittee on K-12 education and shared their efforts to comply with the new school safety law that took effect last year.

KSBA, which presented those figures Tuesday during a meeting of the Budget Review Subcommittee on Education, based those estimates on feedback from a survey it sent to Kentucky school districts this year after the passage of Senate Bill 1.

Area superintendents gathered at Ohio Valley Educational Cooperative in Shelbyville as part of a broader push by the Kentucky Association of School Superintendents to release its priorities for the 2020 legislative session, during which lawmakers will be tasked with writing the next two-year budget.