Alyssa Alhadeff was 14 years old when she was killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, 2018. Her mother, Lori Alhadeff, turned that loss into a specific, practical demand: every school should have a silent panic alarm that connects directly to law enforcement, so a call for help does not depend on someone finding a phone and explaining where they are while an emergency is already underway.
That demand became Alyssa’s Law. New Jersey signed the first version in 2019, and twelve states have followed.
What the law actually requires, which is less than you think
Alyssa’s Law does not look the same in every state, and the differences matter more than the headline count.
About half of the thirteen require public K-12 schools to install a system on a deadline. The rest are softer. New York, Tennessee, Oregon, and Illinois require districts to consider a panic alert system in their emergency planning. Virginia and West Virginia permit school boards to provide one rather than requiring it, and West Virginia’s is contingent on available funding and sunsets in 2029.
The hardware language is looser than the reporting suggests too. Utah is the only state whose statute specifies a wearable device communicating directly with 911. Georgia’s says “mobile panic alert system.” Most of the rest describe a function, not a form factor.
Which states have passed it
New Jersey went first, on February 6, 2019. Florida followed in June 2020, and New York in June 2022. Texas and Tennessee both passed theirs in May 2023. Utah and Oklahoma passed theirs in 2024.
2025 was the biggest year yet. Georgia’s Gov. Brian Kemp signed HB 268 in April, giving public schools until July 1, 2026 to have panic alert systems installed. Washington’s Gov. Bob Ferguson signed SB 5004 in May. Oregon’s Gov. Tina Kotek signed HB 3083 that same month, building on a wireless panic alarm grant the state had already funded since 2023.
Two more arrived in 2026. Virginia’s Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed HB 592 on April 2, effective July 1, 2026. West Virginia passed HB 4798 the same month. Illinois followed in August, when Gov. JB Pritzker signed HB 5107. Illinois took the lightest touch of any of them: the law takes effect January 1, 2027 and asks districts to address mobile panic alert capability in their emergency and crisis response planning by the start of the 2028-2029 school year. It is a planning requirement, not a hardware deadline, but it puts panic alert systems on the agenda in every Illinois district, which is how most of these laws started.
A few states reached the same place under a different bill title and are counted separately by most trackers. Louisiana’s School Safety Act, SB 207, signed August 1, 2023, requires a panic emergency notification system. Connecticut made panic alarms eligible for its School Security Infrastructure Competitive Grant Program.
North Carolina has a panic alarm law. It is not Alyssa’s Law.
This is where most write-ups get North Carolina wrong.
North Carolina has not passed Alyssa’s Law, and it has no Alyssa’s Law bill in committee. But it is not a blank slate. G.S. 115C-105.51 directs Emergency Management and the NC 911 Board, working with DPI and the Center for Safer Schools, to implement and maintain a statewide panic alarm system that sends real time 911 messaging to public safety answering points. The 2021 budget put roughly $4.5 million nonrecurring behind it, Emergency Management ran the procurement in 2022, and the result is a response component of the School Risk and Response Management System. Many North Carolina district IT directors already have access to it.
So the honest version is narrower, and more useful:
- North Carolina has a statewide panic alarm application, available to school employees.
- It does not have a requirement that every school be equipped with a silent alert device.
- It does not have funding for a device per classroom or per staff member.
- The statutory language covers public secondary schools, which is not every school in a district.
An application on a phone and a device on a lanyard are not the same tool. One assumes a staff member has the phone, has it unlocked, and has a free hand. That distinction is the whole argument, and it is a better argument than pretending the state has nothing.
Where bills are actually moving
As of September 2026, four states have Alyssa’s Law bills live right now: South Carolina (H.3258, passed the House and sitting in the Senate), Ohio (SB 105, in Senate Finance), Minnesota (HF 4571, introduced March 2026), and Pennsylvania (SB 541).
Bills in Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, and Alabama died in the 2025-26 sessions and may be refiled. Several other states have introduced versions in recent sessions without movement. Trackers disagree on this list more than any other part of the topic, so check a bill number before quoting a state.
Six questions these laws ask a district to answer
Whether a state mandates installation on a deadline or only asks a district to think it through, the planning questions land in the same place:
- Can a staff member trigger an alert without stopping to think about it or drawing attention to themselves?
- Does the alert identify which room it came from, not just which building?
- How fast do the people actually inside the building find out there is a problem?
- Does it work with what a district already has, including paging, radios, and access control, or does all of it get replaced?
- Does the alert reach 911 and local police directly, or does it still route through a person answering a phone?
- Can the district prove, on demand, that the system was tested and that the test was documented?
These are worth answering on paper before anyone sits through a vendor demo, including ours.
You do not need a state mandate to start
Georgia’s installation deadline was July 1, 2026 and has already passed. Illinois districts have until the 2028-2029 school year just to finish planning. Nothing requires a district anywhere else to wait that long.
True Guardian is a wearable panic alert device built for K-12 schools, healthcare, and government. If you want to walk through how it maps to the six questions above, we will do that with you, with your buildings and your existing systems on the table. You can see the detail on our technology page and our K-12 school safety page.
If you run a school district in North Carolina, or anywhere the legislature has not acted, that is not a reason to wait. It is the reason to move first.