ATLANTA – A sweeping school safety bill in reaction to the mass shooting at Apalachee High School last fall cleared a Senate committee Thursday, keeping it in play just ahead of the deadline for final passage this year.

The Georgia House of Representatives had already approved House Bill 268 with broad bipartisan support. Now, the measure, a priority for House Speaker Jon Burns, R-Newington, is eligible for a vote by the full Senate before this legislative session ends next week.

The Senate Judiciary Committee amended the bill Thursday evening, trimming it to 57 pages from the plump 65 that had come from the House in early March.

It still covers a lot of the same ground though, maintaining the focus on the early identification of potentially harmful students and intervening with mental health services.

School shooters are “really sociopathic-type personalities most of the time,” said Sen. Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, who shepherded HB 268 through the Senate and said he worked with the House on the amendments.

Cowsert’s team sanded away a couple of features that had drawn the most criticism.

The first involved a database that would have served as a repository of information about students who seemed suspicious. One state official said it might contain records on 1% of Georgia’s 1.7 million public school students. Parents and their advocates feared such data would be inaccurate, prejudicial and stigmatizing — and follow students into adulthood, with potentially harmful consequences.

Given the trajectory of brain development into early adulthood, teens tend toward reckless behavior, they noted, and sometimes say inappropriate things they don’t really mean.

The committee deleted the database idea and also struck a provision requiring school systems to establish threat assessment teams. Some schools already have them, but a mandate was deemed to be too complex and cumbersome, Cowsert said.

Other major elements of the House bill remain.

Schools would have to maintain student records on behavior that sends up red flags, from regularly skipping school to disciplinary infractions and police encounters (police would have to inform the schools when they apprehend their students), and they’d have a short deadline to share those records when a student transfers to a different school.

“That will help the new administration know what to do when a new kid comes there,” Cowsert said.

School districts would also have to maintain an around-the-clock anonymous tip line staffed with trained people who can field reports about students who might be planning a violent act.

The help would come in the form of specially trained student advocates. Each school system would get up to three state-funded positions, one for every 18,000 students.

There would also be annual behavioral training for teachers and students about recognizing mental health warning signs such as contemplating suicide.

Finally, HB 268 would treat teens sternly if they threaten violence on campus, sending them into adult courts if they are charged with attempted murder or terroristic threats.

That means a conviction for a bomb threat would tag a child aged 13-17 with a misdemeanor on their permanent record, with a felony punishable by up to five years in prison for a second offense.

“Zero tolerance,” is how Cowsert characterized the approach, prompting questions from Sen. Elena Parent of Atlanta, the chair of the Senate’s Democratic Caucus.

But she also said she had received many pleased emails about the bill, and the committee then passed it unanimously, less than a day ahead of the deadline to keep it in play.

HB 268 now goes to the Senate Rules Committee, which will decide whether and when to put it to a vote of the full Senate. If it passes there, the House would need to agree to the changes for it to become law.