ATLANTA — In a nod to the spread of opioids, Georgia is installing overdose reversal kits at all 2,300 public schools in the state using money from a legal settlement with the pharmaceutical industry.
Distribution began this fall in parts of metro Atlanta and in southwest and central Georgia. The initiative is expected to be completed statewide by spring.
“The opioid settlement funds give us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to turn tragedy into prevention,” Kevin Tanner, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities, said in a statement announcing the distribution Friday. “Putting overdose reversal kits in every Georgia school is a practical, compassionate use of those dollars. It means we are giving our educators and communities a fighting chance to stop a preventable death.”
The Georgia Department of Education is partnering with Tanner’s agency to distribute training resources to school staff. State School Superintendent Richard Woods said the partnership will ensure every school is ready for an emergency.
The initiative comes after Senate Bill 395 became law last year. Sen. Clint Dixon, R-Buford, co-sponsored “Wesley’s Law” in memory of a family member who died of a fentanyl overdose. The law requires schools to stock naloxone — a product branded as Narcan or Evzio — and allows teachers and other school staff to carry and administer the medication on school property.
ATLANTA — A record number enrolled in Georgia’s public colleges and universities this fall as the state’s lottery continued to produce a windfall for academic scholarships, but a bipartisan legislative committee thinks too many students are still being left behind.
More than 2 million have received a HOPE Scholarship since the public lottery that funds them was established three decades ago.
To qualify, they had to graduate high school with at least a 3.0 grade point average. They also had to maintain their GPA in college to keep the money.
Many have slipped below that line, especially students from lower-income families. They must work while they take classes, leaving less time for studies. When they lose HOPE, they fall further behind, often failing to improve their grades enough to recover the scholarship. Many then drop out.
So, a state Senate committee adopted bipartisan recommendations this week calling for Georgia to provide financial aid based on need and not just merit, like 48 other states.
“This is about affordability and about opening doors,” said Sen. Nan Orrock, D-Atlanta, who led the study committee that concluded its work Tuesday.
Republicans joined Democrats to unanimously approve the final recommendations. Their report, released Wednesday, said Georgia should adopt a $126 million need-based financial aid program that could be funded from $1.7 billion in Georgia Lottery Corporation reserves.
Converting the recommendations into law could be a tough sell though.
Some are dubious about need-based financial aid, dimming prospects for such a measure in a General Assembly dominated by conservatives.
For instance, the Selig Center for Economic Growth, a business think tank at the University of Georgia, wrote in a 2019 report that need-based financial aid “sometimes has been cast negatively as a social welfare program.”
It said the state could face a shortage of skilled labor if nothing changes. A growing pool of highly skilled workers attracts employers that offer more skilled jobs, in a “virtuous cycle” of growth that the state should promote by spending more on financial aid, said the Selig Center report, which was co-authored by former UGA president Charles B. Knapp.
“Whatever views are held on this matter, the reality is that without a need-based financial aid program, Georgia is leaving potential economic growth on the table and shortchanging its citizens,” said the report, which was cited by Orrock’s committee.
But the HOPE Scholarship has produced a treasured legacy, and many lawmakers could be wary of drawing from its foundation in lottery funding.
On Monday, the day before Orrock’s committee approved its recommendations, Gov. Brian Kemp lauded HOPE, noting that more than 2.25 million students had received one of the scholarships in the past three decades. The announcement came as the Lottery Corp. surpassed $30 billion raised since its start, a portion of the proceeds paying for both pre-kindergarten and college.
“Since 1993, Georgia students from Pre-K to college have been set up for success through the programs funded by the lottery, expanding access to high-quality education in our state,” Kemp said in a statement. “We look forward to seeing that legacy of impact continue for years to come.”
On Wednesday, Gretchen Corbin, president and CEO of the Lottery Corp., said at a legislative hearing that the lottery returned $1.47 billion— a quarter of all proceeds — to education for the fiscal year that ended in July.
The money paid for HOPE and Zell Miller scholarships and also subsidized pre-kindergarten attendance, helping to drive enrollment in both.
Sonny Perdue, a former Republican Georgia governor and now the chancellor of the state university system, told lawmakers at a hearing last month that a record-breaking 382,000 enrolled this fall, surpassing projections of 379,500 by 2029.
“So, we are really beating the numbers,” Perdue said.
But the premise of Orrock’s committee is that Georgia could be enrolling even more students if they could afford college. Four-year college recipients of the Pell grant, a federal subsidy for students from low-income households, had an average $11,883 in unmet need in 2020, Orrock’s committee report said. That was a few thousand dollars more than the funding gap for all four-year students.
Kamore Campbell, who was a high school salutatorian, told the committee that he had received Pell and Zell funding, yet he still left the state for college.
“There were no public four-year schools that offered me enough aid to make staying in state affordable,” Campbell said. He had wanted to attend Georgia Southern University but had a $10,000 gap. “I enrolled at American University and left Georgia,” he said.
Ray Li, a lawyer with the Legal Defense Fund, a racial justice group, told the committee that Georgia is suffering a “brain drain” as talented students find better deals in other states and never return to contribute to Georgia’s economy.
Georgia has the lowest home state college attendance in the region, he said, with 78% of high school graduates staying here.
Compare that to 91% in Mississippi, 86% in Florida and 85% in South Carolina, he said. “We are losing a ton of students simply because they cannot afford to go to college here.”
A Wing drone totes a Walmart payload (Courtesy of Wing)
ATLANTA — They will not be dropping packages down your chimney, but unmanned air couriers will be able to deliver to your lawn in time for Christmas, if you live near one of six Walmart Supercenters in the suburbs that ring Atlanta.
Walmart announced the new service with partner Wing on Wednesday. In addition to metro Atlanta, the two will be rolling out drone deliveries in Charlotte, Houston, Orlando and Tampa.
They say they plan to reach a hundred stores in a year, after piloting the service at 18 locations in Dallas-Fort Worth.
“The popularity of drone delivery in DFW is a testament not just to its convenience, but to the way this technology quickly becomes a part of everyday life,” Wing CEO Adam Woodworth said in a statement.
The partnership is billing this as the first commercial drone delivery service in metro Atlanta. Yet illegal air deliveries are already commonplace to certain shady customers in Georgia. On Monday, state corrections officials lamented at a legislative hearing how drones had become a security threat, routinely penetrating the airspace over prisons to deliver contraband to inmates.
And driverless Waymo cars are already an everyday sight in Atlanta, where they have been delivering people to destinations since the summer.
But the new pilotless air shipping promises to give Christmas procrastinators who live within delivery range another chance to buy last-minute stocking stuffers, plus seasonal essentials such as wrapping paper and ingredients for holiday meals.
Wing says its 12-pound, white and yellow drones can range up to six miles at a cruising speed of 60 mph, delivering packages in five minutes. Besides quicker delivery, the company says communities stand to benefit when fewer packages move by road: less traffic would be a gift to everyone.
The six Georgia Walmart locations with drones will be in Conyers, Dallas, Hiram, Loganville, McDonough and Woodstock. (Check your address eligibility at wing.com/walmart).
ATLANTA — A federal appeals court has restored a state ban on giving food and drink to people waiting in line to vote.
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta on Monday cancelled a preliminary injunction issued by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia two years ago that stopped the state from enforcing its ban on giving “gifts” near polling places.
The three-judge appellate panel decided that a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in another case last year had changed the legal landscape for such decisions. The high court ruled in that case that lower courts had failed to fully analyze whether state content-moderation restrictions on social media companies violated the First Amendment.
The defendant in that case — Moody v. NetChoice, LLC — was an industry association for internet companies, but the same analysis applies in a case about regulating elections, the appeals court in Atlanta decided.
“The district court didn’t conduct the facial-challenge analysis now required by Moody,” the Eleventh Circuit Court opinion said. It said the district court had “failed to systematically assess the full sweep of the regulation and weigh the constitutional against the unconstitutional applications.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican running for governor, applauded the decision, issuing a statement that said it “reinforces a simple truth: Georgia has the right and the responsibility to shield voters from influence and interference at the polls.”
The GOP-controlled General Assembly passed the gifts ban in 2021, as part of an elections overhaul in the wake of claims by Donald Trump that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.
Senate Bill 202 affected absentee voting and other election procedures, but one element in particular gained national attention: the ban on giving voters “any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink” while in line at polling places.
Civil rights groups sued, calling the ban a barrier to voting. The U.S. Department of Justice under President Joe Biden sued, asserting the law violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by intentionally discriminating against Black voters.
Then, President Donald Trump started his second term and named Pam Bondi U.S. Attorney General. In March, she ordered the Justice Department to drop the lawsuit.
The appeals court order on Monday returns the case to the district court in Atlanta, where U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee has been overseeing the lawsuits and motions related to the 2021 law.
ATLANTA — Drones powerful enough to lift a human have become a routine tool for delivering contraband in Georgia prisons.
At a hearing Monday about the budget for prisons, Tyrone Oliver, the commissioner for the state Department of Corrections, said drones have been used to drop drugs laced with fentanyl and other goods, including power saws made by the company Dremel.
“We’ve confiscated drones that are large enough to lift 225 pounds,” he said. “We had one earlier today that can lift about 80 pounds or 90 pounds.”
He said the pilots pay people who live near prisons thousands of dollars to borrow their driveways to stage the flights.
Other methods for delivering contraband were more time-honored, such as moving it with the help of prison staff or through the mail, delivering it during inmate visitations or tossing product over fences and walls.
Matthew Wolfe, who leads the agency’s Office of Professional Standards, said couriers wrap tape around bundles, forming them into football-sized packages shaped for throwing.
He said enforcement against contraband had led to the arrests of 48 prison staff in fiscal year 2025, which ended in July. There were also 120 inmates charged and 362 civilians arrested, many in connection with drone flights, he said.
“Civilian involvement remains the most common threat vector, with throwovers and drone drops continuing to be the primary method used to infiltrate our institutions,” Wolfe said.
The prisons have tried defensive measures, such as retrofitting windows so that drones can no longer deliver to outstretched hands. But Oliver said that has not stopped rooftop drops from high in the sky.
The prisons have tried to track offenders, but they must capture them on the ground, in person. They cannot just shoot the drones out of the sky, or disable them in some other way, even when they fly over a prison.
That is because the aircraft are protected by federal law.
“The technology is out there. We just don’t have the authority, the legal authority, to be able to do it,” Oliver told Rep. Danny Mathis, R-Cochran, a member of the House panel.
“I hate that your hands are tied,” Mathis said. “That’s what bothers me the most. This is just insane.”
