Hunter Education in Schools – Coming to a State Near You?

Why It Matters: As efforts to bolster hunter recruitment, retention, and reactivation across the country ramp up, bringing basic hunter education to the classroom serves as an excellent avenue to support the next generation of sportsmen and women. It is the next generation of hunters and anglers that will help sustain critical conservation funding needed to support our storied outdoor traditions for generations to come.

Highlights:

On February 13, Georgia Legislative Sportsmen’s Caucus (Caucus) Co-Chair Representatives Chas Cannon and Matt Dubnik, among other Caucus members, and in close coordination with the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation (CSF), introduced House Bill 451, which would allow public schools to offer hunter safety education courses in grades six through twelve.
House Bill 451 specified that the curriculum for the course would be based on existing hunter education courses offered by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources
Additionally, it shall be up to each local board of education to incorporate the course, making the course completely optional for students.
CSF has encouraged, and will continue to encourage, legislators from other states to take a similar approach in bringing hunter education courses to the classroom.

For too long, hunters and anglers have been on the defense fighting against legislation that would have a negative impact on sportsmen and women. To take the fight to the anti-hunting community, CSF has been working closely with legislative sportsmen’s caucus leaders from across the country to take a proactive approach to sporting-conservation policy.

Among CSF’s top proactive policy priorities is the hunter education in schools initiative. This policy priority is relatively simple to implement, gives parents the option to get their children involved in our time-honored traditions, teaches the next generation of Americans to understand the importance that hunting and angling have on the economy and wildlife conservation as a whole, and benefits the “user pays – public benefits” structure of the American System of Conservation Funding (ASCF) by providing an opportunity to recruit new sportsmen and women. The ASCF has three pillars: revenue from sporting licenses and excise tax revenue from both the Wildlife and Sportfish Restoration Programs. As today’s hunters begin to age out of the sport, the next generation must step in to fill this inevitable funding gap. Efforts to get students involved in hunting at a young age will help fund conservation into the future and should be top of mind for sportsmen and women, policymakers, and parents alike.

Georgia and made significant progress on this issue in 2025. CSF and the GA Caucus aim to get House Bill 451 over the finish line and signed into law when the Georgia General Assembly reconvenes in early 2026. Other states, like Tennessee for example, are primed to take similar approaches to hunter education in schools in 2026. In 2024, Tennessee Legislative Sportsmen’s Caucus Co-Chair Representative Chris Todd successfully sponsored House Bill 2882 which allows local school districts to provide students with age and grade appropriate instruction on firearm safety. An appropriate next step in Tennessee would be to expand this instruction offering to hunter education courses.

CSF applauds Caucus leadership in Georgia and looks forward to working with legislative sportsmen’s caucus leaders in the Southeast and beyond to expand opportunities to share our time-honored traditions with the next generation of sportsmen and women.