The 2013-14 legislative session of the General Assembly came to a close Nov. 30.

The two-year session resulted in the passage of a number of bills signed into law, including some to help curb prescription drug abuse, enhance educational opportunities and improve the state's child protection laws.

When it comes to child protection, we passed into law approximately two dozen laws, including one I authored to increase the cost of duplicative birth certificates in order to fund child advocacy centers across the state.

These are one-stop-shop treatment programs for abused children which bring together doctors, nurses, prosecutors, social workers and law enforcement to give abused children the best chance to recover and also provide the most effective way to gather evidence to bring perpetrators to justice.

Furthermore, another new law will prevent school employees accused of child abuse, from quietly resigning and acquiring employment at another school district in the state – a practice often called "passing the trash."

Under the new law, previous employers must provide an inquiring school with all requested background information regarding a former employee, explicitly pertaining to abuse allegations.

Further, the applicant is now required to indicate whether or not he or she has ever been disciplined, discharged, non-renewed, asked to resign from employment or separated from employment while allegations of abuse or sexual misconduct were pending or under investigation.

The law applies to all public schools, private schools, nonpublic schools, intermediate units and area vocational-technical schools in the commonwealth.

One of several new laws relating to education gives public career and technical schools, such as Lehigh Career and Technical School, eligibility to participate in two nationally acclaimed tax credit programs, the state Educational Improvement Tax Credit and Educational Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit programs.

The EITC and OSTC programs allow eligible businesses contributing to scholarship organizations affiliated with a public or private schools to receive a tax credit.

Many of Pennsylvania's 82 career and technical schools have limited options to receive scholarship donations.

This new law makes them eligible to take part in these popular tax credit programs that will improve the educational experience for students on a technical career path.

In order to address the growing prescription drug addiction problem in Pennsylvania, the state House passed legislation signed into law to create a statewide database of certain types of prescription medication records.

The database will collect Pennsylvanians' prescription medication records if the substances fall on Schedules II-V of the federal Controlled Substances Act.

Examples of medications in this schedule are OxyContin, Tylenol with codeine and Valium.

The database would help alert medical practitioners to patients who may be "doctor or pharmacy shopping" to feed an addiction.

According to the office of National Drug Control Policy, prescription drugs are the second-most abused category of drugs in the United States, following marijuana.

Of course, these are just a few of the laws passed. For a complete list of accomplishments, please visit my website at JulieHarhart.com and click on the "End of Session" banner at the top of the page.

We have accomplished a great deal this past session; however, there is still much more to do in the upcoming 2015-16 session.

Among the topics sure to be discussed and debated include public pension reform, liquor store privatization and property tax reform.

As always, I will continue to do my best to represent the voice and views of the residents of the 183rd District as we get ready to embark on a new session year.

For more legislative news and information, visit my website or go to my Facebook page at facebook.com /RepHarhart.