Teachers armed with baseball bats instead of guns

In an effort to protect students in the event of a mass shooter, a school district in Pennsylvania has “symbolically” armed its teachers — with baseball bats.

The Millcreek Township School District in Erie, Penn., recently distributed 16-inch wooden sluggers to each of its 500 or so teachers as a way to emphasize fighting back as a possible response to an active shooter, according to superintendent William Hall.

“They’re the little souvenir bats that you buy in baseball parks,” Hall told the Washington Post. “They could be used as a weapon but so could a number of things in a classroom.”

Hall said Millcreek officials have periodically discussed about how to respond to school shootings for about five years, but always with a focus on hiding from an attacker. However, the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., prompted the northwestern Pennsylvania district to revisit its policies, he said.

“Obviously, after Parkland, we went back and looked at our active shooter and hard lockdown response and realized that it had to change,” Hall said. “We had basically adopted the ‘just lock the doors and turn the lights out and hide’ approach in terms of the response ... (The modified plan) includes not just hiding but also running and, as a last resort, having to fight as necessary.”

The Parkland shooting — one of several school attacks in 2018 — left 17 students and staff members dead, and it immediately jolted nationwide discussions about school safety and gun control. In the weeks after the Florida tragedy, U.S. President Donald Trump continued to push a proposal to arm schoolteachers.

On the other hand, the shooting also seemed to galvanize a new generation of activists, including many teenagers from Parkland, in support of stricter gun control measures. Hundreds of thousands of protesters appeared at March for Our Lives rallies across the country March 24 to call for an end to gun violence. For the Millcreek school district, the response was somewhere in the middle, Hall said. Shortly after the Parkland shooting, the district sent out a survey asking how parents would feel about arming people at its schools who were not police officers.

“We weren’t at the time seriously looking at that, but we were wanting to gauge how our community felt about having a non-SRO gun presence,” Hall said. “There’s an expense involved in that, laws and training and liability — it’s problematic, obviously.”