Other freedoms are at stake

On the cusp of starting my 31st year as an educator, I sat down to read the article “Floyd BOE Discusses Arming Teachers.” The sinking feeling caused by reading this article stayed with me much longer than my usual start-of-the-year jitters. After my first two days of school, I came home to read “After 2nd gun at RHS, schools closed for training” and the feeling returned.

What startled me most about the articles was the descriptions of the public school safety plan for both systems. To paraphrase, there will be one entry where visitors will be buzzed in, classroom doors will be locked at all times, classrooms will be unmarked, backpacks and clothing will be searched, more police will be present, metal detectors will be installed.

The picture is clear: Remove the word “classroom” and you are describing a prison setting.

Would you willingly choose to attend a prison every day all day for 13 formative years?

Are the schools at fault? No. This plan reflects a more general trend in our society of restricting the liberties of the entire population in order to tip-toe around the common sense steps we could take as a country to make mass shootings more rare.

Instead, we are asking children to learn from age 5 to 18 while inside sterile, locked-down environments, with educational time spent drilling how to barricade doors, find hiding places, and keep their phones on them in order to call 911. As devastatingly witnessed on the news, we are also locking parents out.

In considering arming teachers and thus bringing more guns to schools, schools are considering a most ill-advised and misguided path. It is certainly no longterm solution to our problems. The only thing I see this policy achieving is giving the shooter access to weapons they don’t have to bring in themselves.

As a parent, I am relieved that my own children, all Rome High School graduates, were able to be in public school before we decided that the right to guns comes before the right to an excellent education. As a citizen, I am horrified by the mounting number of victims of school shootings. As a teacher, my heart breaks for the children who will bear the brunt of detrimental educational policies put in place because the only freedom we are willing to protect is the freedom of the gun-owner.

Julianne Bailey

Rome