Smaller districts are arming teachers
SIDNEY, Ohio — The 8-by11-inch box sits atop a bookshelf in the district headquarters, as much a part of the office furniture as the manila folders, yearbooks and Webster’s dictionaries. Inside is a semi-automatic Glock handgun with extra magazines, equipment that education leaders here say will prevent this district from suffering the next schoolhouse tragedy.
Dispersed throughout the seven school buildings in this rural Ohio district outside of Dayton are dozens of biometric safes, tucked away discreetly in closets and classrooms, accessible only to a designated staff member whose fingerprint can open the box. A bulletproof vest is nearby, in an undisclosed location, fortified to protect against any bullet except one fired from an assault rifle.
“We can’t stop an active shooter, but we can minimize the carnage,” said John Scheu, superintendent of Sidney City Schools.
After the latest mass shooting, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., last month, President Donald Trump amplified calls to train and arm educators, roiling the teaching profession and infuriating gun control advocates who see yet another inappropriate — and potentially disastrous — duty being heaped on teachers.
For all the outcry, though, hundreds of school districts across the country, most of them small and rural, already have. Officials like those here in Sidney do not see the weaponry scattered through their schools as a political statement, but as a practical response to a potent threat.
The push for others to follow their lead has almost instantly ignited a backlash. A hashtag emerged on social media, #ArmMeWith, followed by a litany of suggestions from teachers other than guns: books, science equipment, computers and better pay. A cartoon depicting a teacher struggling underneath the weight of her responsibilities — social worker, drug detector, disciplinarian — was shared on social media more than 100,000 times.
But the Trump administration has elevated the issue to something of an educational mission. The president insisted that he personally would charge into a school, even unarmed, to challenge a gunman. Frank Brogan, a former Florida lieutenant governor who has been nominated for assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education, carries an unusual credential: When he was an assistant principal, Brogan chased down an armed teenager, talked him into lowering his weapon, then grabbed his arm and wrestled it away.
But even many educators who have faced off with a school gunman oppose the president’s idea.
Every day for 5½ years, Jesse Wasmer said, he has thought about the moment that he tackled a student who had just fired a shotgun into the back of a classmate in the cafeteria of a suburban Baltimore high school.
“Never have I thought, ‘I wish I’d had a gun,’ ” Wasmer said.
Wasmer, who was a guidance counselor at Perry Hall High School when a student opened fire there in 2012, called the president’s assertions “simplistic and misguided.”
“I think as educators we’re trained to nurture kids and foster kids, and our first instinct is to not shoot or harm them,” he said. “What we need is more caring adults in these kids’ lives, not more guns.”
Officials here in this town of 20,000 do not swagger.
“I agree with those folks who say teachers should teach and cops should be cops, but we got a mess on our hands,” said Sheriff John Lenhart of Shelby County, who gave up his National Rifle Association membership in the 1990s. “If I have to wait on state officials, on the federal government, on psychologists to figure out why people hurt one another, we would have nothing in our school system.”
Since 2013, in response to the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., legislation in state capitals across the country has sought to arm school staff.
At least 10 states allow staff members to possess or have access to a firearm on school grounds, according to an analysis by the Education Commission of the States.