HUB TEACHERS PAN PREZ CALL TO ARMS
Move seen as ‘illogical’
Boston schoolteacher Natalia Cuadra-Saez doesn’t want to bring a gun to school.
She called President Trump’s repeated call to arm teachers ridiculous and absurd.
She’s not alone.
“It would not make us teachers feel safer,” CuadraSaez told me last night. “It would not make the students feel safer. It would not make us safer.”
Cuadra-Saez teaches U.S. history to ninth-graders at Snowden International School, not far from where deadly bombs exploded at the marathon finish line nearly five years ago.
Cuadra-Saez said she feels safe at school but she worries about making sure her students feel the same.
“I wasn’t working at the school when it happened,” Cuadra-Saez said of the bombings, “but it’s fresh in the memories of people working there, people going to school there. So that’s on my mind when I talk about safety with students.”
The president floated his proposal yesterday to arm teachers for the second time in as many days, even offering educators bonuses to bear arms in the wake of last week’s Florida school shooting that left 17 people dead. The gunman was a former student at the high school.
“These people are cowards,” Trump said yesterday. “They’re not going to walk into a school if 20 percent of the teachers have guns. It may be 10 percent. It may be 40 percent. The people that do carry, we give them a bonus.”
Jessica Tang, president of the Boston Teachers Union, said simply: “Don’t arm us with guns.”
Giving teachers guns, Cuadra-Saez said, doesn’t
make the “top 1,000” list of what schools should be spending money on. More funding should go toward reducing class sizes, she said, and including special education students in every classroom. “Those are things that are priorities right now at Boston public schools,” Cuadra-Saez said.
Students who survived the Florida shooting are demanding stricter gun laws, including background checks and banning AR-15 assault rifles. “We need to listen to our young people,” Cuadra-Saez said. “The young people have all the answers.”
Boston public schools Superintendent Tommy Chang called arming teachers “utterly illogical.”
Raul Garcia has taught at the Boston Arts Academy since 2001 and also said he doesn’t want to be packing at school. “I do not want to be armed,” Garcia said. “Nor do I think anybody should be armed that isn’t police or regular school guards or security.”
Garcia said more mental health services are needed for students. He said schools are seen as a “moral compass” by students and the community — and arming teachers goes against that.
“We’re supposed to help students resolve conflict. We’re supposed to show students how to talk to each other kindly,” Garcia said. “We’re not expected to say, ‘Oh and by the way, I might have to use a gun today. Or I might have to shoot one of you.’ ”