The anti-Second Amendment crowd has argued long and hard against allowing our children’s teachers to carry concealed during the school day, but more and more schools are getting out of the way of peoples’ freedom.

Recently, for example, Ohio’s Tuscarawas County saw its fifth school district make the move to allowing teachers to be armed. As The Dispatch reported: “School boards at Garaway Local Schools and Claymont City Schools approved the safety measure [to arm teachers at the end of 2019]. They join Newcomerstown Exempted Village Schools, which started arming staff members in 2013, Indian Valley Local Schools (2017) and Tuscarawas Valley Local Schools (2018).”

“When seconds count in responding to a dangerous event, the faster the event is stopped, the more students and staff stay alive,” said Newcomerstown Superintendent Jeff Staggs. “I’m still in favor of a highly trained armed staff along with multiple other layers in the school safety plan.”

Staggs added, “We continue to train and tweak our school safety plan to meet the new issues that schools face every year. The sheriff’s office has been a huge help in our training program with our journey to get better at school safety.”

Rural schools appear especially keen to arm teachers, which isn’t surprising given that the long distances between the schools and law-enforcement staff can make police response times longer than the national average. As originally reported by The Blade newspaper, Michigan’s Addison Community Schools is “a single building in rural southeast Michigan that contains three grade schools for fewer than 1,000 students…. In the past, it’s taken sheriff’s deputies patrolling a sprawling county a half an hour or longer to get to [the school].”

The school is without armed security of any sort. Addison School Superintendent Steve Guerra said, “I have a lot of safety measures in place, but if somebody were to get into the building and had a weapon, I’m defenseless.”

Since Addison Community Schools doesn’t have room in it to hire a school-resources officer, Guerra and the school board are considering becoming one of the first districts in Michigan to allow teachers to carry concealed firearms.

In rural Campbell County, Wyo., “Two [Campbell County School District] committees that have been working to create an armed educators policy and regulations in Gillette hope to bring drafts of their proposal to the school board sometime in January [2020],” according to the Sundance Times.

The “Armed Educators Committee” has prepared a 22-page draft document in which they examined the various social and tactical aspects of having at least some of the district’s teachers carry concealed carry during the school day.

Deputy School Superintendent Kirby Eisenhauer noted that local law-enforcement agencies “are doing such a good job now with what we have. But the added security that [armed teachers] would bring is something we’re all interested in.”

Article by Brian McCombie