A St. Vrain Valley School District official, a representative of a teacher union, a former teacher and a high school student all said President Donald Trump’s idea of allowing teachers to be armed in schools wouldn’t work and would harm the classroom culture.
One week after Nikolas Cruz entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and killed 17 people, Trump suggested at a White House listening session Wednesday that some teachers in schools should be armed in order to combat school shootings.
“If you had a teacher who was adept with a firearm, they could end the attack very quickly,” Trump said, according to a CNN report. “This would be obviously only for people who were very adept at handling a gun.”
But in Colorado, Democratic state lawmakers on Wednesday rejected a Republican bill that would have allowed people with concealed-carry permits to take firearms onto school grounds.
Colorado schools are gun-free zones, with only school resource officers and, in limited instances, campus security guards, allowed to carry guns.
Steve Villarreal, the president of the St. Vrain Valley School District teacher union, said he hasn’t heard any teachers approach him because they want to be able to carry firearms in the classroom.
“I have not heard from one person … who is saying, ‘I’d love to be able to pack or to carry a gun or be one of those guys,'” Villarreal said. “That’s just not something teachers are comfortable with.”
Additionally, Villarreal said, an armed teacher trying to protect students could be in danger in a school shooting situation.
“Everything I’ve read and heard about these situations is that it’s chaotic and it’s confusing,” he said. “Law enforcement’s job is to immediately disarm people who enter schools to kill people. It adds to the confusion, in my opinion, if law enforcement is not able to distinguish a good guy from a bad guy. It would only compound the situation.”
Richard Martyr, a retired high school chemistry teacher who now serves on the St. Vrain Valley school board, echoed this concern. Martyr clarified that he was sharing his personal opinion and not a consensus of the board.
“In a shooting situation, an armed teacher becomes a target,” he said. “If I’m a teacher with a gun trying to track down a perpetrator and law enforcement enters, then I’ve got a target on my chest.”
Martyr also criticized the idea of having armed teachers in schools as out of touch.
“It’s a ridiculous idea and one which could only be conceived of by someone that’s not part of the academic community and has not spent any significant time trying to understand what is happening in the schools themselves,” Martyr said.
School Board President Bob Smith said while it may seem simple to add more armed staff to a school campus, the “reality is much more complicated.”
“I’m reminded of the saying that the further away you are from a problem, the easier it is to solve,” Smith said. “I’ve spoken to the police about this as well and the police feel that the policing should be left to them.”
Smith said that there is a school resource officer in every St. Vrain Valley high school. There is one officer assigned to every two middle schools in the district.
Boulder Valley School District interim Superintendent Cindy Stevenson said she looked extensively at the issue of arming teachers in her 12 years as superintendent in the Jefferson County School District.
Police departments recommended against allowing teachers to carry guns because research shows that even highly trained police officers miss 70 percent of their shots — and it drops to 18 percent when a suspect returns fire, she said.
“There’s this mythology that bad guys will get shot, but that’s not always true,” she said. “Sometimes, the good guys get shot. Our teachers should be worried about effective teaching, not managing firearms in classrooms.”
Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said during a Thursday news conference that the SRO at the Parkland, Fla., school was armed and in uniform but stayed outside while the shooting was ongoing, NBC News reported.
Scott Peterson, a sheriff’s deputy assigned to the school, was suspended without pay pending an internal investigation of his inaction. Peterson has resigned.
Regardless, Smith said that the district has discussed school safety extensively and has taken measures to protect students and staff.
“We had this discussion a couple years ago after one of the other shootings and we felt that there were many other things we could do and put in place to keep our kids safe,” he said. “The community has been very supportive of us in the recent bond, so we’ve got locked entrances, cameras, SROs and a variety of other things. I personally do not think arming teachers would help.”
Smith added that Superintendent Don Haddad had planned another spate of community meetings about school safety set for the spring before the Florida shooting.
Martyr said that arming teachers would be antithetical to what calls people to teaching.
“They’re called to the profession in order to help equip students to be successful in the future. By nature, they’re nurturing and supporting,” he said. “A teacher in front of the class with open carry or if a teacher had a gun in their desk, it changes the character of the relationship between a teacher and a student to the detriment of that relationship.”
Villarreal said expecting teachers, at their relatively low salary levels compared to law enforcement officers, to fire on a shooter would reduce the pool of people who want to go into the profession.
“They do it for the love of the children and feeling like you’d need to be armed or have to carry. I don’t see where that would really attract teachers,” he said. “People I’ve talked to say if they wanted to become a police officer, they’d become a police officer. If you want to become a teacher, become a teacher.”
Madison Hadley, a 14-year-old freshmen at Mead High School, said she would not feel comfortable if she knew a teacher had a gun in the classroom with her.
“Some kids would feel safe, but me personally, I would find it very hard to concentrate almost,” she said, adding that even if a teacher had training, “it doesn’t mean that a student couldn’t get to a gun in the classroom.”
Hadley added that she thinks if students knew teachers had firearms, it might cause some students to make trouble in order to goad teachers into using them.
“If we arm teachers or even just have guns in schools for people who aren’t SROs, it’s giving more fuel to the fire to start conflict in schools and get teachers to use their guns,” she said.
Staff writer Amy Bounds contributed to this report.
Karen Antonacci: 303-684-5226, antonaccik@times-call.com or twitter.com/ktonacci
