Parents hesitant about NRA armed schools proposal

CHRISTINE ARMARIO

AP Edu­ca­tion Writer

MIAMI — The nation’s largest gun-rights lobby called Fri­day for the place­ment of an armed police offi­cer in every school, but par­ents and edu­ca­tors ques­tioned how safe such a move would keep kids, whether it would be eco­nom­i­cally fea­si­ble and how it would alter stu­dent life. Their reac­tions ranged from sup­port­ive to disgusted.

Already, there are an esti­mated 10,000 sworn offi­cers serv­ing in schools around the coun­try, most of them armed and employed by local police depart­ments, accord­ing to a mem­ber­ship asso­ci­a­tion for the offi­cers. Still, they’re deployed at only a frac­tion of the country’s approx­i­mately 98,000 pub­lic schools, and their num­bers have declined dur­ing the eco­nomic down­turn. Some depart­ments have increased police pres­ence at schools since last week’s shoot­ing ram­page at a Con­necti­cut ele­men­tary school that left 26 dead, but say they can only do so tem­porar­ily because of funding.

The National Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion said at a news con­fer­ence that it wants Con­gress to fund armed offi­cers in every Amer­i­can school, break­ing its silence on the Con­necti­cut shoot­ings. The idea made sense to some anx­ious par­ents and teach­ers, but pro­voked out­right anger in others.

“Their solu­tion to resolve the issue around guns is to put more guns in the equa­tion?” said Super­in­ten­dent Hank Grish­man of the Jeri­cho, N.Y., schools on Long Island, who has been an edu­ca­tor for 44 years. “If any­thing it would be less safe for kids. You would be putting them in the midst of poten­tially more gunfire.”

Where school resource offi­cers are already in place, they help fos­ter con­nec­tions between the schools and police, and often develop a close enough rela­tion­ship with par­ents and chil­dren that they feel com­fort­able com­ing for­ward with infor­ma­tion that could pre­vent a threat, said Mo Canady, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the National Asso­ci­a­tion of School Resource Officers.

But an Okla­homa edu­ca­tor who teaches at a school with armed offi­cers described the NRA’s pro­posal as a “false solu­tion,” though she’s not opposed to the pres­ence of more police.

“I teach at a school that has four armed police offi­cers on cam­pus every day, but it’s more than a quar­ter of a mile from the main office to my room, and I’m not even the far­thest room away,” said Robil­lard, a French teacher at West­moore High School. “If (a stu­dent) put a loaded gun in their bag and came to my class­room and pulled it out and started shoot­ing, by the time the police offi­cer fig­ured out what was going on and got to my class­room, we’d all be dead. This whole hall­way could be dead before a police­man got here.”

Around the coun­try, school sys­tems some­times rotate armed offi­cers through schools or sup­ple­ment them with unarmed safety agents. New York City’s school dis­trict is the largest in the coun­try with more than 1 mil­lion stu­dents. The NYPD has 350 armed offi­cers who rotate through­out the school sys­tem, and they’re sup­ple­mented by unarmed safety per­son­nel who also report to the depart­ment. In Philadel­phia, school offi­cials have rejected armed patrols in city schools and instead use unarmed school police.

In rural Blount County, Ala., a tobacco tax is used to fund a squad of nine armed sheriff’s deputies and a super­vi­sor who are assigned to work inside the system’s 16 schools on a full-time basis, super­in­ten­dent Jim Carr said Fri­day. They also assist in sports games and other after-school events.

An armed sheriff’s deputy assigned to Columbine High School the day of the mas­sacre there in 1999 was unable to stop the vio­lence, though police pro­ce­dures around the coun­try have changed since then.

Accord­ing to a Jef­fer­son County Sheriff’s Depart­ment report released in 2000, the uni­formed sheriff’s deputy was eat­ing lunch in his patrol car at a park near the school when he rushed to the school in response to a radio report about the vio­lence. The deputy briefly exchanged fire with one of the gun­men, but the gun­man ran back inside the build­ing to con­tinue the rampage.

The offi­cer radioed for assis­tance, and police fol­lowed the then-standard pro­ce­dure of wait­ing for a SWAT team to arrive before enter­ing the build­ing. Since that tragedy, police pro­ce­dures have been changed to call for respond­ing offi­cers to rush toward gun­fire to stop a gun­man first.

In his speech, NRA chief exec­u­tive offi­cer Wayne LaPierre said Con­gress should appro­pri­ate funds to post an armed police offi­cer in every school. In the mean­time, he said the NRA would develop a school emer­gency response pro­gram that would include vol­un­teers from the group’s 4.3 mil­lion mem­bers to help guard children.

The NRA’s call came two days after a Ken­tucky county sher­iff announced on Face­book that deputies would have an increased school pres­ence begin­ning in Jan­u­ary. The announce­ment was met with dozens of notes of thanks and pos­i­tive com­ments from parents.

“Thank you so very much,” wrote one com­menter. “I can stop stress­ing a lit­tle while at work now.”

“This is the best news we could have received for Christ­mas!” wrote another.

Monte Evans, a sixth grade teacher in Wichita, Kan., said schools should have a des­ig­nated point per­son licensed and trained to shoot a gun.

“What am I going to stop them with? A sta­pler?” said Evans, an NRA mem­ber. “You need equal force.”

Rose Davis, 47, who lives in Chicago’s South Side Engle­wood neigh­bor­hood and helps care for her two young grand­chil­dren, said she sup­ports the idea of hav­ing armed police offi­cers in schools. Her neigh­bor­hood is beset by gang vio­lence and she wor­ries about it spilling into schools.

“With the things going on today, you really don’t feel secure,” she said.

Even those who sup­port the pro­posal, how­ever, ques­tioned how prac­ti­cal it would be.

“The real ques­tion is sus­tain­abil­ity,” said Ken Trump, pres­i­dent of the Cleveland-based con­sult­ing firm National School Safety and Secu­rity Ser­vices. “In the long haul, how are you going to fund that?”

But Randi Wein­garten, pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Teach­ers, one of the nation’s largest teach­ers’ unions, called the NRA’s idea “irre­spon­si­ble and dangerous.”

“Schools must be safe sanc­tu­ar­ies, not armed fortresses,” she said.

Repub­li­can New Jer­sey Gov. Chris Christie said that post­ing armed guards out­side schools wouldn’t make class­rooms safer or encour­age learning.

“You can’t make this (school) an armed camp for kids,” he said.

Jacina Haro, a col­lege edu­ca­tor from Malden, Mass., and the mother of two young chil­dren said the solu­tion shouldn’t be about hav­ing more weapons on campus.

“Schools shouldn’t be about guns,” said the 38-year-old. “It should be a safe place to learn, free from weapons and the like. I under­stand want­ing to pro­tect our chil­dren, but I don’t know if that’s the right solu­tion. It’s a scary solution.”

Posted by AP News on Dec 21 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.