Back to school in Missouri: With some teachers carrying guns?
Back-to-school days at the end of summer yield a roller coaster of expectations. Safety is an ever-growing concern, and events like the August 2014 officer-involved shooting and subsequent public unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, only add to the emotional tinder.
Guns on school campuses are increasingly on the minds of American educators, many of whom will always remember where they were when they heard the news on December 14, 2012.
That's the day 20-year-old Adam Lanza grabbed three guns from his home, including an AR-15 assault rifle, and killed 26 people in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty of the victims were children at Sandy Hook Elementary.
Tom Phillips is the executive director of school security in Blue Springs, Missouri, and was a lawman for 37 years. "My initial reaction was, as a police officer, we got a bad guy coming in the door what would I have done to stop this? And then as you see the carnage that occurred and your parenting mode kicks in."
The 1999 massacre at Columbine High School changed the way police respond to a school shooting. But it was Sandy Hook that changed the schools themselves.
"I was sick to my stomach. I was nauseous about it," says Dr. Erin Dugan, an assistant superintendent in the Olathe School District in Kansas. "It's too hard, after Newtown, to say we'll get to your school and make it super secure in a couple of years."
Ballotpedia.org has found three ways schools are trying to get safer: Giving teachers guns. Making buildings more secure. Putting more police officers in schools.
No method is perfect and all come with a variety of complications that can be monetary, procedural and/or political.
Arming teachers
School security is a consideration for every school board member and administrator in the country. While spending money remodeling buildings, adding security technology and hiring more police are complicated solutions, those ideas are less controversial than the proposal to arm school teachers.
About a third of all states allow teachers or staff with a conceal-and-carry permit to pack a gun in school, as long as they have permission from the school board.
Nowhere in America right now is the issue of armed teachers more complicated than in Missouri.
In July 2014, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon (D) vetoed legislation (SB 656) that would have allowed districts to designate "school protection officers" who would get special firearms training to carry a concealed weapon in the classroom.
"Arming teachers will not make our schools safer," Nixon said in his veto message. "I have supported and will continue to support the use of duly authorized law enforcement officers employed as school resource officers, but I cannot condone putting firearms in the hands of educators who should be focused on teaching our kids."
That hasn't stopped a dozen school districts in Missouri, mostly in rural areas around the Ozarks, from training teachers and arming them for the start of school.
"If you can't shoot you can't make it through this program," says Dan Wehmer, executive vice president of Shield Solutions in West Plains, Missouri. "I'll stack up my educators against almost any cop – local, county or state."
Shield Solutions was formed specifically to train teachers to shoot in schools. In Missouri, someone only needs eight hours of training to get a conceal-and-carry permit. Shield Solutions provides 40 hours of training, mostly on the range. Wehmer says 34 teachers so far have graduated from the program. They received training that includes shooting at moving targets and learning how to maneuver through a school in a combat situation. They also have to qualify three times per year and get an additional 24 hours of annual training.
The minimum firearms training for police cadets in Missouri is 66 hours, with four hours of additional training every three years, although some metropolitan departments double or even triple that training requirement.
Skirting the law
How are teachers with guns legal in Missouri?
The trained teachers automatically become Shield Solutions employees only after an active shooter enters a school. "They don't deal with hacked off parents or school bullies," says Wehmer. "Only active shooters."
One of those districts that will have Shield Solutions-trained teachers this year is tiny Climax Springs, where there are 250 students in the entire district.
The town was once a thriving resort area where visitors came to enjoy the natural spring water. Now the main street is a ghost town. And it is a long way from the nearest cop.
"So if we ever had any kind of catastrophe, armed intruder of anything like that, we are looking at a significant time lapse between the time they get the phone call and them getting here," says Nathan Barb, who is just starting his second year as a superintendent. "The road between here and (the county seat in) Camdenton is very crooked and you can only drive so fast."
Barb does see a scary side to the practice of teachers with concealed guns. "There are boards and administrations that are giving people permission to carry guns on campus without the training."
Ballotpedia.org examined the contract between Climax Springs and Shield Solutions, and it spells out all the training and the additional liability insurance the company will provide.
What it doesn't divulge is exactly how much it's going to cost. The district will not reveal who was trained or even how many educators were trained. The contract says two trained employees cost the district $17,500 per year and that goes up $6,000 for each additional employee.
Blue Springs School District security head Tom Phillips says while armed teachers might work for rural districts, it's a bad idea for urban and suburban districts.
"Within two or three minutes there's going to be 15, 20 cops on the scene and we don't want a civilian walking around in the hallways with a handgun because it's not going to end well."
Missouri National Education Association President Charles Smith disapproves of the practice in any school, rural or urban. "We're there to educate the children," he says. "That's our job, and not to carry pistols or carry guns when we have someone who's trained to take care of our children and employees."
The security mindset
Since Sandy Hook, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by school districts on cameras, door buzzers, card readers, software and remodeling of buildings.
Call it the school security industrial complex.
"If school district A spends a million dollars, and school district B was planning on spending half a million dollars, now there's pressure to create the impression that their schools are just as safe as schools in the next district over," says John Rury, a professor at the University of Kansas School of Education.
There's been a huge building boom among school districts in the Kansas City Metro area.
The Shawnee Mission School District, with 27,000 students in 43 buildings on the Kansas side of State Line Road, has spent $4.5 million in the past two years upgrading security. The district says it may spend double that in the next few years.
A little farther south, the Blue Valley School District, with 22,000 student in 34 schools, has spent $14 million on security. A district spokesperson says security improvements accelerated after Sandy Hook.
No district in Metro Kansas City has spent more than the Olathe School District. In 2013, with 77 percent approval, the district passed a $245 million bond issue with $32.7 million dedicated to security improvements.
"We've done everything, we think, that keeps the school safe but we haven't built fortresses that keep the public out because these are their schools and they need to be able to get in and parents need to be able to drop off lunches and go to Valentine's Day parties," says Dugan.
There's also a boom on the Missouri side of the state border.
The Raytown School District, which also serves students from Kansas City, Missouri, has spent $1.7 million on cameras and access control systems to make its 8,800 students safer.
In the Blue Springs School District, voters approved a $20 million bond issue two years ago to remodel many of the district's 22 buildings to enhance safety.
There's general agreement about how you now build schools to keep them as safe as possible. You move the office to the front of the building, create a pinch point that everyone has to pass through and you have cameras and buzzers on all the doors. But, research says, too much security actually scares children.
"We try to impose as much security and safety as possible to the schools without interrupting the educational process," says Blue Springs School District's Phillips. "You don't want guys walking around with assault rifles and sub-machine guns dressed all out in SWAT gear."
School cops: fastest growing segment of law enforcement
Blue Springs is the only school district in Missouri with its own police department. The district added six officers following the Sandy Hook shooting, for a total of 13 officers.
The National Association of School Resource Officers says school district departments are the fastest growing segment of law enforcement in the United States. The latest figures available from the U.S. Department of Justice state that in 2008, there were less than 5,000 officers employed by school districts around the country. That's just a fraction of any estimate for 2014. The Philadelphia School District has the biggest department with 450 officers. The Los Angeles Unified School District has 340 officers. In Houston, there are 197 officers.
Putting armed, sworn police officers in more schools has led to some serious problems around the country.
In Texas, according to The New York Times, police officers in schools cite 100,000 students each year for misdemeanors. Offenses that used to be handled with a trip to the principal's office now become criminal matters, with trips to court.
Earlier this year, district police officers in the Maize School District in suburban Wichita issued $50 tickets to some students for using foul language.
A leading researcher told The New York Times, "There is no evidence that placing officers in the schools improves safety." Denise Gottfredson is a criminologist at the University of Maryland and an expert in school violence. She says it increases the number of minor behavior problems that are referred to the police, pushing kids into the criminal system.
"I'm not sure that adding additional officers really addresses the threat, other than making people feel secure because there's more people in uniforms walking around," says KU's Professor Rury.
This year, Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools decided to create its own police department. The school district is sending its current security team to the state law enforcement training academy and will eventually have a 30-officer force.
"This is a higher level of training and expectations to provide a higher level of safety with what's happening in schools," says district CFO Dr. Kelli Mather.
Mather says there's been no uptick in threats, crimes or suspensions. Still, she says, the district decided it was time to upgrade. "I think this is a solution wanting to stay a solution. Just being proactive. Being reactive never solves anything."
The first thing the district did was hire away the police chief from Kansas City, Kansas. Rick Armstrong spent 35 years in the KCK police department. He was on the SWAT team for three years, was shot in the line of duty and almost beaten to death in a fight with a fleeing burglar.
He knows this new department has a different mission.
"We recognize up front we're not going to measure a success point or a measurement of value by the number of arrests we make," says Armstrong. "Maybe to the counter. Maybe it's the lack of arrests that we have to make."
A tall marathon runner, Armstrong still looks like he could take down a door. But while he looks like a cop, he talks like a teacher.
"If you change a child, what does that mean?" he asks. "What if you change just one child, you keep one child safe, you're able to keep one child on track? It's unlimited. The potential is just unlimited."
Sam Zeff is an education reporter for KCUR-FM, which is an NPR-affiliated radio station serving Kansas City, Missouri. He has won a National News Emmy for investigative reporting, four National Headliner Awards and four Edward R. Murrow awards. Zeff has managed newsrooms in Minneapolis, St. Louis and Kansas City. He was educated at the University of Kansas.
See also
- United States school shootings, 1990-present
- Gun control on the ballot
- Kansas school districts
- Missouri school districts
- Education policy portal
- School board elections portal
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