Last month, the school board for District 308, which serves Washington Community High School near Peoria, Ill., discussed the possibility of training and arming three school administrators in order to increase safety and security for students at the school, according to minutes published by the district.
Schools Superintendent Dr James Dunnan and Washington Police Chief Jim Kuchenbecker are conducting an investigation through the School Safety Committee, a study they hope will lead to an improved safety plan containing the idea of deputizing school administrators as auxiliary police officers. This would give trained individuals the ability to carry firearms on school property and perhaps protect students from a Sandy Hook incident at the school. The committee should present its findings to the board by March 11.
The Safety Committee has scheduled meetings on Feb. 14 and 21, and at those meetings they’ll have the results of a safety audit conducted by retired Illinois State Police officer Stuart Erlenbush, who visited the high school on Jan. 29 and Feb. 6. He’ll also present a session entitled “Handling a Critical Incident in a School Setting” to teachers at an in-service day on Feb. 18.
“It’s a sad state of affairs that we have to even engage in discussions like this,” said Mr Kuchenbecker, whose impression was echoed by Dr Dunnan at the January board meeting, where several board members also expressed misgivings about educators carrying weapons on school property.
The case for deputizing school administrators
Sad as it may be to have this discussion, here we are. Although initial reactions, including those of President Barack Obama, called for reducing access to high-power assault rifles or ammunition clips that allowed gunmen to fire off a hundred rounds in less than a few minutes, there isn’t anything schools can do about those issues. That’s up to Congress, and the Second Amendment is a valuable part of our Constitution for all sides in this debate.
Protecting our children’s lives is just as, if not more, important. This is where the debate’s turning. First, we acknowledge the good motives on both sides: everyone wants to keep kids safe at school, though they may have differences of opinion as to how to accomplish that.
Not even posting an armed guard at every entrance to a school, however, can guarantee the safety of the young lives inside. Since it’s not plausible to guarantee the actual safety of students, we need to focus the debate on making them “feel” safe. Would an armed police officer in schools make kids feel safer?
Well, the New York Times actually asked kids what they thought about this question. In a published blog post on the Learning Network, the Times showed that most kids think they would feel safer if their school had an armed guard. Most of the responses were similar to the following:
Honestly, the security in my school is just laughable. The fact that out security guards carry pepper spray will most likely make the shooter laugh himself to death. Having armed guards would make me feel more safe. The time it would take, getting used to seeing armed guards, should be minimum. The armed guards would be on our side and protecting us from possible outside and inside danger. My only concern is that schools might not be getting armed guards, just another supply of pepper spray.
As of this writing, the School Safety Committee in Washington hasn’t published their recommendations, but initial suggestions called for training three school administrators at the high school and then making them deputy police officers. This is different from posting armed guards at schools, and it’s a little different from other proposals that call for adding school resource officers.
Let’s just say it’s the principal, the dean, and an assistant principal. They would presumably complete the training needed to be deputized, which comes from the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board, which has a website here. In Washington, it may be possible for the community or the school board to pay for this training, since anything less than full police training would not be appropriate for people to be entrusted with guns in schools.
The Dayton Daily News conducted a round-table discussion with six educators earlier this month, publishing comments by Robert D Heywood, among others. “Our society has long determined that a disciplined, trained police force is the most effective way to provide for public safety,” he said. “Promoting the use of barely trained vigilantes as security for our schools is a travesty.”
But as I said, Washington isn’t talking about “barely trained vigilantes.” The community will make these three administrators sworn peace officers. “If we must, the only acceptable security is a school resource officer assigned by the local police department. This burden should not be expected of our teachers and other regular school personnel,” Mr Heywood said.
Now, recruiting and training good police officers is even more difficult than recruiting and training good teachers. District 308’s idea would eliminate the need to recruit police officers, have them complete the training, and earmark them for the school. The need for police to stop crimes is low at high schools, and Washington itself isn’t really a “crime-ridden” area. We would object to taking police officers away from a community where they would be more likely to be needed in other capacities and dedicating their entire day to the school, but District 308 has shot this objection down by starting with people who are already in the school and would not be part of a pool of traditional applicants for police work anyway.
So, assuming the administrators complete the training with passing marks and the police department assigns them to the school, they could be issued guns. Those guns would have to be paid for either out of their own pockets, by the school, or by the police department in Washington. In the last two cases, your tax dollars would pay for those guns, but it is in the interest of school safety.
At this point in our hypothetical scenario, we have three people with guns in the school every day. Presumably, they would make very sure these guns could never fall into the hands of students (or anyone else). They might put them in a locked case, since seeing principals with holstered guns around their belts would be a little disturbing. Now, if anyone with bad intentions and a machine gun barges into the school, there would be time to unlock the case, remove the loaded gun, and shoot the criminal according to the rules of police shooting.
The case against deputizing school administrators
If cost is no object, we can safely ignore the possibility that the school’s liability insurance premiums might go up or that the insurance company may actually drop the school. Neither scenario is likely to occur in Washington, though other communities that might consider such an option would have to take the liability insurance issue into account.
Even with armed deputies in the schools, though, they may not be able to get to a shooter before anyone is dead. However, armed police officers, a.k.a. principals, who are in the school would certainly be able to get to the scene of a school shooting faster than police. A call to 9-1-1 wouldn’t even be necessary, since someone in the office would probably hear something as soon as the first shot was fired.
Some people from Sandy Hook Elementary, where a Dec. 14 shooting that killed 26, including 20 children, started this whole debate, have testified that even an armed school resource officer would not have been able to help.
“Make no mistake,” the New York Times quoted Mary Ann Jacob, a staff member at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., as saying. “If there was a police officer in our building that day, he would be dead. Adam Lanza did not knock on the door and ask for permission to come in. He shot his way through the door barely seconds after he got out of his car.”
Like Mr Heywood in Ohio, others believe school resource officers and not armed educators are the right answer. For example, a proposed law in Maryland would provide funds for a school resource officer at every elementary school in the state. In addition, school and police officials in Fort Lee, N.J., have stepped up security in and around campuses. They’ve added school resource officers, who are specially trained to interact with youths, give class presentations, and advise students of their rights. These officers also address bullying, suicides, etc., and help develop overall school security guidelines and plans.
Lt Patrick Kissane of Fort Lee said kids need to be taught how “to care about themselves, the schools. Hear something, say something. Recognize that bad things can happen, so take people’s threats for real. Let someone know if someone’s desperate, suicidal. Engage your students. Talk to them. Know them by name.”
And there’s the difference between police officers and educators: Lt Kissane’s advice would be second-nature to an educator, whereas police officers need to be trained how to engage students. I have to admit, I could never be a police officer. I don’t think like they do, I don’t converse like they do, and I don’t act like they do. The mindset of a good, dedicated educator—and I’ve educated seventh graders in algebra as well as university students in neurobiology—is completely different from that of a good, dedicated police officer. Thank God, because we need both in our communities.
I once saw three kids sitting in the middle of a high school football field, hovered over a flame. I thought they were smoking drugs, so I called the police. The police came quickly and determined that the kids were not smoking drugs but rather sniffing candles. That’s not what they were supposed to be doing, but not something that needed a police response. My inability to recognize the scene for what it was stemmed from my training and mindset as an educator. I saw kids in trouble and immediately feared for the worst. Police officers made fun of me for several years after that incident, rightly so.
Cops and even judges in criminal courts, to a certain extent, see people as individuals that need rehabilitation. They focus more on the negative side of people than the positive. For example, when I go to court for a speeding ticket, no one cares how much scholarly research I’ve conducted and written about, how many people I’ve mentored, or any of that. All they care about is that I’ve broken the law and need to be rehabilitated.
Educators see people differently in those same situations. Educators believe that every kid can learn anything he wants to learn, can do anything or become anything he wants, etc., so we have to assume that educators, at least the good ones, might not make the best police officers. They can go through the training, but ultimately, they’re still educators at heart. It’s possible that seeing an adolescent or young adult with a machine gun would change their view, but this is not why they became teachers. They became teachers because they thought that a teacher’s viewpoint was the most consistent with their own beliefs about people, that every child could be good, not that everybody has a dark side.
Another way to frame this difference, using Lt Kissane’s own words: “Engaging” people for military and police assets sometimes means using force to arrest the subject to prevent further harm to people or property. They develop the skill of acting quickly with judgment. Engaging people for educators means, most of the time, demonstrating the right way to behave, to solve a math problem, or execute a move in gymnastics. They develop the skill of acting patiently with tolerance and open-mindedness. These skills are wrong in a police response to a crime in progress. What we have to hope is that a more highly trained police response would be appropriate in a school setting.
