The Rise of Armed Teachers
THEY’VE ALREADY EXISTED IN SOME
DISTRICTS FOR YEARS, BUT NOW SOME SCHOOL EMPLOYEES ARE GETTING INTENSIVE,
POLICE-STYLE TRAINING IN HOW TO RESPOND TO A SHOOTING.
Over nine days in July, the
first class of school marshals gathered for training. The group of seven
teachers and administrators, largely male, assembled at eight each morning at
Tarrant County College’s Criminal Justice Training Center, in northwest Fort
Worth, to discuss tragedies like Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Sandy Hook. They
parsed the details and talked about how they would theoretically respond to
such an emergency.
By the seventh day of training, the group had moved to the
facility’s fifty-yard indoor shooting range. It was there that they were
learning how to use deadly force in the event of a school shooting. Wearing
T-shirts, jeans, and lime-green ear muffs, they stood with their legs apart,
pointing their guns at white paper targets as the thunderous popping sounds of
gunshots bounced off the concrete floor, walls, and ceiling. Seasoned cops
wearing bright-red shirts managed the drills.
After lunch, they practiced shooting on the move, an advanced
skill that few civilians learn but is standard practice for police and
military. Several of the men darted from side to side, their arms outstretched
and their fingers clenched around Glock and Sig Sauer pistols. Some crisscrossed
their feet in the style of a football player, and the instructors encouraged
them to shuffle, to decrease the risk of tripping. Some held their breath in
concentration, and an instructor noticed. “This is not underwater shooting!” he
shouted above the din.
Rafael Perea, the instructor in charge of the training, paced
behind them, offering suggestions only when everyone had stopped shooting and
the noise died down. The students had been mostly calm and collected, and Perea
was impressed with their progress. However, he had been surprised to find some
of expressing anxiety before their first shooting exercise. Though they had all
shot guns at firing ranges before, this was different since more than ten
journalists with big cameras and flashing lights were there to cover the event.
“I heard from some of the guys that they were nervous,” Perea said
with a grin, a teacher excited to have challenged his students. “But that’s
good, because if you talk about what they'd go through in real life, there
would be stress.” The feeling of being on camera, he said, is the only kind of
stress I can give to them.
That was not exactly the case. The next day, they would be acting
out a shooting scenario at a local school using detergent pellets instead of
bullets. And Perea had found other methods of creating stress under artificial
conditions: instead of the circular targets or vague human outlines you’d see
at many shooting ranges, he had posted up pictures of suspects from recent mass
shootings. The white sheets of paper getting ripped apart by the trainees’
bullets featured human faces, some of who were teenagers.
When asked about these targets, Perea paused. His tone suddenly
shifted from friendly to solemn. His grin disappeared. I don't want someone to
hesitate just because the shooter is a young person, he said. “We're not used
to shooting people, much less a child.”
Perea then put on his earmuffs and walked back into the firing
range.
In early 2013, the Texas Legislature passed the Protection of Texas
Children Act , which
gives districts the option of arming and training one school employee, known as
a “school marshal,” for every four hundred students. The trainees who assembled
at Tarrant County College more than a year later were the first official school
marshals, sent by districts taking advantage of the new law. They will function
as peace officers, authorized to act only “under circumstances that would
justify the use of deadly force.” Their identities are kept secret from
students and the public.
The new law expanded the practice of arming public school
teachers; some districts had already been doing so for years. In 2007 the
Harrold Independent School District—a tiny district of one hundred students
located 175 miles northwest of Dallas—responded to the Virginia Tech shooting
by creating the “Guardian Plan,” which designates certain teachers, or
“guardians,” to carry concealed handguns. David Thweatt, the school’s
superintendent, told reporters that he’d enacted the plan because the district
was 30 miles away from the nearest law enforcement. A handful of rural
districts around Texas called Thweatt for advice and started similar programs.
These guardian plans received
little attention until the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. In
much of the country, the tragedy of twenty murdered children spurred anti-gun
activists to push for gun control measures, but in Texas and a few other states—like
Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, and Colorado—the response was the opposite. Parents
and teachers reasoned that armed teachers, administrators, and even college
students might help to kill a mass shooter before the police were able to
arrive. Some months after the shooting, a gun store in Austin startedoffering discounts to teachers.
As the Texas Legislature geared up for their 2013 session, newly
elected state representative Jason Villalba, a Republican from Dallas, began
arguing that the current guardian plans were not enough and that armed school
employees needed police-style training. The bill faced plenty of critics,
including some officers. The police chief of Dallas ISD said he questioned the
wisdom of placing teachers in a situation that would be challenging for even
the most experienced law enforcement. Others worried that a teacher with a gun
might be mistakenly shot by responding officers.
Still, the bill passed easily (123 to 22 in the House, 27 to 4 in
the Senate) and was signed into law by Governor Rick Perry, making it the
second law in the country to explicitly allow teachers to carry guns (South
Dakota, earlier that year, became the first).
This past April, after questions surfaced about whether the
Guardian Plan potentially conflicted with the Marshal Plan, Attorney General
Greg Abbott issued an opinion that both programs were allowed, and now
districts can choose between these options. Villalba’s school marshal program
is actually more restrictive than the disparate concealed-carry policies that came
before it, which differ from district to district and, to be legal under the
Texas Education Code, only require some “written regulations” created by that
particular district.
Whereas Harrold ISD’s guardians simply obtain approval from the
school board after proving they have a concealed-carry license, prospective
school marshals must take the same psychological exams given to police
officers. They are asked to confront whether they’d be comfortable shooting an
intruder. They are given police-style instruction in active shooter response
strategies. And if the school marshal is a teacher, as opposed to a principal
or secretary, he or she must keep the gun in a locked safe within “immediate
reach.”
That last requirement has
proved unpopular. Muleshoe ISD, in the Panhandle, decided against implementing
the program, and their superintendent, Gene Sheets, told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal it
was because the locked box requirement would prevent teachers from responding
quickly enough. It remains to be seen whether more districts will choose
Villalba’s school marshal program, with its psychological testing and intensive
training, or Harrold ISD’s guardian plan, which doesn’t mandate a locked safe
and which gives districts more discretion in what they require of armed
teachers. In a letter to Abbott, state representative Joe C. Pickett, who
chairs the House Committee on Homeland Security and Public Safety, noted that
because of these “stringent requirements,” many school districts are expected
to choose the less intensive guardian plan.
But whichever program
districts choose, Villalba’s law has undeniably led a wave of districts to more
actively consider the idea of arming employees and has prompted public support.
In Spring, a suburb of Houston, a firearms instructor named Chuck Persinger is
offering free concealed-carry classes to teachers (many of those taking the
class, he noted proudly, are women). In January 2013, when Villalba’s bill had
been announced but had not yet passed, Alan Spence, a retired peace officer and
law enforcement instructor, started the Texas School Marshal Academy, in
Giddings. He offers classes to teachers and school administrators about what to
do in a shooter situation, even if they are not armed, to minimize deaths and
injuries. “We can't wait on a cop to get there,” Spence told me. “These
teachers need to have the opportunity to protect themselves, and knowledge is key
in any tactical situation.”
Perea spent more than a decade as a police officer in Abilene and
several years in the Air Force police, but for the past twelve years he has
been a full time gun safety instructor. He displays the cheery solicitousness
you might associate with a teacher more than a cop. Watching the marshals in
Fort Worth fire at targets on the other side of soundproof glass, he explained
how each school shooting has produced lessons for law enforcement. Because the
Columbine shooters in 1999 took the unprecedented step of using explosives, the
marshal curriculum includes steps for how to handle a bomb on school grounds.
The Virginia Tech shooting taught police to be prepared for a shooter who
chains the school doors shut. Since the Sandy Hook shooter gained entry to the
school by shattering the windows, some districts are now purchasing thicker,
stronger glass.
Many of the lessons taken from these mass shootings are less about
how to react in the moment than they are about what criminologists and cops
call “crime prevention through environmental design.” Perea hopes that in
addition to the school marshals’ ability to respond to a crisis situation, they
will provide expertise on how to institute preventative measures as districts
build new campuses and update existing ones.
Still, Perea said it is often impossible to predict the particular
horrors of school shootings that may occur in the future. As an
example he cited Jonesboro, Arkansas, where, in 1998, two middle school
students pulled a fire alarm and then hid in a wooded area near the school
entrance, shooting at kids and teachers as they filed out. Nobody could have
really been ready for that, Perea told me.
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