The reasoning is simple: the nearest law enforcement officers is 30 minutes away, and the school district is just off a heavily travelled highway. The school system is afraid that if someone decided to exit the highway and terrorize the school, armed assistance would be half an hour away.
There's been a predictable uproar, since anything involving abortion/birth control or firearms/the Second Amendment is guaranteed to raise a ruckus. My favorite part, at least so far, was that the trustees assured parents that the teachers would use bullets designed to minimize the chances of ricochet in the halls. Oh, and the superintendent saying that the need for teachers to carry guns is "just common sense."
Not common enough, apparently, for any other school district in the country to have come up with a similar regulation.
No doubt classroom discipline will improve tremendously as will, I suspect, test scores. I know that if my teachers had been armed with something larger than a red pencil, I would have done better. Who wouldn't?
I don't think the reason is that the teachers fear the students: the one school, which houses students from kindergarten through 12th grade, reportedly has 50 teachers and staff members to watch over 110 students. I'm not sure why 110 students require 50 adults to teach them — there can't be more than one class per grade level, or 13 classes total — but apparently they do.
The real question, at least for me, is what this might do to the school district's liability insurance premiums. If I was the school's insurer, the idea that dozens of teachers and administrators are going to be walking abound with guns would make me nervous. And make me want to jack up the school's premiums.
Perhaps the teachers will institute a new school tradition of firing their guns in the air on the last day of school. After all, it is Texas.
Yee-hah!
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