This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Dec. 17, 2012 - When Tim Fitch, the chief of the St. Louis County police department, talks about arming teachers and other school personnel, he is concentrating on the critical minutes between the time a determined shooter bursts into a school and the time that trained law enforcement personnel can arrive.
When Paul Fennewald hears suggestions that arming teachers and other school personnel can help deal with or even prevent tragedies like last week’s deaths of students and adults in Connecticut, he wants to make sure everyone involved takes a step back to realize all of the implications.
Fennewald – who spent 23 years as an FBI agent and six years as director of homeland security for Missouri – now is with the Missouri Center for Education Safety, a joint project of the Missouri School Boards Association and the Missouri Department of Public Safety.
Having armed employees in a school isn’t necessarily bad, he told the Beacon. But if weapons are securely stored to keep them out of the hands of curious students, they may not be able to have much effect in situations such as the one that struck Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Friday.
“If you’re going to have it totally locked up,” he said of a teacher’s weapon, “how quickly could you get it? Unless you have it on your person, ready to use at a moment’s notice, how much difference would you make?”
Fennewald was reacting to Fitch's suggestion that arming school personnel and giving them the proper training could make a difference in shootings that are already in progress. During the five or 10 minutes that it takes for police to arrive, Fitch told the Beacon, “short of just being a sitting duck, what can schools do?”
“The person is in the building,” he added. “Somebody at the school has to deal with that because there are no police officers. What I’m talking about is that schools should look into the possibility of having a person with a firearm and trained in how to use it.”
Fitch says there are new ways to secure weapons that can answer some of Fennewald's concerns. And he has heard all of the counterarguments about the downside of stricter gun control and the need for better efforts to combat mental illness.
But, he adds, he hasn’t heard anyone come up with a better response to deal with the crucial time period he is talking about.
“They say more guns are not going to solve anything,” Fitch says. “My response is, then what is your idea?
“I haven’t heard any, other than they hope this doesn’t happen again. I think we hoped that after Columbine. How many have we had since then?”
On Friday, in the wake of the Connecticut massacre, Fitch took to Twitter to say that his department would provide extra security at county schools to try to calm fears. Monday morning, he visited area schools to try to extend that effort. What did he find?
“Parents were glad to see us,” he said. “Kids are so used to seeing police around, with the DARE program and other programs, I don’t think they give us much thought. It’s the last week of school before they have time off. They were just being kids, which is what we like to see.”
Fennewald said that whatever districts may decide about arming the personnel in their schools, the policy should be determined locally.
“If school boards make the decision to do that,” he added, “they need to make sure that personnel are as well-trained and get the same continuing training as local law enforcement. You would be giving them the same authority to make life-and-death decisions in a fraction of a second as law enforcement officers, and they have strict requirements. You would have to do the same thing with educators.”
Fennewald also noted that the signs at the door of most Missouri schools, saying that the carrying of concealed weapons is prohibited, represent a policy required by the federal Safe Schools Act. States can opt out to allow teachers and other personnel to be armed, but Missouri has not done so.
What will actually wind up happening? Fitch has an idea.
“I think we are going to have elected officials talk about all kinds of gun control issues,” he said, “and probably convene all sorts of committees to look at it just as they did after Columbine. Then, if you go for any time period without another one, everybody will forget about it.”
He hopes that’s not the case because he's sure that school violence hasn't ended.
“There is always somebody out there who says, ‘I can top that,’” Fitch said. “What am I going to do that is bigger and more impactful?”
How can violence be prevented?
The website of the center for education safety has lists of things that can be done by various groups – students, parents, teachers, principals, law enforcement – to make schools safer. But in many cases, the recommendations seem to run counter to the arming of teachers and others.
Principals, for example, should “establish ‘zero tolerance’ policies for weapons and violence.” Students should “refuse to bring a weapon to school, refuse to carry a weapon for another, and refuse to keep silent about those who carry weapons.”
In any case, Fennewald said, no one should look at giving guns to teachers and training them on how to use them as the answer to preventing school violence.
“There is no quick fix,” he said. “We need to look at all of the pros and cons of anything we might do. These are complicated issues. If they weren’t, we would have already figured them out."
The problem of violence in schools needs to be put into a measure of perspective, Fennewald said, with suicide and bullying the kinds of problems that result in a much larger loss of student life than the relatively infrequent but high-profile shootings like those in Connecticut.
“Schools are the safest places that children can be,” he said. “It’s a rare occasion to have things like what happened last week.
Whatever is decided, Fennewald knows what at least one teacher feels about the possibility of guns in the classroom. He said his wife is a teacher, and she isn’t particularly keen on the idea.
“She tells me I didn’t become a teacher to become a law enforcement officer,” he said. ‘We have a responsibility to protect kids, she says, but we’re not cops.”
Sympathy from East St. Louis
In the wake of the Connecticut shooting, education leaders in districts throughout the area wrote open letters to their communities. But one from Arthur Culver, the superintendent of schools in East St. Louis District 189, struck a unique note.
Hailing the adults at Sandy Hook for heroic actions, Culver noted that he has been an educator in three states for more than 35 years, and “and I can assure you that there are teachers and administrators in East St. Louis School District 189, in Champaign, Ill., in Longview, Tex., and in every district where I have served who would give their lives to protect students. We become educators to prepare children to leave the world better than we found it. We are committed to their learning, to their health and to their safety.”
In East St. Louis, he said, “we have locked school doors, metal detectors, and guards at all secondary schools, but there is no guarantee that these precautions can always prevent such a tragedy.”
In his community, though, as opposed to Newtown, Conn., concerns about violence take different forms.
“Our prevailing fear, however, is not the lone intruder forcing his way into our schools. Our nightmares live with us daily as many of our children walk through unsafe neighborhoods to get home from school or get caught in the crossfire of gang violence or drug deals in the community. We understand the horror of losing students to senseless violence, including an honor student shot to death this year. Yet, our educators continue to work tirelessly to prepare our children for a future with hope.”
Despite the differences in the two communities, Culver added, “we are much more alike than different. We both have dreams for our children, we want them to have the best education possible, and we pledge to keep them safe and secure on our watch. Sandy Hook teachers and staff were required to make the ultimate sacrifice to keep the children safe.”
Culver concluded by asking faculty and staff members of the district to talk to their students about efforts to keep them safe, then to “please observe a moment of silence to remember all of the beautiful children and teachers of Sandy Hook Elementary School, the ones who died and the ones who will live the rest of their lives with the nightmare in their memories. As educators, we salute the brave principal, teachers and staff members who gave their lives defending children. We all share this loss.”