Is House Bill 99 a harbinger of things to come in America’s classrooms?
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine is reportedly poised to sign the above legislation into law, and if he does, that means teachers there would be given the right to bear arms in their classrooms, if they desire and complete the mandated training.
In neighboring West Virginia, though, the leaders of the state’s two largest educator unions say arming-up teachers, no matter how well-intended, is denying the real problem — with potentially dangerous outcomes.
Fred Albert, the president of the American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia, said there’s a high-caliber learning gap in the proposal.
There’s a difference, he said, between receiving instruction on how to handle a weapon, and then actually wielding it in the way a teacher might have been called to do two weeks ago in Texas.
That’s when an 18-year-old gunman, armed with an assault-style weapon, walked through an open door and turned a fourth-grade classroom into a scene of carnage and terror.
When it was done, 19 students and two teachers lay dead. As many more were wounded.
One student recounted seeing her teacher shot dead, killed in the act of trying to shield the class while getting them to cover.
Addressing members of U.S. Congress via a pre-recorded video Wednesday, 11-year-old Miah Cerrillo told how she covered herself with the blood of a classmate at the height of the rampage.
She was playing dead.
The blood was from the mortally wounded person who had been sitting next to her.
Then, Miah told Congressional members in the quickly convened hearing on gun violence, she used her slain teacher’s cellphone to call 911.
“I thought he would come back to the room,” she said of the gunman.
Under emotional siege
Albert, himself, a former classroom teacher and principal, said an ensuing shootout would have only made things worse.
The standard defense of a “good guy with a gun,” he said, wouldn’t work.
“What if you’re a teacher, and you have a weapon, and you’re called out of your classroom?” he asked.
“What happens to the kids you’re responsible for then?” he continued.
“What if you’re faced with having to shoot one of your former students? Teachers are trained to build up lives, not take lives.”
That’s why Albert would rather see schools armed with more counselors and other mental health professionals, opposed to teachers and other staffers with concealed-carry permits.
His counterpart at the West Virginia Education Association agrees.
“We want schools and classrooms to be safe havens for our kids,” WVEA President Dale Lee said, “but not that way.”
Lee was most recently vocal in his opposition to West Virginia House Bill 2364, which didn’t make it out of last year’s legislative session.
Like Albert, he called for more counselors — not concealed weapons.
“I was opposed [to guns in classrooms] then and I’m opposed now,” Lee said.
Something, anything
Monongalia County’s school district, in the meantime, will deploy high-tech weapon detectors at its three high schools this fall, with the possibility of expanding the protection to the county’s middle schools as well.
That doesn’t mean that Ohio isn’t on everyone’s collective mind, though.
Earlier this week, Kanawha County’s Board of Education briefly discussed its teachers taking up arms in classrooms, also.
In an environment where students now flinch and duck at the sound of a balloon popping on a prom decoration — or the accidental dropping of a textbook on the floor — Albert said he knows schools are under emotional siege, and probably forever.
He knows bullets have altered brain response, as it were.
Last week, he and a handful of union members staged informal rallies at the Charleston offices of Sens. Joe Manchin and Shelley Moore Capito, the state’s senior lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Both lawmakers were in Washington, but the lesson plan of the day was still delivered, Albert said.
AFT was asking for gun reform — “Something, anything,” Albert said.
“We don’t want to take anyone’s guns away,” the union president said.
“But something’s going to have to be done. It’s long-past.”
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