The way Tim Krugh sees it, he’s just trying to minimize carnage.

The Lake Local Board of Education president said that when he reads or hears about mass shootings in schools, he worries about it happening in his district. With the school system cash-strapped, and no large police force nearby, he’s joined a growing number of Ohio school officials considering a last-ditch line of defense: arming staff.

Mr. Krugh is quick to say that no decision has been made. The board will hold a forum at 10 a.m. Saturday, at which a Buckeye Firearms Association speaker will discuss a training program the nonprofit offers to school staff.

It is a chance for the community to ask questions about having teachers, principals, or janitors, or anyone carrying a gun into their child’s school.

“We are looking at every option we can,” Mr. Krugh said.

In the wake of mass school shootings in Newtown, Conn., Chardon, Ohio, and elsewhere, school districts around the country re-evaluated their security procedures.

Some focused on making it more difficult to enter a school, often by locking doors and requiring visitors to identify themselves.

Others added surveillance systems. Many retrained staff to respond to an active shooter, adopting a proactive approach and ditching passive lock-down procedures.

Others have armed their staff. For years, some school districts, particularly urban ones, have hired police officers or armed security guards. But a new trend developed in the last two years of schools training select staff members and allowing them to carry firearms in school buildings.

There are no exact numbers, as no agency or group seems to track districts that allow staff to carry guns. But the Ohio School Boards Association believes about three dozen public school districts now allow staff members to be armed in schools or are considering it.

This is a new phenomenon, said Richard Caster, a consultant for the association. As best he can tell, no Ohio school districts allowed armed staff members before Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine suggested in December, 2012, that they should consider the idea.

The districts that have given some staff members guns seem overwhelmingly to be in rural areas. Edgewood City Schools in southwestern Butler County and Newcomerstown Schools in eastern Tuscarawas County have adopted policies that allow teachers to be armed. Sidney City Schools in Shelby County has considered a similar measure.

When discussions first began about arming staff members, Toledo Public Schools quickly rejected the idea.

The district already has police officers and security guards, TPS officials said, and then-Superintendent Jerome Pecko said society should focus on improving mental health services, not giving teachers guns.

“That would be, in my estimation, an insane way to approach a solution to the problem we have in our country,” he said.

Twice last school year, a TPS high school was locked down after a student was found with a gun, one real and the other a replica. Bill Weyandt, chief of TPS security, said those incidents validated the district’s security measures, because an armed officer responded to the scene “in a matter of a minute or so.”

While the district uses random metal detector checks at its high schools, it hasn’t made them a permanent fixture. Partly, that’s because of cost. But it’s also a perception issue.

“Schools are meant to be a welcoming environment,” TPS spokesman Patty Mazur said. “We want to make sure we can maintain this openness while keeping schools safe.”

The district, like others in the area, is training staff in the Alert Lockdown Inform Counter Evacuate system, where instead of simply locking rooms and hiding, school staff train to react based on presented information.

The trouble, said Mr. Caster and school officials who have considered arming staff, is that districts in small, rural communities might find the closest police officer at any given time miles away from a school. Mass shootings tend to happen very quickly.

“By the time the sheriff and the deputies do get there, they aren't there to save lives,” Mr. Caster said. “They are there to process a crime scene.”

Most of the time, Mr. Krugh said, a Lake Township police officer is stationed at the school complex, but there are times the officer must respond to another location. If someone entered a Lake school with a gun, a police officer might arrive too late.

If Lake Local decides to arm staff, they wouldn’t be alone in northwest Ohio. Montpelier Exempted Village Schools decided last year to allow custodial staff to carry handguns.

Superintendent Jamie Grime said he’s heard no complaints or concerns from parents. It took about six months for the staff to be trained and the policy implemented, and the community seems to have accepted it.

It’s not an ideal situation, Mr. Grime said. But the local police and sheriff’s department cover a lot of ground. If he could hire police to be stationed at the schools, he would.

“If I had an endless budget and had to choose between arming staff and having police officers on site, I would choose police officers every time,” Mr. Grime said.

That, education officials said, is the core problem. Schools, especially small ones, can barely pay their core educational expenses.

“The reality,” Mr. Caster said, “ is most of our districts can't afford it.”

So far, there’s no indication that any of the districts who decided to arm staff have reconsidered their policies. And, Mr. Caster said, there have been no unfortunate incidents he’s aware of involving those staff members carrying guns.

Contact Nolan Rosenkrans at: nrosenkrans@theblade.com or 419-724-6086, or on Twitter @NolanRosenkrans.

First Published January 20, 2015, 5:00 a.m.