ADDISON, Mich. — Steve Guerra has 74 doors, more than 200 windows, and not nearly enough shatterproof tape to cover them all.
So the Addison Community Schools superintendent has deployed the tape strategically throughout his campus: a single building in rural southeast Michigan that contains three grade schools for fewer than 1,000 students.
At the entryway for middle and high schoolers, for instance, he added it to the chest-high panels on the doors students walk through every morning to get to class. The bottom ones he left untouched.
His reasoning? If a gunman approached the school and started blasting the windows, “[the students] would live if they got shot in the shin,” the superintendent said.
When Mr. Guerra, 59, declares that school safety is his top priority, he can easily back it up. His building is equipped with buzzers and intercoms. It has 60 security cameras, which works out to roughly one camera for every 13 students. He believes his campus is more secure than schools in ritzy Ann Arbor, where taxpayers just approved a $1 billion levy for sweeping school upgrades.
The only thing he’s missing are armed guards or school resource officers — someone with a gun.
“I have a lot of safety measures in place, but if somebody were to get into the building and had a weapon, I’m defenseless,” he said.
In the past, it’s taken sheriff’s deputies patrolling a sprawling county a half an hour or longer to get to them.
“That to me is unacceptable,” Mr. Guerra said. In a shooting, “they would wipe out my 800 kids.”
Since his budget doesn’t allow for hiring an officer, Mr. Guerra and the school board are considering whether to become one of the first districts in Michigan where teachers can carry concealed firearms, a precedent-setting move that would lay the groundwork for other districts across the state to follow suit and join the national debate over arming teachers.
In rural districts especially, many school leaders see arming teachers, principals, and custodians as a solution to lagging response times and tight budgets. But those against it cite concerns about training and effectiveness and research that concludes it would actually make schools less safe.
“An armed teacher cannot, in a moment of extreme duress and confusion, transform into a specially trained law enforcement officer,” the gun control nonprofit Everytown For Gun Safety wrote in a report arguing against arming teachers. “In reality, an armed teacher is much more likely to hit a student bystander or be shot by law enforcement than to be an effective solution to an active shooter.”
The question that keeps everyone involved in this debate up at night: Could a teacher take down a student? And then what?
“Would you actually be able to pull that trigger if you’re looking at someone you’ve known your entire life?” asked Addison High senior Jacquelyn Ruder, who, despite going hunting with her father and being comfortable around guns, doesn’t want teachers in her school to have them.
“What if that teacher isn’t in the right frame of mind one day and something snaps? What’s to stop them from injuring one of us?”
‘I WOULD NEVER WANT TO BE THAT PERSON’
The conversation happening in Addison has played out similarly in dozens of Ohio districts where teachers are allowed to carry or access firearms on school grounds.
The movement began here in late 2012, after a gunman killing 20 first-graders and six teachers at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., ignited a mad dash to address gaping holes in school security.
While Mr. Guerra, who’s licensed to carry a concealed pistol, said he’s ready and willing to have his gun at school, the school board isn’t in any hurry to let him.
“The board realizes this is a sensitive issue and regardless of the outcome, we want to make sure all avenues have been explored,” Addison School Board President Michael Murphy said. “This is just the first part of the equation. If the board decides to allow the arming of our staff, it doesn’t mean it’s approved on Monday and Tuesday morning the staff is armed.”
Board members have been gathering input from teachers, principals, and other school staff following a forum in September that suggested the community was deeply divided on the issue (one ninth-grader who attended said if her teachers were armed she would “fear for her life”). They’ve also asked Mr. Guerra to reach out to neighboring townships about possibly chipping in for a $100,000-a-year school resource officer, a position the district can’t afford on its own.
Mr. Guerra admits that while some employees have been receptive to the idea of carrying weapons, there is far from a consensus on the issue after nearly two years of discussion. Without an actual proposal on the table, the local teachers union has yet to officially weigh in, but the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, the nation’s two largest teachers unions, oppose arming teachers. Addison educators said that as a group they’re probably split.
“I’m for it,” said Mark Beougher, a 43-year-old chemistry and physics instructor. “I would just never want to be that person. It’s too much responsibility.”
Mr. Beougher once had to restrain a student for 35 minutes during a violent outburst until police arrived.
“That’s a long time,” he said. “We’ve had a couple of incidents where it’s taken upwards of half an hour for police officers to show up if we had a bad fight.”
“But it’s not like it happens very often,” he added. “That’s why it’s hard for us to justify having an armed officer.”
Jessica McNett, a 38-year-old who teaches special education, is one of eight Addison teacher with a concealed-carry license, but she said she isn’t prepared to put it to use at her job.
“I don’t know if put in that situation I could be the one to do something,” said Ms. McNett, who graduated from Addison High School the year two gunmen murdered 13 people at Columbine High School. “I got it for protection, obviously. I don’t feel like I have enough training to come in with it tomorrow.”
If the district moves ahead with arming teachers, Mr. Guerra said he would want to thoroughly vet candidates and use a training course like Faster Saves Lives, a program run by a nonprofit affiliated with the Buckeye Firearms Association, a prominent Second Amendment group in Ohio.
Since 2013, Faster Saves Lives has trained 3,000 staff members from 260 public and private schools through its three-day intensive program, according to program director Joe Eaton. The “vast majority” of districts are in Ohio, although the group has trained people from 17 other states. To his knowledge, an Ohio teacher has never needed to draw a gun on school grounds.
Mr. Eaton admits the program isn’t for everyone and some teachers will drop out.
“Every year, we have several staff who self-select themselves out of it,” he said. “There’s either more involved than they thought or emotionally they’re not at the point they could be involved.”
In Ohio and Michigan, school boards have the authority to authorize teachers to carry guns. So far in Ohio, districts haven’t had to disclose their plans beyond public meetings. The state doesn’t keep a database with this information, so there’s no way to track exactly how many are recruiting teachers to carry firearms. A recent statewide survey suggested that armed teachers are present in at least 43 school buildings.
Mr. Eaton advises districts to “be public about adopting it ... but keep the rest out of the public record.”
“We won’t release information unless we’ve seen an article making it public,” he said. “The state of Ohio, in my opinion, they’ve done it the right way. They’ve left a lot of control at the local level.”
Lucas County Sheriff John Tharp said he’s not aware of any districts in his county where teachers are armed, and he wouldn’t be in favor of that happening.
“What I would like to see is more law enforcement appropriated and involved in the school system,” he said.
‘IT’S JUST PART OF OUR CULTURE’
After the Sandy Hook massacre, and the Chardon High School shooting that killed three northeast Ohio teens the same year, Sidney City Schools in Shelby County became ground zero in the nascent movement to beef up school safety by arming teachers.
Five other districts in the county have since given teachers access to firearms in some capacity, said Sheriff John Lenhart, who spearheaded a program there he deems an overall success.
“There was pushback” at the beginning, he said. “I understand that my police chief friends were not excited about arming teachers in a school.”
Sidney educators do not actually carry firearms. Instead, trained teachers have access to biometric safes with guns maintained by the sheriff’s office, which oversees the entire program and requires teachers to attend monthly training sessions.
“For us at this point it’s just part of our culture,” Sidney Superintendent Bob Humble said. “Our kids don’t even really think about it. They don’t talk about it, but everyone knows it’s there.”
In Blanchester, a village of 4,000 northeast of Cincinnati where an undisclosed number of teachers began carrying firearms this year, Superintendent Dean Lynch said he has peace of mind knowing staff members can respond in “possibly seconds” to a threat. Especially after a gunman shot 26 people in 32 seconds outside a Dayton bar in August.
“[Police] could be on the other side of town, so it might take them an extra two or three minutes to get here. We do not have two or three minutes to stop an intruder,” he said.
Madison Dillon, an Addison High sophomore, said she might feel safer in school with teachers who are “qualified and comfortable” carrying weapons. It would depend largely on the teachers — who are generally advised to remain anonymous for safety reasons.
“It would make me feel more safe or just make me anxious depending on the person who was carrying,” she said.
Mr. Guerra acknowledges there are other issues affecting his student body that guns won’t solve. Well over half the district qualifies for free or reduced lunches. He worries about vaping and medical marijuana. He’s dismayed that of the 68 students in his 2019 graduating class, only five came from homes where they had “both parents from birth to graduation.” After more than 25 years as an educator, he’s troubled by some of the behavior he’s seeing now in kids as young as 5 or 6.
“If you push the clock forward, there could be a potential [for violence] with some of the behaviors that are out of control,” he said.
Earlier this month, an Addison Middle School student entered a bathroom and scrawled a threat to blow up the school on the wall. Mr. Guerra said security cameras helped him identify the student within 10 minutes, preventing a lockdown. He believes the student may have been influenced by a similar threat that prompted a lockdown in a nearby township.
He said armed teachers need to be prepared for an unthinkable scenario: “If there’s an active shooter, they’re going to have to kill somebody.”
And while this doesn’t sit well with everyone, it’s fine with him.
“If my granddaughter was there, I would sleep like a baby knowing I saved her,” he said.
First Published December 2, 2019, 11:30 a.m.
