From a school shooting in Chardon, Ohio, last year to one in Sparks, Nev., this month, mass school shootings are becoming all too familiar, and school boards throughout the country are scrambling to find a way to prevent the acts from repeating.
One idea: arming principals, teachers or guards as a security measure. Several schools in Ohio have already done so, but some educators and school board officials have mixed feelings about the idea, including some in Athens.
For Athens Middle School principal Paul Grippa, allowing anyone in the school, himself included, to carry a gun would be “a disaster waiting to happen.”
“It would just create a whole other issue of keeping a gun safe,” Grippa said. “You would have to carry it on your person at all times or have to hide it in a safe in your office, and then if there is a shooting, what good is it if the gun is in your office?”
Dick Caster, senior school board services consultant for the Ohio School Boards Association, said the idea has been talked about often since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in suburban Connecticut, though few schools in Ohio have adopted the practice.
“The districts that I’m hearing about are the ones where the police have a long commute,” Caster said.
A school’s emergency preparedness is protected from public disclosure, Caster said. Still, he speculated that a number of schools have armed teachers or principals. However, there is no easy way of knowing the exact number of schools that have armed employees because each local school board decides whether teachers or principals should have guns.
Although Grippa noted that any final decision would rest with an individual school board, he also said giving someone a gun creates a new risk factor that wasn’t there before.
“You have teachers that lose their pens or their gradebooks or their watches or radios and all kinds of stuff — even laptops,” he said.
On the other hand, retired Athens High School principal Mike Meek said in an April interview that having the principal carry a concealed weapon is a good idea for safety purposes.
“I think that’s a decision that the Board of Education needs to make, but it’s got to be a special person whoever’s going to carry the concealed weapon,” Meek said.
Scott Nisley, vice president of the Athens City Board of Education, said the board has never considered or even discussed allowing local principals to be armed.
In an effort to get what he’d consider to be the next best thing, Athens County Sheriff Pat Kelly announced last week that his deputies will begin doing random walk-throughs at Athens County schools outside city limits.
“Our people are trained to handle situations like this, so we just don’t want to have any teacher or principal responsible for killing kids too, along with (a possible shooter),” he said.
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@XanderZellner
