PA Bill Number: SB945
Title: Consolidating the act of August 9, 1955 (P.L.323, No.130), known as The County Code; and making repeals.
Description: Consolidating the act of August 9, 1955 (P.L.323, No.130), known as The County Code; and making repeals. ...
Last Action: Third consideration and final passage (199-0)
Last Action Date: Apr 17, 2024
Uncharted territory: The legal landscape on policies arming teachers will be shaped by districts like Tamaqua :: 02/22/2019
When the Tamaqua Area School District implemented the commonwealth’s first policy to arm teachers, leaders at the district knew they would be pioneers.
But now, after facing two lawsuits from teachers and families opposed to this particular answer to school shootings, experts say the district also will be laying the legal groundwork for such policies across the state. The eyes of other school district leaders, elected officials and solicitors are now focused on Schuylkill County.
“This is an extremely important issue,” said John Freund, an attorney with the Bethlehem law firm KingSpry who serves as solicitor for a handful of Lehigh Valley school districts. “We’re advising all of our clients to wait and see what happens here because the outcome is certainly uncertain.”
According to the nonprofit Education Commission of the States, there are 21 states that explicitly give districts, school boards or schools the authority to decide whether weapons are allowed in schools, and nine states that have laws that give school employees permission to possess weapons. In the wake of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre in 2018, Florida passed legislation requiring districts to have a “safe-school officer” on staff — be it a police officer, private security or trained, armed employee.
There are no databases that track the number of school districts across the country that have armed staff, but the number is certainly in the hundreds, if not thousands, according to Kenneth Trump, president of the Ohio-based National School Safety and Security Services, a consulting firm that specializes in increasing school safety.
In Texas alone, where state law gives school boards the authority to arm staff, 303 of the state’s 1,031 districts have armed teachers and staff. But considering that there are upwards of 100,000 districts around the nation, these numbers are still a tiny fraction of the whole.
“There are more school systems doing it today than in the past, yes. But more does not automatically equate to most or even many,” Trump said. “We’ve seen a number of states … expand opportunities to arm staff. That said, the vast majority of superintendents and school boards say thanks, but no thanks.”
Fewer still are the districts where changes have been implemented and then challenged in court. Still, they provide a glimpse of the legal hurdles that may lie ahead for Tamaqua:
- Parents in Madison Local School District in Ohio, a state that already has armed teachers despite some vague provisions in the state law, sued the district last year, alleging the law requires more intensive training for gun-wielding personnel in school than can be provided by the district. Proponents of arming staff say the training guidelines outlined in the law pertain to school resource officers and not district staff. Madison Local experienced school violence first-hand in 2016, when an eighth-grader opened fire in a school and injured three classmates.
- In January, the Lee County School District in rural Virginia filed a lawsuit against the state challenging its refusal to allow the district’s policy to arm teachers. Virginia’s attorney general says the district, which has borders touching both Kentucky and Tennessee, does not have the authority to arm district staff under state law. The school district believes its program counts as an exception to the prohibition of firearms in schools there.
- The Clarksville School District in Arkansas implemented a policy to arm teachers after the horror of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012, when Adam Lanza killed 20 young children and six staff members in Newton, Conn. The Arkansas attorney general issued an opinion blocking the policy because the district designated staff as a private security firm in order to allow weapons on school grounds. In 2015, the state established new guidelines and cleared the way for Clarksville and other districts to continue with such policies.
Liability questions loom
“We’re in uncharted territory here,” said Luke Cornelius, professor of education law at the University of North Florida. “I don’t think people know what they’re getting into with this.”
Cornelius believes the real issue isn’t whether districts have the authority to arm staff, but the liability they may face after an employee discharges a weapon on school grounds. Since the phenomenon is relatively new and school shootings are very rare, this has yet to play out.
“You’re opening a can of worms here and I don’t think anyone is looking too deep into the implications of it,” Cornelius said. “Law, by its nature, is reactive. Which is, in this case, the tragedy of it. What is the liability for a school where a teacher wrongly shoots someone? We won’t know until a teacher wrongly shoots someone.”
Cornelius said the school boards believe they are acting as citizens who have a constitutional right to bear arms for self-defense.
The problem, he said, is that employees are not armed as private citizens, but by a school policy that authorizes them to use deadly force. Even police, who are highly trained in the use of deadly force, face liability issues, Cornelius noted.
The proof is in the myriad civil and criminal cases filed against law enforcement in wrongful death cases, he said. Police departments and municipalities are aware of this risk and often have insurance and savings earmarked for the kind of expensive settlements brought on by such liability disputes. It’s highly unlikely any school district is equipped for such a thing, he said.
“There is a hell of a legal difference between an armed citizen defending oneself as a private citizen and an armed public employee defending with deadly force,” he said. “When it’s part of your job description, you’re not an armed citizen anymore. I guarantee nobody is explaining this to a teacher carrying a weapon.”
Tamaqua and many other districts that moved forward with policies to arm teachers have cited finances as a rationale. District leaders say they cannot afford the $50,000 to $80,000 a year for more school resource officers. But given the liability and litigation risks cropping up, Trump is skeptical that arming staff would be cheaper than hiring trained security or police.
“When you divide the cost of an officer into the total operating budget of a school district, it’s a very small percentage,” he said. “And especially so when you compare that with the potential liability of training a noncommissioned, nonlaw enforcement personnel. I think it’s penny-wise and pound-foolish to take that risk.”
Policy without pushback
Sheriff John Lenhart watched the news unfold in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012, and immediately started dialing numbers.
Lenhart could think of no reason why such horror would spare his corner of western Ohio.
“I called up some of the superintendents I was friendly with and said, ‘Let’s get our heads together on Monday and let’s talk about this,’” remembers Lenhart, the sheriff of Shelby County. “I wanted to get a game plan together because I knew we were not prepared for anything even resembling this.”
Those conversations would lay the groundwork for policies to arm teachers and staff in two of the county’s school districts within the year. One of those districts partnering with Shelby County is the Sidney City School District, serving about 3,500 students squarely between Lima and Dayton, Ohio — both cities about 40 minutes away.
Lenhart remembers some pushback from the effort in Sidney City — a few grievances from the teachers union and some statements from the public. But there was no litigation.
“You need to have all the players at the table to hash something out,” Lenhart said of such policies. “You have to have buy-in from the citizens, otherwise you’re not going to have success in anything you do. And you have to your employees working with you.”
Bob Humble, superintendent of Sidney City schools, said authorized staff members do not carry guns, but are only 10 to 15 seconds away from one at any given time.
“I like the fact that there’s less of a chance that something is going to happen here because people know they’re not going to get very far,” Humble said. “Our kids don’t even think about this anymore. This is just another layer of security in our district.”
https://www.mcall.com/news/education/mc-nws-tamaqua-legal-landscape-gun-policies-20190129-story.html
