How We Protect Our Children At School

What does it mean to protect our children at school? For the past decade, I’ve been following a program that protects school children from celebrity-seeking mass-murderers. This program teaches school staff to be first responders who provide both armed defense and medical first aid. We’ve learned a lot over the past decade, but there are still unanswered questions.

Protecting our children at school actually covers a lot of ground. Being “at school” is really a shorthand way of saying we want to protect the children when they are out of their parents care. That includes when they are off campus and on the school bus before school starts. It includes the school events after the last class period ends. We want to protect our children from the ball field to the classroom and into the parking lot.

Once you see the scope of the problem, you realize why a single uniformed School Resource Officer is only the beginning of a safety plan. One defender, no matter how well-trained or effective, can’t be everywhere all the time.

First responders must be near the children because we don’t want to give a murderer time to kill. That means an armed defender has to be within a few hundred feet of every child. The number of defenders that we want depends on the size of the campus and the layout of the buildings. A one-room school house takes fewer defenders than a sprawling K-12 campus.

This is why an effective campus security plan needs more than just a few armed teachers. Kids eat in the cafeteria, so we want armed cafeteria workers. Students go to the administrative offices, so we want armed administrative staff. Students are with bus drivers before school and with coaches and art instructors after school. We want a few people in each position to be first responders.

Armed defenders are important, but they are only a small part of defending our children in school. We’ve seen mass-murderers who presented many “red flags,” signs of disturbed or violent behavior. We need school counselors to be trained to spot warning signs. We need police and the schools to have a realistic plan for dealing with those students before they create disasters. We’ve seen students die from treatable wounds at school. Some states have mandated that all school staff take a one-hour class in emergency trauma care. That class, often called “Stop the Bleed”, makes sure that more injured students are alive when EMTs finally get there. Stopping an attacker at school is neither the first step nor the last step to save lives.

We don’t really know how much defense is enough. We don’t need a retired Navy SEAL or a retired prison guard in every classroom. But also know that the number of children who will be injured is a function of distance between them and the nearest armed defender. We need to confront an attacker in less than 30 seconds, with a follow up defender arriving within a minute. 19-percent of teachers surveyed across the US were willing to carry a firearm if it was part of a recognized program in their school. We probably don’t need almost one-out-of-five teachers armed, but it is nice to know that they are willing to help.

About one-out-of-five teachers were willing to be part of an armed first responder program.

So far, the announced presence of armed volunteers who carry concealed has stopped sociopathic murderers from attacking their schools. There is a good reason for that. Mass-murderers don’t want to get shot so they attack undefended victims. Based on our experience in non-school settings, we observe that ordinary citizens who carry concealed in public stopped more than half of the attempted mass-murders that were not in gun-free zones. They stopped a mass-murderer more than once a month, 124 successful defenses in 2014 to 2021. The very fact of training school staff and announcing this fact has a deterrent effect of its own.

It isn’t clear that every volunteer defender would defeat every possible attacker.
It is clear that the defenders we have today raised a doubt in every attacker so far.

So why haven’t more schools adopted the policy of training school staff to be armed defenders and medical first responders?  Politics. Optics are more important than facts. Sound bites are more important than evidence. Politicians want to take credit for everything good and evade blame for any problems. Journalists want simple solutions. Some parents are squeamish about guns, regardless of the facts. Some educators are more committed to ideology than to truth. Teacher unions want to make sure that teachers can’t be volunteer defenders unless they get higher pay.

I’ve looked, and I can’t find easy answers for those problems.

More parents want their children defended by volunteer staff than want their children undefended. I don’t know how to satisfy both this majority of  parents and those parents who want to leave their students undefended. I don’t know how to satisfy the teachers who will put their lives on the line for their students, and the teachers who want to leave their classrooms undefended.

Are you satisfied to simply wait until the police arrive? I’m not. I hope I’ve convinced you that these are important questions, well worth asking your school board and your elected representatives.

I’ve written about it here.