The 2018 state legislative session continues this week in Jackson and several newsworthy bills have passed in the both the Senate and House.
In the wake of the deadly school shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., the Senate passed House Bill 1083, which would give school leaders the option to arm certain staff members and seek proper emergency response training through an approved course by the Department of Public Safety as a means of protecting students and teachers in an emergency until law enforcement arrives on campus.
Since the Parkland shooting that claimed 17 lives on Feb. 14, the discussion of how to protect students from gun violence has been at the forefront of the nation’s political discourse with students all across the country participating in a walkout last week to protest what they view as the government’s inaction on gun control. One of the solutions that has been suggested by President Donald Trump is arming faculty personnel at schools, and it seems that the state legislature is leaning toward making this an option in Mississippi.
I have a unique perspective onthis issue because it just so happens that I have covered a school that has been implementing this policy for more than a decade. Earlier in my career, while I was the sports editor at The Vernon Record in north central Texas, one of the schools I covered was Harrold, a very small community on the eastern outskirts of Wilbarger County.
That region of Texas is covered with very small towns and counties, which results in some school districts consisting of a little more than 100 K-12 students. Harrold was one of those school districts, with all of the students from kindergarten to 12th grade being taught in two buildings.
In 2007, in the wake of several major school shootings around the country, the school district became the first in the entire U.S. to pass a concealed handgun policy aimed at providing protection for students in the case of an active shooter.
HPSD Superintendent David Thweatt, who I would see occasionally as I visited the school to cover games or to do season preview stories, said the thinking behind arming staff was that the school was 30 miles away from the nearest law enforcement agency in Vernon, and that if there was an active shooter, they wouldn’t be able to get there in time.
The issue made national news, and Thweatt did interviews on Fox News and CNN to defend the district’s policy.
As expected, the policy drew a lot of criticism, even from inside Wilbarger County, a gun-friendly, conservative area. When I arrived there in the spring of 2009, a lot of the discussion had died down, and during the nearly three years I was there, I never heard of any problems with firearms like the one that happened last week in Seaside, Calif., when a teacher accidentally fired a handgun in a classroom, causing minor injuries to three students.
I never noticed any of the teachers or coaches with firearms whenever I visited the Harrold campus, as it was a voluntary policy, and as far as I know they’ve never had to draw any weapons.
If Bill 1083 is signed into law by Gov. Phil Bryant and some school districts decide to consider arming their teachers, those communities will have to make tough choices to see whether the dangers of accidents like the one in Seaside or the danger of the guns falling into the wrong hands on campus outweigh any pros.
I can honestly say that I have seen a school district do this policy without any major problems. However, the reasons for Harrold enacting the policy were very different from the reason a school such as Stoneman Douglass, which has more than 3,000 students, would enact such a policy. For instance, here in Newton County, there are no long distances from any of the county’s schools for law enforcement, and the county has a Special Response Team that can be deployed in minutes who are trained to handle exactly that type of emergency.
If the law is passed, school districts across the state must keep in mind that just because this has worked at a tiny school in northern Texas, it doesn’t mean that it would work smoothly at every school.
Contact Demetrius at dthompson@newtoncountyappeal.com.
