Five Feet of Feisty

I guess this is the response from the NRA that in order to prevent another mass murder of innocents in our schools, teachers should be armed. 

Let’s think about this for a minute.

School districts sometimes face lawsuits for the bad decisions teachers make. After all, teachers are human. Sometimes we make mistakes and sometimes we use poor judgment. 

As president of my local, there have been times where I have had to offer support and guidance for a colleague who made a mistake and used poor judgment. Despite claims to the contrary, some teachers who use poor judgment are usually good people who had a momentary lapse and did something that wasn’t very smart.

Let’s imagine for a moment that a teacher has been harassed for the better part of the school year by a student or a group of students. This teacher has turned to administration and is offered very little to no support. The teacher is told time & time again that it must be something “they” are doing and perhaps, they need better classroom management skills or they need to work on engaging students more, or they need to work on making that Geometry lesson a little more relevant. 

Bottom line, the message the teacher is told over & over again, is that it must be something they are doing that is causing the student to “choose to be disruptive.” (Seriously, this is what too many teachers are hearing now a days.)

Let’s imagine that things have escalated and the student has moved to threatening the teacher with physical violence. The teacher again reaches out to administration and again is admonished to “try harder.” And, let’s imagine, that even though Ed Code specifically states that when a teacher is threatened with physical violence and is in fear that this physical violence will occur, the administration refuses to call the police or the call is made and the police refuse to take a report. (Unfortunately this routinely happens where I work.)

The teacher believes they have no where to turn. They believe that something bad is going to happen unless they do something.

Now imagine that teacher with a gun.