DeWine said if he were on a school board, he would seriously consider having an ex-police officer or someone with significant training have access to a gun in school.
“If I was on a school board … I would seriously consider having someone in that school, who may be an ex-police officer, someone who has significant training, someone who had access to a gun in school,” DeWine said. “But you would have to be very careful about it. I’m not saying everyone in the school should be armed but someone who knows what they are doing and who has that gun under lock and key and can get to it instantly out of their office. That’s something I would at least debate and talk about,” DeWine said.
DeWine said arming employees is not the answer for every school and should be a local decision because each school has different needs and culture.
Ohio law prohibits guns and other weapons from schools but allows anyone to carry those weapons if they have written permission from the local school board. Law enforcement officers can carry weapons on school grounds when they are acting within the scope of their duties.
Kelly Kohls, the president of the Springboro school board, said the conversation about arming school staff members has come up in board discussions. She said a great deal of research would have to be conducted before any decisions are made.
“It’s a scary thought to me to have a gun in the building, but from what I’m hearing, if there were one or two more armed people in the (Sandy Hook) building, they certainly would have been able to stop the murders sooner,” Kohls said. “We just want to keep the kids safe; we’re just not sure what route to take.”
“I think we’d consider anything to protect our students, but how we would do that is to develop a series of plans,” Kohls said.
Julie Gilmore, Kettering school board president, said arming teachers and administrators would be a very tough decision.
“In my opinion, it’s the guns that are the problem; and perhaps the kinds of guns that are the problem,” Gilmore said. “As far as having more guns about (in schools), I would definitely be very leery of going in that direction.”
State law requires each city, exempted village, and local school district and the governing authority of each chartered nonpublic school to file a comprehensive school safety plan and floor plan for each school building.
The attorney general released on Tuesday guidelines for drafting those plans based on best practices. DeWine said “a significant number” of the nearly 4,900 plans submitted won’t meet those guidelines and his office will work with schools to revise their plans.
Schools must file plans every three years, but DeWine said school safety should be an ongoing discussion in communities.
A training course about how to recognize and deal with shooters is currently offered through the Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy. The academy plans to offer the course to educators in 2013, beginning in central Ohio.
“We cannot, unless we barricade every school in this country, assure that there’s never going to be a problem,” DeWine said. “But what we can do and what is our moral obligation to do as citizens and elected officials is to minimize the risk, increase our odds of survival and decrease the odds of something happening.”
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