Arming Teachers Won't Help

It took State Rep. Frank Lasee (R-Bellevue) only five days after the Cazenovia shooting to declare that students bringing guns to school should be greeted by heavily armed teachers.

“To make our schools safe for our students to learn, all options should be on the table,” Lasee told an interviewer Wednesday. “Israel and Thailand have well-trained teachers carrying weapons and keeping their children safe from harm. It can work in Wisconsin.”

Israel? Thailand? Are things really that bad here? Is the only line of defense left to us the willingness of a home economics teacher to engage a firefight in front of the school gymnasium?

Of course that’s not a very likely scenario. It’s a rare school these days that can actually afford to employ a home economics teacher, let alone who is also a good shot. Physical education programs have also been on the chopping block. There’s no telling who would have been left to defend the schools under the cuts that would have been realized if Lasee’s so-called Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights had passed.

Voters have not been kind to school districts looking for increased funding during the last decade or so. It will be interesting to see how much support exists for designating tax dollars to teachers needing cross-training in marksmanship.

Schools are different these days. There was a time when schools employed their own psychologists and guidance counselors, as well as a bevy of aides, coaches, and others who saw it as their jobs to watch over the kids, discuss their problems, and keep parents informed. Many more people were available to note the children who were loners or might be getting in trouble.

Due to funding cuts, schools today are often short-staffed, harassed, and somewhat chaotic.

There are also places where difficult choices abound due to a lack of funding. Two years ago the principal at our son’s school told us she had to choose between having a full-time physical education, art, or music program. She ended up selecting physical education because she felt that would be better for the school’s population.

Now, two weeks into this school year, she was forced to lay off the physical education teacher.

Society is different today, too. Many families, struggling under the weight of multiple jobs, don’t have as much time to develop positive relationships with teachers and staff. Children are increasingly lost in this mix of schools stressed by falling budgets and parents stressed by competing priorities.

We have the money. What we don’t have is the will to align our funding priorities to the places where some children spend six to eight hours a day. As schools endure fiscal problems, Washington seems to be able to find funding of $2 billion per week for the war in Iraq, an exercise more brutally violent and less rational with the passing of each day. By comparison, the annual budget for the Milwaukee Public Schools is about $1.2 billion.

How many school guidance counselors could we have funded for the cost of just one week in Iraq? Two weeks, well, maybe we can bring back music and art.

As for Rep. Lasee’s proposal, let’s just imagine the day when a student steals a gun from a teacher’s desk, as opposed to a parent’s closet, and uses it to shoot a student, a teacher, or a principal. Is Lasee willing to have the state bear the costs—both moral and financial—for that?

It will take awhile to get our funding priorities back in line. A good first step would be to let Rep. Lasee know that Wisconsin schools need books more than bullets.