NEWS | EDUCATION
Bullets and Bookbags Will arming adults in schools make students safer? BY DANIEL WALTERS
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he production assistant from ABC’s 20/20 team thought he’d found a story in Coeur d’Alene. Supposedly, school district teachers there had begun carrying concealed handguns to protect against school shooters. It was only when he called the district that he learned he’d been duped. The story was completely made up — his source turned out to be a satirical online newspaper similar to The Onion. But the truth wasn’t so far off. After the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary last December, two different camps demanded solutions. Gun control advocates said it was finally time for new legislation to rein in the availability and power of assault weapons. The NRA called for schools Send comments to to add more armed personnel, reasoning that editor@inlander.com. only a “good guy with a gun” could stop a “bad guy with a gun.” As gun control attempts fizzled nationwide, many schools have pursued the NRA’s option. The Coeur d’Alene school district added additional police officers in the schools and spent $3,390 to install six gun safes in school offices, giving officers powerful rifles that can shoot accurately down long hallways. Spokane Public Schools plans to arm its security officers for the first time. And in Sandpoint, a school board member’s proposal to use armed volunteers — or even gun-toting teachers — has triggered contentious school board meetings and a recall campaign.
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ver since the Sandy Hook tragedy, Lake Pend Oreille school board chair Steve Youngdahl keeps coming back to one big question: In the event of a mass shooting, how long would it take the cops to reach the sprawling district’s rural schools? He says it could take up to 20 minutes for them to arrive at Clark Fork Junior/Senior High School. Every victim killed at Columbine was shot within the first 16 minutes of the siege. That same concern arose at Spokane Public Schools. In 2003, it took about five minutes for the police to arrive after Lewis and Clark junior Sean Fitzpatrick fired a bullet into a cabinet. And that was a school in the middle of downtown. In a security audit commissioned after Sandy Hook, the district noted that an armed school security staff in the high schools “will clearly be more capable of responding to a threat at their site [than the police] as they are already there and could respond imme-
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CITIZEN INITIATIVE POWER VOTE YES ON I-517 Citizen Initiative: A 100- year-old Washington constitutional right of the people to propose new laws directly to voters without interference from government and corporations.
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