In a nearly unanimous vote, the school board voted on Nov. 11 to adopt a program that trains teacher volunteers to be “firearm marshals,” which would allow them to carry a firearm on campus. The school board’s vote approved a “pilot phase” to start training teachers over 10-12 months, with hopes to install concealed marshals across the district as early as next school year. The program is part of a statewide effort to arm teachers, implemented after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012. Only about 9% of Texas school districts have adopted this policy, and Humble ISD is one of eight school districts to adopt it this school year.
This program should not be allowed to progress past its pilot phase.
There’s little to no evidence that suggests the presence of more guns in schools somehow makes them safer. A Columbia University study found that states with more relaxed gun laws tend to experience higher rates of school shootings. Texas, which has some of the most relaxed gun laws, also leads the nation in school shootings. Expanding firearm access in schools follows that same flawed logic.
When the law was first passed in 2013, firearms were required to be locked in a safe, but that was repealed in 2021, allowing teachers to carry the firearms on their person. Easier access to deadly weapons on school campuses only increases the likelihood of an incident occurring. This program would make more sense if district schools had no safety precautions, but that’s simply not the case. In addition to the armed Humble ISD Police Department stationed at every school, the district has poured money into weapon detectors, iHELP, safety drills and more preventative measures.
Teachers are in their positions to educate students, not to act as armed guards. If the district wants to invest even more into the safety of students, they should expand the Humble ISD Police Department, bringing in more trained professionals instead of exploiting teachers for free “protection.”
The primary reason school board member Ken Kirchhofer gave for adopting this program was to scare “the bad guys” away, but that was an empty statement. A vast majority of school shooters are either incarcerated or killed, so deterrence-based logic is a hunch, at best. And spending heaps of money to create an Humble ISD training department is not a purchase that should be made on a hunch.
You cannot add more firearms into schools but expect to see less firearm-involved incidents. This program has the potential to be detrimental to students’ safety, and if the school board truly cares about that safety, it will stop this program before it makes it past its pilot phase.
