The Wondering Mind

I first read about a Texas town which would allow teachers to carry concealed firearms into the classroom on the BBC website a while ago. And I had the usual reaction to such news.

“Those crazy Texans. What it’s the water over there?”

But the NY Times had an article which went into more detail on the story. And in all fairness, the lunacy appears to belong primarily to the school superintendent and the school board.

You can read the story for yourself to see all the threadbare arguments backing up the thinking of these individuals, so I won’t take apart the weaknesses of the individual justifications. They’re rather obvious, at least to me, but I doubt I would persuade anyone who thinks this is a good idea.

The thing is, the real issue in this case seems to be that the policy was the result of a paranoid individual who let what little power he had get to his head, and a school board looking for a raison d’être.

As the article points out, it’s not clear what threat this policy is supposed to counter.The sorts of criminal activities which blight some urban schools, such as gang violence, is not an issue in this district. In fact, incidents of criminality appear to be rare in general.

If the fear is of sociopathic incidents, such as Columbine or crazed individuals entering the school, there really is no practical way to counter such threats. More to the point, as horrific as such incidents are, they are rare enough (thankfully) that you really have to have nothing better to do before you would spend any amount of time thinking how to counter such an improbable occurrence.

This is a small school district in rural Texas. I don’t know how good this 2-building school is, but I will assume that they have educational needs for which they could have better spent the money than on this security policy. Unless all 100 students are going onto Ivy League schools or other top universities, they could probably stand to improve their educational achievements. Which is the sort of thing most school superintendents spend their energies on. It’s also the sort of thing most school boards want their superintendent to spend their time on.

Of course, improving the educational achievements of your school is much harder than sending some of your teachers off on a week of weapons training and arming them in the school for a threat you can’t define.