At Grand Saline Independent School District in East Texas, some teachers are now allowed to carry firearms to protect the students.
The New York Post reports that the tiny Texas school district with an enrollment of about 1,200 started allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons at the end of February.
"Every time there was a school shooting, me and the board talked about it again," Superintendent Micah Lewis told the Post."If some crazy came in here, could we minimize the damage by being armed?"
"We're educators," he continued. "I hate that we have to do that, but again, you weigh it out. Do you take this student down if he's mowing people down? It's an easy answer. You take one to save many."
The school board voted in favor of its "Guardian Plan" after three years of discussions, the Post reports.
According to Lewis, the district joins approximately 300 other school districts in Texas that allow some educators to show up to school armed.
No one knows who among the faculty or staff is armed, and the superintendent says that's the point. The firearm stays with the guardian at all times, and the weapons are not stored at school.
According to the Post, the guardians understand that they could be called upon to potentially shoot an armed student at any time.
District employees who are interested in becoming guardians must apply for the program and go through a screening and training with the Texas Department of Public Safety, Lewis said. They must complete 40 hours of initial training, as well as additional hours on a continuous basis, and must also have a license to carry.
"I think that handguns in schools are something that's necessary these days," Branda Hellums, Grand Saline resident told CBS 19. "People go crazy. They bring guns in school and start killing people. I mean there's been too much of it going on."
Lewis said he assumed that, overall, the program would have the conservative community's support.
"There's going to be a few people that question why would you want to do that," he told CBS 19. "We just weighed out, Do we think that our kids are more safe or less safe if we do this? And we feel like our kids would be more safe if we enacted the Guardian Plan."
There have been 104 school shootings since 2018, when Education Week began tracking them, and 34 last year.
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