Parents Speak: Should We Arm Staff Members in Schools?

In 2013, while serving as principal of a K-8 non-public school, I had three different parents ask me if anyone in my school was armed to protect their children in the event of an active shooter. A year later, I had two different parents ask the same question. And it occurred again the following year.

In 2016, I began my doctoral work in educational leadership. I attended FASTER (FASTERSavesLives.org) training after reading “Lesson Learned” in the November/December 2016 issue of Concealed Carry Magazine (Pages 56 to 60) describing the program that trains teachers and administrators to use firearms to protect their schools.*

All of the aforementioned events influenced the direction of my dissertation research analyzing parents’ perspectives on having armed and trained staff members in schools to protect their children from an active shooter.

Addressing a Need for Arming Schools

Attacks on schools have continued to occur at increasing levels in the United States. With each incident, the topics of gun control, arming teachers, school safety measures, prevention and more are intensely considered and scrutinized. The topic of arming school staff has arguably drawn the most heated debate.

Opinion polls on the topic of arming staff members have been taken shortly after attacks, but opinion polls do not qualify as research. Little reliable data exists on many aspects of school safety, including the topic of arming staff members. Therefore, I sought to gain, using a reliable research method, an understanding of parents’ perspectives on having armed and trained staff members as a best practice in school safety.

Research Methodology

In February 2020, the parents of 209 students enrolled at a K-8 non-public school were invited to voluntarily participate in a study on best practices in school safety.

Parents had two weeks to volunteer for a 45- to 60-minute interview related to these safety best practices. They also needed to indicate whether they place a high, medium or low priority on school safety. Of the 273 parents with children in the school, 25 volunteered to participate without knowledge of the actual content of the study.

Three parents indicated a medium priority on school safety and were excluded from the study because the sampling method for the study required participants to place a high priority on school safety in order to qualify. Thirty-three students (15.8 percent) attending the school had a parent participate. The 22 parents who participated included nine fathers and 13 mothers.¹

A qualitative study gave me the freedom to explore the parents’ perspectives during the interviews. This freedom produced a theory grounded on the perspectives that the parents already possessed in relation to the topic. The two initial research questions were:

• What are parents’ perspectives of having armed and trained staff members at their children’s school?
• How do parents’ perspectives of having armed and trained staff members at their children’s school inform best practices in school safety at the school?

Ten initial questions guided the interviews, but the first two parents talked about how specific events or experiences formed their perspectives. As qualitative studies allow, I made the determination to explore whether past events or experiences influenced other parents’ perspectives as well.

Therefore, an additional question was added to all subsequent interviews: Are there any events or experiences that inform parents’ perspectives on the topic of school safety?

Every interview was recorded and transcribed for the purposes of coding themes that developed in parents’ responses. Each parent was given a summary of the themes in the analysis of his or her responses. All 22 parents confirmed that the themes derived from their interviews were accurate representations of their perspectives. This process, called “member checking,” guarantees a very high level of accuracy in the data.

The interviews were all conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, so there was not a recent attack to influence parents’ perspectives. This time frame helped create a level of reliability related to the three main themes that emerged from the study:

• Events and experiences inform parents’ perspectives on school safety.
• Parents support having armed and trained staff at school.
• Parents’ perspectives indicate that armed and trained staff members should be considered as a best practice in school safety.

Events and Experiences

The first theme of events and experiences informing parents’ perspectives included mass murders, mass-shooting drills in which they’d been involved, media coverage of mass murders and school attacks, and becoming a parent.

Parents also mentioned experiences such as their careers. Those who worked in hospitals, schools, IT fields, law enforcement and various other occupations expressed experiencing a variety of frightening factors, such as violence and gunshot wounds. Other experiences that informed parents’ perspectives included perpetually worrying about their children, crime at their homes and attending a concealed pistol license class.

Overwhelmingly in Favor

The second theme, and the focus for this study, was that 21 of 22 parents (95.5 percent) expressed support for having armed and trained staff members at school. Only one parent indicated armed staff members as “not something I am looking for” from teachers or administrators. Noteworthy is that no parent mentioned a school resource officer or law enforcement officer. The parents all spoke of administrators, faculty or other staff as the ones being armed and trained. This could have been due to the size of the school, but that is unknown since I did not explore it further during the interviews.

Support was divided into two different levels — passive and active support — based upon these responses:

• Passive support: Five parents (22.7 percent) expressed passive support for having armed and trained staff members with statements such as, “I would probably support that,” “I’m OK with that,” and “I have no problem with teachers being armed.”
• Active support: Sixteen parents (72.7 percent) expressed active support for having armed and trained staff members with statements such as, “I would absolutely support a small set of staff being armed,” “I am fully supportive of that,” “Absolutely,” “I think it’s a great idea,” “I’d be for it,” and “I am in agreement with that idea.”
• Lack of support: The one parent (4.6 percent) who expressed a lack of support stated, “That wouldn’t be my first choice.” This parent expressed that all training for teachers should be related to education.

Parents’ perspectives on training for armed staff members varied widely in terms of what training would be appropriate, but all 21 parents with passive or active support agreed with armed staff members receiving some level of training. Determining the necessary training was a challenge for participants because they didn’t know what level would be appropriate.

Many of the parents’ responses in support of armed and trained staff members emphasized the importance of a quick response time to stop a deadly attack.

One actively supportive parent added: “Very simple. Very simple — response time. Response time. Seconds count when something like that [a school shooting] is going down. And, you know, seconds count when help is minutes away. I mean, I think first responders do the best they can. But yeah, seconds count. So yeah, response time would be my No. 1 thing.”

Use of Force and Training

Each parent received and read a copy of the school’s emergency operations plan (EOP) before his or her interview. The plan covers all kinds of emergency situations, including a fire, severe weather, an intruder in the building, lockdowns and chemical spills.

The first three questions during the interviews were related to the content of the EOP. However, the fourth question was open-ended for parents to express their opinions: “Tell me something regarding school safety that causes you to worry sometimes.” (At the time I presented the fourth question, no parent had yet been informed that the study was about having armed and trained staff members at school. The parents only knew the study was about best practices in school safety.)

Parents’ responses to this question did not create the diversity of perspectives I thought would be expressed. Twenty-one parents (95.5 percent) indicated a school shooting, and one parent (4.6 percent) indicated bullying. Parents’ perspectives, possibly just like most people’s perspectives, have been impacted by the tragic events in schools in the past.

With 95.5 percent of parents worrying about a school shooting and 95.5 percent of parents expressing support for having armed and trained staff, one might assume that parents would easily support the use of a firearm to eliminate an active shooter in their children’s school. But this was not the case. The ninth question I asked each parent was: “What do you think would be the best response if someone began a mass shooting inside your child’s school?”

Almost every parent responded to this question with some form of the statement, “Oh my. I’ve never thought of that.”

There seems to be a big disconnect if 95.5 percent of parents are concerned about a school shooting but indicate that they haven’t thought of what the best response would be if that actually occurred. There appears to be a significant level of denial.

A perspective that parents repeatedly provided was that something needed to be done quickly to save the lives of children. Fast response was highly valued in order to save lives in the event of a school attack, and yet parents found it difficult to endorse armed staff using force to eliminate a threat. As one parent put it, “It is not the world I grew up in.” This parent acknowledged that school safety practices must be adapted to today’s needs rather than those of the past.

Only three parents (13.6 percent) immediately endorsed eliminating a threat quickly. Other parents endorsed it too but also talked about other options or possibilities before arriving at shooting an attacker.

An overwhelming number of parents (95.5 percent) supported having armed and trained staff members. Even with no clarity on the kind of training, level of training or certification requirements, parents supported some kind of training for all armed staff.

The research shows that parents expect schools to be safe, and the parents interviewed in this study clearly expressed a desire for armed and trained staff members to keep their children safe in the event of a school shooting.

A School’s Perspective

The debate about arming staff members in schools seems to come up after each attack on a school, but it focuses on the perspective of politicians, not of parents whose children are currently in school. Other constituents’ perspectives should be considered as well, including administrators, faculty, staff, police and students. Perhaps it is time to take these individuals’ perspectives into consideration and to conduct further research similar to this analysis to determine best practices in school safety.

Endnotes

(1) The limitation of this research is that it considered the perspectives of 22 parents from one school. There are many schools in diverse settings with too many variables to apply this study’s findings to all schools. Another limitation is that only parents with a high priority on school safety qualified to participate in the study, and other parents from this school might have differing perspectives. Further investigation would be beneficial.
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