St. Marys schools now relies on a small group of armed employees to act as a first line of defense should an active shooter ever target its schools.
The Lima News
ST. MARYS — St. Marys schools now relies on a small group of armed employees to act as a first line of defense should an active shooter ever target its schools.
Their names are confidential, included in a school safety plan authorized by the school board last October which permits a limited number of employees in each of the district’s three school buildings to carry firearms on school grounds.
Those staff members, selected from a pool of volunteers who have undergone background checks and at least 40 hours of initial training, are expected to assist the district’s sole school resource officer in the initial response to an active shooter while waiting for law enforcement to arrive.
While most of the district’s school safety plan is proactive — controlled access to school buildings, threat assessment teams, positive behavioral supports for at-risk students — Superintendent Bill Ruane pointed to national data suggesting the first four minutes after a shooting are the most crucial.
“That’s usually about the time it takes for law enforcement to get here,” he said.
The plan, Ruane said, puts weapons in the hands of “capable defenders” to “cut off that time before first responders get here.”
“No superintendent, no school board member, no teacher, no police officer wants to be in a situation where they’re considering arming staff,” Ruane said. “But unfortunately, with the times we live in now, we don’t want to be in a situation where after a tragedy we’re looking at parents who maybe lost a child and saying that there was one more thing that we could have done that we chose not to do.”
A new era of school safety
After 19 students and two teachers died in a shooting at an Uvalde, Texas, elementary school last summer, Ohio lawmakers revived a controversial idea: arming teachers and other employees to act as a first line of defense.
A 2021 Ohio Supreme Court ruling scaled back previous efforts to arm teachers and staff by requiring those employees to complete 700 hours of training, the equivalent of peace officer training, after parents sued a Madison Township school district over its plan to arm some staff members.
Lawmakers revised those standards last summer through House Bill 99, which set a minimum standard of 24 hours of initial training and eight hours of yearly recertification training for school districts that choose to arm their staff.
St. Marys schools is one of 46 school districts that have submitted rosters of armed employees to the state since HB 99 took effect, including nearby districts like Upper Scioto Valley and Indian Lake schools, Ohio Department of Public Safety records show.
‘We don’t want to be the Wild West’
Administrators started discussing the idea five or six years ago, Ruane said.
Talks resumed last year in the wake of the Uvalde massacre, culminating in a meeting with teachers, parents and other members of the public before the board authorized its plan in October.
State law requires school boards to disclose their intent to arm staff to the public, while keeping details like the names of employees included on a school’s armed roster confidential.
Model curriculum created by the Ohio School Safety Center covers a variety of subjects, from scenario-based training and threat neutralization to an overview of the history and patterns of school shootings, mitigation techniques and de-escalation strategies, that districts can use in their trainings.
St. Marys officials opted for stricter standards: Employees must complete 40 hours of initial training, rather than the minimum 24 hours required by state law, and are subject to criminal and psychological background checks before they are considered for the volunteer team, Ruane said.
The district works closely with the St. Marys Police Department “so we’re on the same page,” Ruane said, and doesn’t select every person who volunteers to join the armed roster so as to restrict the number of guns present in each building.
“We don’t want to be the Wild West here,” Ruane said. But Ruane said he didn’t want to be in a situation where he had to tell parents the district failed to take every measure it could to protect students should the worst-case scenario unfold.
“I felt it was our obligation to do one more layer of safety, that if something would happen that we have capable defenders that are able to defend against what other people might bring in here to hurt our kids.”
