The US Education Department is weighing up whether to allow federal funding to buy guns for school teachers.
The unprecedented move, by education secretary Betsy DeVos, would reverse a longstanding policy barring the federal government from equipping schools with firearms, The New York Times reported today.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said: “Betsy DeVos wants to turn the US government into an arms dealer for schools. That’s insane.”
But as a wider funding bill for the Education Department passed through the US senate on Thursday, Democratic senator Chris Murphy said planned to block the move.
In a tweet Murphy said: “I’m introducing a last minute emergency amendment today to stop Devos’s plan to arm teachers. My lord - we can’t let this happen.”
The Education department’s move follows outrage at school shootings in Parkland, Florida, where a former student killed 17 students in February, and Santa Fe, Texas, where a 17-year-old pupil killed eight fellow students and two teachers in May.
At the time of these shootings US President Donald Trump said arming teachers might be a way of stemming these mass attacks. A controversial position also held by America’s powerful gun lobby group, the National Rifle Association.
However, the move is bitterly opposed by many teachers, politicians and police departments.
Ms DeVos is understood to have targetted an existing federal programme, the Student Support and Academic Enrichment grants, as a way to fund guns in schools, according to people familiar with the plan.
This $1 billion student support programme, unlike a number of other federal education grants, does not expressly forbid the purchase of weapons for schools.
The move would see Ms DeVos backtrack on comments she made in June, in which she said she had no plans to use the federal government to arm teachers. And just last month her assistant secretary for the office of elementary and secondary education, Jason Botel, also ruled out national government funding for firearms in schools during a congressional hearing.
A number of US states, such as parts of rural Arkansas, already fund armed employees in schools in areas that cannot be easily reached by the police.
In May Tes visited a centre that trains teachers to carry guns in the classroom in New York State , where teachers are already allowed to carry a concealed weapon at work, so long as they have a concealed carry permit and the authorisation of the local school board.
The US Congress has been long opposed teachers carrying firearms in schools, and as recently as March passed a school safety bill that handed out $50 million a year to local school districts, but prohibited the use of the money for weapons.
An Education Department spokeswoman, Liz Hall, said: “The department is constantly considering and evaluating policy issues, particularly issues related to school safety.”
