Slightly OT but I attended a school board meeting the other night. They have a 15-minute "public comment" period where 5 people can comment in front of the board on "education-related" subjects for up to 3 minutes each. The prior meeting all the spots were filled and I would have had to wait another hour to comment and I said "F that!" and left. This meeting I was fortunate to be lucky number 5!
As you may or may not know, FL Governor DeSantis just signed an amendment to the onerous, kneejerk MSD bill (ie: Parkland shooting last year). The "Coach Aaron Feis School Guardian" bill provides for teachers to be trained and armed in addition to resource officers and security guards IF the school board approves, hence my commenting to them in the affirmative.
I was pleased that I didn't have to follow a bunch of whiney-babies complaining about they wouldn't teach if other teachers were armed OR parents that would take their kids out of school if teachers were armed. I heard an obviously biased local public radio show on the subject and the only callers they fielded had those concerns.
The issue was not yet on the agenda and I presented my points and fortunately had printed out a summary which all the board members were presented once I was done. Prior to speaking, I was alarmed that just reading the summary took 4 minutes!
Points were: teachers can be trusted and will NOT shoot students or be disarmed, an estimated 1 out of 8 people over 21 have a Concealed Weapon License in FL, our county Sheriff approves of teacher/guardians as his department can't afford to put a Deputy in every school and having an armed teacher saves money because you won't have a guardian just sitting there doing nothing all day. Teachers do get a small raise in pay to be a guardian--I think around $8000/year but have to attend training of 134 hours or something like that.
Many other county's school boards have not allowed teachers to be armed--it is up to the school board. Some counties that do NOT allow armed teachers are Orange (Orlando), Broward (Ft. Lauderdale) and Hillsborough (Tampa), all of which are solidly blue-voting areas...