New Device For Securing Classrooms Against Shooters

[workinwifdakids]

push-bar outward opening and automatically closing/locking steel doors, with a lock on the outside.

You actually just described every room in every school of our very large District. I was unaware classrooms, modern by any sense of the word, had anything different.

Regarding weapons, the principal was telling us after Sandy Hook that no weapons of ANY KIND would be allowed or tolerated by staff on campus. I said VERY loudly in the meeting, "I don't have any weapons. However, we all teach P.E., and sometimes I have to leave to the field in a hurry. Therefore I keep an aluminum bat under my desk. I WOULD HATE TO GO TO PE AND NOT HAVE A BAT WITH ME."

Everyone there looked stunned.

The inability of teachers and law enforcement to speak to one another in ways they can each understand is an unrecognized hindrance to school safety.

[skb12172]

Please elaborate on this hindrance.

[Aesop]

The inability of teachers [strike]and law enforcement to speak to one another in ways they can each[/strike] to comprehend or begin to understand that anything within reach from pencils to staplers to desks to trash cans to fire extinguishers present in every school is, in fact, a weapon when properly used is proof that the blistering ignorance of about 90% of them nationwide is an unrecognized hindrance to school safety.

FIFY.

[skb12172]

Got it. I thought that's what you meant, but just wanted to hear you spell it out. Thanks.

[workinwifdakids]

I haven't seen a systematic effort by teachers and law enforcement to collaborate in ways that help each other. Teachers are, in general, blissfully pacifistic sheep. Cops need to speak teacher, and teachers need to speak cop, if we're to make the progress we need. For example, when I told my staff that if a shooter was on campus, prepare to be led out - and, during the process, the cops could and probably will point guns at adults and tell them to keep their hands on their heads. They were stunned. No one told them, they couldn't imagine why. Is there anything from a teacher's perspective LE needs to know, or anything LE would like us to do?

That's what I'm talking about. From what I've seen, information isn't getting to gut teacher level. Blame the teachers, blame cops, I don't care. But that's what I mean and it needs to be fixed in a systematic way.

[Aesop]

What you're talking about is getting teachers to recognize reality.

If that's possible, no one in 90 years has been able to figure out how to do it, and in no small part because of the severe political (and rational) imbalance of most of those who self-select for the occupation.

The only thing I can figure out would be to mandatorily force them all to swap jobs for 2 years.
The results for both professions would be worthy of study for centuries. In most cases, posthumously.

[workinwifdakids]

I disagree somewhat, in that I do believe sheep and sheepdogs can communicate in ways that make each others' team efforts more likely to succeed.

[randy]

Fortunately Darlin' Daughter's school has an ex-cop and some ex-military on staff. An active shooter situation has been the topic of discussion in their classes and from what Daughter reports on their attitudes, an active shooter is really going to have to earn their body count, assuming they survive long enough to rack one up.

And I think we've discussed Darlin' Daughters rep among the sheep of the student body. Including the fact that the one room where there is no way to escape out a window and she would be forced to fort up is the chemistry lab.

[Aesop]

I disagree somewhat, in that I do believe sheep and sheepdogs can communicate in ways that make each others' team efforts more likely to succeed.

But you're an outlier among CA teachers.
I think the flaw there is assuming the sheep and the sheepdogs both regard each other as on the same team.

To date, the only notable love or respect law enforcement has earned from the overwhelmingly leftist teaching profession K-PhD nationwide is precisely to the extent that it has exceeded its legal, ethical, and moral boundaries in enforcing unconstitutional levels of oppression to support leftist dogma. They have reached the dubious conclusion that the best use of the alligator is to feed everyone else to it first, in the certain conviction that it will eat them last. Historically, that has a poor track record.

When teachers nationwide rise up and demand an end to being used as live bait for psychotic sociopaths in gun free Victim Disarmament Zones, I think you'll have a case. But by that point, cooperation with law enforcement will have assumed a distant lower place that first on the rungs of school safety.

{Things are assuredly different between, say, the Sierra Nevada/Cascades and the Allegheny mountains, but for both coasts, where most of the people in this country live, not so much. PawPaw's district or Randy's home are probably models of common sense, but not Workin's, nor anywhere within a full tank of gas from where I live, unless I cut straight up towards Utah or across to Phoenix, and have a prevailing tailwind.}

[First Shirt]

My aunt taught 4th grade for nearly 40 years (with a brief foray into teaching 7th graders, which ended when she told the principal that she'd quit if she had to teach 7th grade on more year).

For most of those years, she kept a snubbie .38 in her purse. She knew it was illegal, but she said that she'd rather have it, and not need it, than need it and not have it. For her, protecting her students was more important that keeping her job.

Of course, she's also the aunt who taught me how to shoot a slingshot. No hothouse flower, she!