HARRISBURG — A month after a shooting at a Florida high school left 17 people dead, Pennsylvania legislators are once again mulling whether to arm teachers and other school employees.

Sen. Don White, a Republican from Indiana County, has introduced in each of the three most recent sessions legislation that would allow school districts to create their own policies about whether employees who receive training should be permitted to access guns on school property.

His first two efforts failed. Now, at a time when national debates about gun control and school safety have intensified, his bill has advanced farther than ever before.

For now, the bill faces opposition in the governor’s office -- Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf has said he would veto it — but that could change if one of the Republican candidates wins the governor’s race later this year. At a debate earlier this month, all three Republican candidates for governor said they were open to the idea of allowing teachers to have guns in classrooms.

“I’m just passionate about it, and I feel it should be a local option,” Mr. White said.

Five years in the making

Mr. White began introducing this legislation in 2013, after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut left 20 students and six adults dead.

“If I were a teacher — I’m not and I’ve never been a teacher, but I am an NRA member, I’ve been in gun competitions, I think I’m worthy of handling a gun...I’d insist that I have the right to protect myself and the right to protect these kids,” Mr. White said in an interview last week.

His bill would allow each of the state’s roughly 500 school districts to “establish a policy permitting school personnel access to firearms in the buildings or on the grounds of a school.”

There are nearly 2,000 school resource, security or police officers in state schools, roughly a quarter of whom are authorized to carry guns, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Mr. White’s bill would allow school districts, if they desire, to expand that list to permit other employees, include teachers, nurses and administrators, to bring guns to school.

The first two times Mr. White introduced the bill, it languished in the Senate’s education committee without receiving a vote. Last year, some of his colleagues added amendments, including one that would require school employees to pass a psychological examination before they could bring a gun onto school grounds.

Mr. White, whose district includes the Franklin Regional High School where 20 students and a security guard were injured when a student carried out a knife attack in 2014, said when the bill came up for a Senate vote that he fears the police response time could be slow in some rural areas where the nearest departments are far away.

“This damage was all done in 4 minutes and 50 seconds,” Mr. White said when the bill came up for a vote on the Senate floor. “Police protection was 2½ minutes away, and yet he was able to accomplish what he did, and we can only imagine what would have happened if he had an automatic weapon.”

Some of his colleagues across the aisle raised concerns that allowing more employees to access guns in schools would create a different set of problems.

“How long will it be until the first student who has a problem, or is upset, or is fighting with another student sees the teacher across the room giving instructions on some other issue, or drawing on the blackboard, or getting a drink, and gets that gun and starts shooting people in that classroom?” Sen. Daylin Leach, D-Montgomery, asked, according to a transcript of remarks made the day of the Senate vote.

The bill passed with 28 votes, enough to send it over to the GOP-led House but not enough to override a veto by Mr. Wolf, should the bill ever land on his desk.

Tough opposition from education groups, others

For now, all eyes are on the GOP-led House to see if it will advance the bill. Mr. White’s bill, along with several others, was discussed during a hearing last week of the House Education Committee, which also discussed other school safety issues.

Asked at a Thursday hearing about response times, Major Douglas Burig, who heads the Pennsylvania State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation, said it’s difficult to predict how long it would take an agency to respond to a rural school shooting. He noted that officers often patrol around their districts, rather than staying in a station, but can be pulled to one area if a major, violent crime happens. He also said that a school shooting would almost certainly receive a response from multiple police departments, rather than one.

Should teachers and other school employees be armed because of that uncertainty?

“As far as teachers being armed in school, it’s the position of our agency that a trained, professional police officer is better suited to counter an active shooter threat than an armed teacher,” Major Burig said.

Educators’ groups also weighed in on the issue. Michael Faccinetto, governing board president of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, did not mention Mr. White’s bill specifically but did say that ask that decisions about this issue remain at the local level -- which would largely be the case if Mr. White’s bill passes.

“There is no one-size fits all approach,” Mr. Faccinetto said.

The Pennsylvania State Education Association, the union representing more than 180,000 teachers across the state, came out strongly against Mr. White’s bill. Its leadership team voted unanimously to oppose it. Instead, they’d like to see more funding devoted to installing safety features such as panic buttons and door jammers and to hiring additional employees including nurses, psychologists and school counselors.

“There are proven safety measures that do not involve the risk and dangers of adding thousands of guns to our schools,” said PSEA president Dolores McCracken.

Locally, Pittsburgh teachers have expressed similar concerns. Nina Esposito-Visgitis, president of the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers, called the idea “ludicrous.”

“They go to school to learn pedagogy and teaching, and then you have to be a trained marksman?” she asked rhetorically.

Staff Writer Liz Behrman contributed.

First Published: March 19, 2018, 12:40 p.m.
Updated: March 19, 2018, 12:44 p.m.