I posted this in its own thread in order to prevent a thread-jack in a different thread. It is a topic that come up a lot. I hope to address three things, First is teacher qualifications, the second is plain old space issues, the third is curriculum time.
I think a lot of people are a bit unrealistic regarding the level of training and education that is required to be a teacher. They are also a bit unrealistic about the cost, to a district, of having campus resource officers (police) just hanging out at the schools.
To teach a class, particularly a class that is in the curriculum, a teacher needs about six years of college level education. First the teacher needs a bachelors degree, and due to the proliferation of required classes, most are not completed in four years; but for the sake of simplicity I will pretend that are. Following that is another two years of full time post-grad education coursework, in some states it is only a year and a half post-grad. At the end of that program the teacher can only teach in the field they have a degree in. I will go over the exceptions in the next paragraph. You are not going to just pick "the random veteran" and expect to put him in the classroom (there a a lot of veterans teaching; but they have completed the training outlined above. At our school, for the veterans day presentation, they make all of the teachers, who are veterans, sit onstage during the presentation. Frankly, I hate doing that; for some reason it just feels very uncomfortable to me.).
Exceptions, for K-6 a teacher may have a generalized degree in education, instead of a degree in their subject area; but the post-grad coursework is still required. Another exception, and this is the one I used, if the teacher has a masters in their subject area, and passes the subject area exam, they can teach in the classroom; however, they must complete their certification process in two years or less. That means that for the first two years of teaching they are also a full time student.
After a teacher has their full license, then they can take subject area tests to enable them to teach in other areas. As an example, I have an MBA. This, along with the additional two years of training, allows me to teach business and computer application classes. After I was done with the certification process I then studied for, and took, the Education Technology (shop) certification test. This was so that I could also teach Robotics. I was a copier technician for about 10 tears, you would probably be amazed at how well that prepared me for robotics.
My district then had me take another year of coursework (if you are adding this up, we are now at nine years of formal classwork). This was in ESL. The coursework is required in order to sit for the exam. The reason that the district wanted me to do this was that I teach a large number of English Language Learners. If a teacher is ESL certified then the seat cost (that is the process of breaking down the cost of a single student in a class) is compensated through the federal program that requires the school to accept the English Language Learners.
To that, in the near future I will also be adding a Economics endorsement to my license. I have taught AS/A2 level Economics, a UK reader will be very familiar with that level. The closest US level of equivalence is to say it was at the community college level.
This is all to teach grades 7-8 (however, my license is for grades 7-12). Why don't I teach at the college level? Because, quite frankly, it pays a lot less. Right now the community colleges are only hiring adjunct, that means part time, instructors. The full time positions are posted; but they reality is that there is no attempt to fill them. Even for full time I would take a pretty big pay cut to teach at a college (which I would be willing to do if they would hire me full time; however, the full time position sits unfilled, allowing them to justify the need for a bunch of minimum wage adjunct faculty).
Back to firearms knowledge teachers. The next issue is where would we put them? My school has no extra rooms and that is not uncommon. The final issue is education hours. making sure that all students take to core classes every day leaves very little time for other classes. Each student takes five seventy minute classes per day. They have Math, Language Arts (English), Socal Studies (History), and PE every day. That leaves one block for other classes. That block is typically split on an A/B schedule On Monday and Wednesday they go to class A, on Tuesday and Thursday they go to the B class. On Friday thy go to both classes for thirty-two minutes each. Not all school use the same schedule; but as you can see, there isn't a lot of time to work in more required classes.
I do realize that this has little to do with the topic of the thread it started in; however, I hope to provide some illumination to the idea that is thrown in to many different threads that takes some form of, "Why not just hire a vet to teach gun safety and provide security at the same time?"
As far as just providing security, people already complain about the cost of staff. As it is, my class only gets vacuumed and a cursory cleaning, every other week. I will give an example of the duties that the custodian already has (and there are only two custodians). She has to check the locker room after each PE class and randomly check the bathrooms.
Why? here is an example, Last year she was checking the bathrooms after PE and found a student in the process of killing herself. The girl was hanging and unconscious. The custodial lifter her, in order to relieve the rope pressure, and opened her knife with the other hand to cut the rope (which, I will admit, is probably harder than it sounds). The other two attempts last year were OD's. An attempt is differentiated from a regular OD by the existence of a statement of intent (generally a note). There are things the staff already deals with. If more staff is added, it will be in custodial staff.
Instead of hiring more people, I am in favor of a voluntary program, that is appropriate and available, for allowing teachers to be armed. My district does not have such a program; however, they do allow individual teachers to have a single locked drawer that the teacher alone has a key to. No, I do not have a firearm in my desk; but I know other teachers who do.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I have been directly asked if I do cary at school, the answer is "no."
* Here I was making a reference to belt "pouch style" holsters
I think a lot of people are a bit unrealistic regarding the level of training and education that is required to be a teacher. They are also a bit unrealistic about the cost, to a district, of having campus resource officers (police) just hanging out at the schools.
To teach a class, particularly a class that is in the curriculum, a teacher needs about six years of college level education. First the teacher needs a bachelors degree, and due to the proliferation of required classes, most are not completed in four years; but for the sake of simplicity I will pretend that are. Following that is another two years of full time post-grad education coursework, in some states it is only a year and a half post-grad. At the end of that program the teacher can only teach in the field they have a degree in. I will go over the exceptions in the next paragraph. You are not going to just pick "the random veteran" and expect to put him in the classroom (there a a lot of veterans teaching; but they have completed the training outlined above. At our school, for the veterans day presentation, they make all of the teachers, who are veterans, sit onstage during the presentation. Frankly, I hate doing that; for some reason it just feels very uncomfortable to me.).
Exceptions, for K-6 a teacher may have a generalized degree in education, instead of a degree in their subject area; but the post-grad coursework is still required. Another exception, and this is the one I used, if the teacher has a masters in their subject area, and passes the subject area exam, they can teach in the classroom; however, they must complete their certification process in two years or less. That means that for the first two years of teaching they are also a full time student.
After a teacher has their full license, then they can take subject area tests to enable them to teach in other areas. As an example, I have an MBA. This, along with the additional two years of training, allows me to teach business and computer application classes. After I was done with the certification process I then studied for, and took, the Education Technology (shop) certification test. This was so that I could also teach Robotics. I was a copier technician for about 10 tears, you would probably be amazed at how well that prepared me for robotics.
My district then had me take another year of coursework (if you are adding this up, we are now at nine years of formal classwork). This was in ESL. The coursework is required in order to sit for the exam. The reason that the district wanted me to do this was that I teach a large number of English Language Learners. If a teacher is ESL certified then the seat cost (that is the process of breaking down the cost of a single student in a class) is compensated through the federal program that requires the school to accept the English Language Learners.
To that, in the near future I will also be adding a Economics endorsement to my license. I have taught AS/A2 level Economics, a UK reader will be very familiar with that level. The closest US level of equivalence is to say it was at the community college level.
This is all to teach grades 7-8 (however, my license is for grades 7-12). Why don't I teach at the college level? Because, quite frankly, it pays a lot less. Right now the community colleges are only hiring adjunct, that means part time, instructors. The full time positions are posted; but they reality is that there is no attempt to fill them. Even for full time I would take a pretty big pay cut to teach at a college (which I would be willing to do if they would hire me full time; however, the full time position sits unfilled, allowing them to justify the need for a bunch of minimum wage adjunct faculty).
Back to firearms knowledge teachers. The next issue is where would we put them? My school has no extra rooms and that is not uncommon. The final issue is education hours. making sure that all students take to core classes every day leaves very little time for other classes. Each student takes five seventy minute classes per day. They have Math, Language Arts (English), Socal Studies (History), and PE every day. That leaves one block for other classes. That block is typically split on an A/B schedule On Monday and Wednesday they go to class A, on Tuesday and Thursday they go to the B class. On Friday thy go to both classes for thirty-two minutes each. Not all school use the same schedule; but as you can see, there isn't a lot of time to work in more required classes.
I do realize that this has little to do with the topic of the thread it started in; however, I hope to provide some illumination to the idea that is thrown in to many different threads that takes some form of, "Why not just hire a vet to teach gun safety and provide security at the same time?"
As far as just providing security, people already complain about the cost of staff. As it is, my class only gets vacuumed and a cursory cleaning, every other week. I will give an example of the duties that the custodian already has (and there are only two custodians). She has to check the locker room after each PE class and randomly check the bathrooms.
Why? here is an example, Last year she was checking the bathrooms after PE and found a student in the process of killing herself. The girl was hanging and unconscious. The custodial lifter her, in order to relieve the rope pressure, and opened her knife with the other hand to cut the rope (which, I will admit, is probably harder than it sounds). The other two attempts last year were OD's. An attempt is differentiated from a regular OD by the existence of a statement of intent (generally a note). There are things the staff already deals with. If more staff is added, it will be in custodial staff.
Instead of hiring more people, I am in favor of a voluntary program, that is appropriate and available, for allowing teachers to be armed. My district does not have such a program; however, they do allow individual teachers to have a single locked drawer that the teacher alone has a key to. No, I do not have a firearm in my desk; but I know other teachers who do.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I have been directly asked if I do cary at school, the answer is "no."
* Here I was making a reference to belt "pouch style" holsters
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