Thursday, August 23, 2018

U.S. Department of Education may let states use its grant funds to buy guns for teachers

The U.S. Department of Education is considering whether to allow states to use federal grant funding set aside for educational purposes and student services to buy guns for teachers.

"Such a move would reverse a longstanding position taken by the federal government that it should not pay to outfit schools with weapons," Erica Green reports for The New York Times. "And it would also undermine efforts by Congress to restrict the use of federal funding on guns. As recently as March, Congress passed a school safety bill that allocated $50 million a year to local school districts, but expressly prohibited the use of the money for firearms. But the department is eyeing a program in federal education law, the Student Support and Academic Enrichment grants, that makes no mention of prohibiting weapons purchases. That omission would allow the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, to use her discretion to approve any state or district plans to use grant funding for firearms and firearm training, unless Congress clarifies the law or bans such funding through legislative action."

Education Week reports that rural Arkansas teachers told the Federal School Safety Commission that sheriffs were 20 to 30 minutes away from their schools, and they felt arming teachers was the best way to keep their students safe.

But one Texas school says it and other rural schools can have a harder time getting grant money to add security measures to protect against active shooters. At Granger Independent School District in Williamson County, leaders say using funding for such measures means diverting scarce funding from educational needs, Steffi Lee reports for KXAN-TV in Austin. Supt. Randy Willis told Lee that rural schools are sometimes ignored when federal and state officials discuss grant options.

"I have two principals and I have two people in central administration that help me with counseling, our accountability and our testing," Willis told Lee. "So when you have to write a . . . grant application and you have to put all this stuff in to write that grant, it takes time and it takes expertise."

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