After the Uvalde shooting, a Christian school in Texas called Faith Academy created an armed teacher program to protect students from horrific mass shootings such as the one at Uvalde. The school was shocked into action by the shooting and decided it needed to go to the drastic step of letting teachers be armed to keep its pupils safe, and it made the decision to move forward with an armed teachers program in September of 2022. While the story is from then, we believe it is relevant because it shows that arming teachers is a potential alternative to gun control that some schools are embarking on.
In any case, the private Christian school, which is located in the small town of Victoria, Texas, was allowed under law to implement the program because a Texas law allows school officials to designate individuals who can have firearms on school premises. That is important, as having a firearm at a school is otherwise illegal.
Principal Larry Long described how the horrific Uvalde shooting sparked the school’s decision to move forward with the “guardian program,” saying, “This isn’t a decision that was made lightly. It’s one that we’ve talked about for several years, but with the recent incident with Uvalde, really close to home, that we need to do what we need as a school in order to protect our students.”
Under the program, those staff members who are approved to carry firearms on the Faith Academy campus will be trained by local firearms instructor Cully Stoilis. Stoilis is both a licensed instructor for firearm carry classes and has a shool safety certification, issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The school safety certification is important because it is a Texas program designed to qualify handgun instructors to provide relevant instruction to school employees who will be armed. Under it, the educators take between 15 and 20 hours of training. In that training, they address how to protect students, how to interact with first responders, how they can fire a handgun accurately in high stress scenarios, and how they can prevent a shooter or other intruder from entering the classroom or school in the first place.
After completing the rigorous training program, Faith Academy instructors will carry firearms on their person throughout the school day. That detail is different from similar programs established by public schools in Texas, where teachers do not keep firearms on their person.
Principal Long added that the program is important because it gives teachers the ability to respond near-immediately to a shooting scenario and, hopefully, stop the shooter equally quickly. By contrast, law enforcement officers would, he estimated, take between five and seven minutes to make it to the campus and protect the students.
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The Uvalde shooting served as an impetus to schools to arm teachers not just because of the sickening carnage wrought by the shooter, but because the local law enforcement unit did not act quickly to stop the shooter after arriving, a detail of the situation that horrified and outraged many Americans.