Seventy-seven minutes. Seventy-seven excruciating minutes of inaction by the police as 19 elementary school students were gunned down when, on May 24 in Uvalde, Texas, an 18-year-old man walked into Robb Elementary on 11:33 a.m. with an AR-15 rifle after shooting his own grandmother. Salvador Ramos slipped through an unlocked door, faced no opposition and made his way to two classrooms where he barricaded himself inside for more than an hour. As gunshots rang out, parents gathered outside in horror begging the Uvalde police to take action. Eventually, after about one hour and 15 minutes, Border Patrol officers breached the classroom, ultimately killing the shooter.
The Uvalde school shooting is an extreme case of police response times, but even in other school shootings police do not neutralize the suspect until on average 14 minutes after the first shots, and most deaths occur in the first three minutes. Police response to school shootings is necessary, but it is simply not possible for the police to respond fast enough to save the majority of lives lost during these violent events. Therefore, as school shootings become increasingly prevalent, it is clear that having more armed security on campus is imperative to saving lives.
The Legislature’s reaction to lengthy police response times was to initiate the School Guardian Program in 2018. Under this program, armed guards can be hired by a school district to bolster schools’ defense. There has been talk to extend this program to teachers in many school boards, including Brevard County’s. School guardians are trained professionals that make about $50,000 a year, so many school districts are looking to extend the Guardian Program to teachers to save costs and deal with a lack of armed guards.
School boards, in fact, should consider extending the Guardian Program to teachers; however, it needs to be done correctly. Arming teachers across the board would be exceedingly reckless, and even under a purely voluntary basis, not every teacher should be considered fit and suitable to carry a weapon.

Guardians must …
• volunteer
• weigh more than 150 pounds
• meet the police fitness standard
• pass an annual psychological examination
• undergo police training in firearms and melee combat
• complete yearly physical examinations
• keep guns in a secret, safe and secure location
• only use firearm provided by local police department
• keep guardian status secret from students
• have direct contact with police, guardians and SROs
• meet monthly with SROs and other guardians

My proposed framework would make all teacher guardians as safe as an armed guard would be. The physical, psychological and training requirements are there to ensure that all guardians are not only able to use a firearm, but also able to prevent a student from accessing their weapon. The weight requirement may seem arbitrary, but the average weight for 18-year-old males in the US is 166.7 pounds according to National Health and Statistics. Teachers need to be on par with that weight to ward off a student going for their weapons, but guardians and weapon locations should not be known in order to prevent any altercations. Teachers would also need to be in ongoing contact with school SROs to ensure they are not mistaken for the shooter and are able to coordinate strategy with police and each other. Qualified teachers would enter this program voluntarily at no monetary cost to them. By signing up to program, they would be agreeing to the duties required of them, and the county would provide the rest. By volunteering, guardians would be saying they would be willing and able to end a life if it meant saving countless others. If legislators can agree to this framework, then extending The Guardian Program to teachers should be seriously considered.
In fact, implementing this policy could even be better than simply hiring armed guards. First, it would be substantially cheaper; most schools would probably need more than one guard, resulting in more than $100,000 in added annual salaries for each school in the district. Besides the initial investment in training and providing a secure location in the classroom for the firearm, teacher guardians would not drain district money that should otherwise be going towards education. Next, teacher guardians could be more effective than armed guards because they are unknown to the students. Many shooters are students who are familiar with the location and protocols of security. If they do not know where or what security measures are, they will not be able to make a solid plan, which may deter the shooting altogether. Lastly, having armed guards on campus and can make school feel unsafe and disrupt learning. Teacher guardians and their weapons would be out of sight and out of mind, keeping school feeling like school and not a prison.
School shootings are becoming more common, therefore heightened security beyond just an SRO and some fences would be needed to help keep schools safe. In 2023 alone, there have been 36 school shootings resulting in injuries or death: 20 deaths and 41 injured according to “Education Week.” Heightened school security could start reducing those numbers for the first time since the Columbine shooting in 1999.
If teachers are willing and able to protect students, they should be allowed to. On the other hand, if not enough teachers qualify, then the district must hire armed guards. Under this framework, there is no harm done arming teachers ­— and it could save lives.