Some Colorado school faculty are enrolling in firearms training. Here’s why.
share
HIGHLANDS RANCH, Colo. — Tim Kistler, a retired superintendent from the Peyton School District, first looked into firearm training for himself and other faculty after a local sheriff took about 24 minutes to respond to a planned school shooter drill.
The Peyton School District, which serves around 600 students and employs more than 100 people across three schools, is northeast of Colorado Springs, about a 15-minute drive from the Falcon Fire Protection District Station to the west and the Calhan Police Department to the east.
“Typically in a rural setting, you’re under a county sheriff, or you’re under somebody’s jurisdictions, but you’re so many miles between the schools,” said Kistler.
“God bless what [the county sheriff] is doing, but they could be on the other side of the county when something happens,” he said.
In 2017, Kistler reached out to FASTER Colorado, a nonprofit that trains school staff in firearm and medical response, to receive training as a supplement to law enforcement in case of a school shooting.
School shootings can turn into mass fatalities in a matter of seconds. Some researchers argue that even the quickest law enforcement response can be ineffective, pointing to mass shootings like the 2019 Dayton, Ohio attack where in only 32 seconds, an assailant shot 26 and killed nine before an active duty police officer fatally shot the shooter..
Kistler and Laura Carno, who founded FASTER and leads its trainings, argue that in isolated, rural school districts not as easily accessible to first responders, turning to volunteer teachers, principals, janitors and food service workers is the best protection for potential shootings.
“[Rural school districts] were the earliest adopters of [FASTER] because of how far away they are from law enforcement response and medical response,” said Carno.
About 60% of the educators seeking weapons training come from rural schools, said Carno, who coordinates about five to 10 trainings yearly, each with generally about 10 to 15 participants.
“They have done this math that these school shootings are over in far less time, nobody else was going to come save them,” she said.
Since the Columbine High School mass shooting in 1999, when two armed teens killed 13 and injured 24 at the Littleton school, Colorado has seen six K-12 school shootings.
At the time, the Columbine shooting was the second deadliest school shooting in American history, surpassed only by the University of Texas tower shooting in 1966. More recent shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 and Rob Elementary School in 2022, among others, resulted in higher death tolls of students, teachers and staff.
There have been more than 400 school shootings nationwide since Columbine, according to tracking done by The Washington Post, and incidents have been increasing rapidly in the past few years.
Only the 2020 COVID-19 school closures slowed down the pace of school shootings.
On September 4 a shooter killed four people — two 14 year-old students and two teachers — at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. Officials there credited the school’s two armed resource officers for acting immediately and arresting the shooter relatively quickly.
Determining exact numbers of US gun violence in general can be difficult due in part to the Dickey Amendment, a provision backed by the NRA that passed in 1997 barring any national funds from being “used to advocate or promote gun control.”
This significantly restricted national agencies including the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from researching and studying firearm violence, which has since been labeled a “public health crisis” by the American Medical Association.
The Dickey Amendment was adjusted in 2020 when Congress began reappropriating funds to federal agencies to support future firearm-impact studies.
There are upwards of 30 to 40 school districts in Colorado that permit staff to conceal carry, though an exact number can be difficult to determine because the state of Colorado does not track the schools where school staff can be armed.
Reporting by The Denver Post in 2018 confirmed the following districts arm staff: Peyton School District, Bennet School District, Sangre de Cristo School District, Woodlin School District, Weld County RE-1, Hanover School District and Frensham School District.
All of the schools are located in suburban to rural areas
A number of Colorado districts have considered introducing firearms, such as Academy School District 20 in Colorado Springs, which raised the issue during a school board work session earlier this year.
More than 30 states currently allow school staff to carry firearms, with the majority requiring school permission and additional firearms training. New Hampshire is the only state with no restrictions on adults possessing firearms on school property.
Gun-control organizations including Everytown, Moms Demand Action and the Giffords Law Center are strongly opposed to firearms in schools, citing increased gun accidents and an increased burden on school teachers.
Some, like Eileen McCarron, a co-founder of Colorado Ceasefire, a gun violence prevention nonprofit, oppose any “instructional personnel” at a school from carrying a firearm and expressed worries about armed school security guards and resource officers.
As a 10-year high school math teacher in Aurora, McCarron said she could not imagine herself nor her colleagues having a concealed gun “only inches away from students” while teaching.
“[Colorado Ceasefire] is strongly opposed to any teachers or staff carrying a firearm except for school rescue and security officers, and even then we’re still leery,” she said.
McCarron co-founded Colorado Ceasefire in 2000 after the Columbine shooting. The organization educates and advocates for gun violence prevention in Colorado, primarily through lobbying in favor of tighter gun control legislation.
She pointed to the potential risks that might come with adding more guns into an already crowded and high-pressure situation and cited the STEM School Highlands Ranch shooting where a security officer mistakenly shot and injured two students.
McCarron added that introducing more guns through programs like the FASTER Colorado training will further the “normalization of guns” in the United States, which she advocates limiting access to.
Researchers believe the U.S. has about 378 million guns currently in circulation. Gun homicide rates are many multiples times higher than countries of similar population and economic size (19 times greater than in France and 33 times greater than in Australia).
McCarron said that these figures are related.
“[Guns] are everywhere,” said McCarron, “and when guns are everywhere, they’re used everywhere and eventually in places they’re not expected.”
Carno, one of Colorado’s leading proponents of firearms in schools, first made news leading a “Udall Lied” campaign against Democratic Senator Mark Udall for his support of widespread gun control legislation during his time in office.
She founded FASTER — which stands for Faculty/Administrator Safety Training and Emergency Response — Colorado in 2017 as a project within the Independence Institute, a conservative think tank based in Denver.
“We’ve had Columbine here, STEM school here and Platte Canyon here. School staff [in Colorado] should be the best trained in the country,” said Carno, who said her organization has trained more than 300 school staff across 40 school districts.
“About 40% of the people that we see are actually teachers,” said Carno, who estimated her organization has trained more than 300 school staff across 40 school districts.
“There are teachers and janitors and coaches and principals and school nurses, and we’ve had a lunch lady come through,” she said.
A training program in Ohio (which originally inspired Carno to start FASTER Colorado) is the only other FASTER counterpart in the country, though different organizations have coordinated firearms training for school staff.
FASTER Colorado students, all of whom are volunteers, typically apply after their school district has decided to arm, or is considering arming, staff on campus. Classes include about a dozen trainees, though Carno noted they try to keep instructor-to-trainee ratios lower in the lower levels.
The entry level three-day class Kistler registered for focuses on handgun safety practices, air-soft or BB gun simulation training.
Trainees advance after passing the handgun qualification portion of the National Police Officer Selection Test (POST), which involves taking 25 shots and hitting a target (mostly body, and once in the head) from distances ranging 3 yards to 25 yards, while standing positions and while moving and while resolving weapon malfunctions.
FASTER Colorado bumps up the 25 shots to 27, adding two single-handed shots with one’s support (non-dominant) hand.
Carno, as well as Kistler of the Peyton School District, argued that having well-trained and armed faculty at schools throughout campuses provides better chances to stop the killing sooner and is particularly pertinent in rural school districts.
Kistler worried that more isolated schools like Peyton are more “vulnerable to some type of shooter activity.”
A 2018 analysis from the Associated Press found that most school shootings happen in “small-town America.” Access to guns is also more common in rural communities. A recent Healthy Kids Colorado Survey found that 40% of Colorado students in rural areas reported having access to firearms (that number was 29% for students in urban areas).
Kistler said that some schools had looked into emergency response technologies such as LifeSpot, an app that allows users to notify emergency responders of a threat similar to the CrisisAlert System used at Apalachee High School in Georgia. However, he said that still left students and staff in need of people standing by until the arrival of first responders.
“There’s so many miles out in a rural district that we just don’t have the personnel from the sheriff’s department to be able to sit at school all day,” said Kistler.