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The Idaho-based St. Maries School District is now allowing teachers and faculty to carry guns on campus and in classrooms.

Parents will not be notified which teacher is carrying a firearm. Only building principals will know which of their staff are carrying guns.

“They can assume that everybody is armed,” Seth Stoke, chairman of the St. Maries School Board, told after the board voted 4-0 to finalize this new policy. “The whole idea is not knowing who is carrying.”

In order for St. Maries staff to be permitted to carry a firearm on campus, they must have an Idaho enhanced concealed carry license, a completed national background check, and their own firearms. The school district will not provide firearms for teachers to use.

Staff members will also be required to be screened and interviewed by local law enforcement, in addition to the board of trustees and the superintendent. Teachers carrying firearms on school grounds will need to go through 40 hours of training, which includes de-escalation and threat assessment.

The firearms will have to either be on the approved staff member’s person or in a district-approved lock box at all times.

The reason for the firearm policy

Stoke stated that this policy is in response to the rampant increase in gun violence on school campuses across the country. According to the , there were 1,453 school shootings from the 1997–1998 school year to the 2021–2022 school year. The most recent five school years have had a substantially higher number of school shootings than the prior 20 years.

“School shootings have risen in frequency in the recent 25 years and are now at their highest recorded levels,” the American Academy of Pediatrics stated. “School mass shootings, although not necessarily increasing in frequency, have become more deadly.”

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