Tennessee Signs Modest School Reform Bill to Allow Staff to Protect Children

AmmoLand ^ | April 29, 2024 | Dean Weingarten

[marktwain]

On Friday, April 26, 2024, Governor Bill Lee signed the popular school reform bill that would allow a few voluntary, highly regulated school staff to carry concealed firearms to protect the children under their care. The reform bill moves Tennessee from the few states that completely ban school staff from carrying concealed firearms to those states that allow staff to protect their children but with extreme restrictions. Most states have programs that are much less restrictive than the bill signed by Governor Lee.

The bill, SB1325/HB1202, was popular in the state legislature, where it was passed with veto-proof majorities. The bill is much more restrictive than the requirements for ordinary police officers’ firearms training. Initially, volunteers who wish to protect the children in their care must complete 40 hours of firearms training, as much as ordinary police officers. Current or former police officers who are school staff are exempt from this initial training.

Each volunteer must complete an additional 40 hours of training every year. The volunteer or their school must pay for the training. Police departments are not required to provide the training for free. Most police officers do not receive an additional 40 hours of firearms annual training. Most have between 1 and 8 hours of qualification hours a year, which is testing, not training.

The staff volunteers who wish to be able to protect the children in their care must willing to take a week of time off to train each year (or, perhaps five days of week-ends), and to pay for the training out of their own pocket, every year, at a local police department. From the bill, as signed by Governor Bill Lee:

(D) Have successfully completed forty (40) hours in basic training in school policing as

[marktwain]

A very modest bill, which accomplishes extremely little. It is a "foot in the door" bill.

[msrngtp2002]

One problem is that school boards are not allowing teachers to carry. I would think there is some kind of supremacy that school boards can’t over ride state law. I know the state laws on concealed carry allow an employee of a college or university to carry while on the job on campus no matter what the local rule is. That element needs to be resolved or might as well no have a law that allows teachers to carry.

[arthurus]

Better to require all teachers and staff at public schools to take NRA gun safety courses, then allow them to carry or not. Signs on entries saying “This school protected by Second Amendment and armed teachers.” Perhaps in any given school many will be armed, perhaps only a few or none but an attacker has to consider the likelihood that some are armed and he might just get shot down before he gets to kill students and go out in a blaze of glory, or at least the attention he craves for his death. Florida is implementing such a custom. We won’t have any more school shootings, I think, until trannies and other crazies get their hands on RPGs or Hamas rockets, but that is a different problem.

[marktwain]

Nice to know.