School Hardening, Madison County, NC

While not quite at the same level as some schools in Georgia, at least one county in North Carolina is moving in the correct direction.

With the start of the 2022-2023 school year all of the schools in the Madison County school district will have School Resource Officers (SRO). All SROs will be armed with a 9mm sidearm with at least 2 reloads (50+ rounds). In addition there will be breaching tools in each shool.

The article states that the breaching tools will be kept in the safe, which really doesn’t make sense.

…the local school system and Sheriff’s Office are rolling out some beefed up security measures in 2022-23, including putting AR-15 rifles in every school.
— AR-15s put in all Madison County schools to enhance security in case of active shooter

The Citizen Times reports that schools are being hardened by pre-staging equipment for the SROs and responding law enforcement. They are also adding panic button systems to will be directly connected to the police dispatch.

The problem with all of these styles of hardening is the same. It is what we saw in Uvalde and Parkland, the effective response to a mass shooting requires men and women to advance to the sound of gunfire and take out the shooter.

It doesn’t matter if the police response time is less than 3 minutes if they are going to cower in the hallway for 77 minutes. It doesn’t matter if there is an SRO on site if they are hiding being the building with brown stains in their shorts.

You are your own first responder. When my children enter a school as a student the school becomes parent in loco. That means the school staff members need to be able to be first responders.

My wife doesn’t carry. I can’t make her. I won’t make her. We’ve come a long way in that she is comfortable handling firearms. She is prepared to defend our home and children with deadly force today. She’s had formal training and she will put rounds on target. She is certainly much better than minute of animal.

I do carry. We do not want every teacher to carry. There are some that are not mentally up to the task. There are some that are more afraid of making a mistake than of doing the right thing. What we want is for staff, including teachers, to have the ability to carry on campus.