Ohio teachers might be able to carry firearms in their classrooms after completing only 24 hours of training starting this fall.
The state Legislature passed a bill to lower training requirements for teachers who want to carry firearms Wednesday. It now heads to Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who said he plans to sign it into law.
“My office worked with the General Assembly to remove hundreds of hours of curriculum irrelevant to school safety and to ensure training requirements were specific to a school environment and contained significant scenario-based training,” DeWine said in a statement.
Under the latest version of the bill, school employees who carry guns would need up to 24 hours of initial training, then up to eight hours of requalification training annually.
Democrats said the proposal, which is optional for schools, sends the wrong message a week after the massacre of 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Republicans say the measure could prevent such shootings. Lawmakers fast-tracked the legislation to counter the impact of a court ruling that said, under current law, armed school workers would need hundreds of hours of training.
What the bill would do
The bill would create the Ohio School Safety and Crisis Center within the state’s department of public safety. School districts that want their personnel to carry firearms would submit their training plans to the new center for approval. Individual school districts would have to pay for their own training.
School personnel would be subject to annual background checks.
The measure is opposed by major law enforcement groups, gun control advocates and the state’s teachers’ unions, which asked DeWine to veto the measure. It is supported by a handful of police departments and school districts.
Democrats, law enforcement and many public school advocates said arming teachers is the wrong solution to prevent school shootings, and instead argued for universal background checks of gun buyers and red flag policies.
“This is not what the people asked for, and I’ve got receipts from moms, dads, people in my community, kids,” Rep. Juanita Brent, D-Cleveland, said. “They’re not asking for no guns. They’re asking for background checks.”
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Could school districts require more training?
Ohio allows individual school districts to decide whether staff can carry firearms, but the question, for years, had been how much training is legally required.
The bill passed Wednesday comes roughly one year after the Ohio Supreme Court ruled in June 2021 that school personnel must have 20 years of experience or take about 728 hours of peace officer training before carrying a gun at school.
If DeWine signs HB 99 into law, “at least four hours of training in scenario-based or simulated training exercises” would be required, according to the bill.
It’s unclear whether some school districts would end up requiring more hours of training than others, because of the way the bill is written.
The bill says initial training could be no more than 24 hours, but it would also have to follow the authorization process for armed security guards and private investigators. That rule requires 20 hours of handgun training and five hours on any other weapon.
But the bill also states “nothing in this section prohibits a school district board of education or governing body of a school from requiring additional training.”
“It’s not clear to me that the training issue is resolved in this bill,” said Matt Dolan, R-Chagrin Falls, one of four Republicans to vote against the bill. “None of my school districts knew anything about it until yesterday. My chief of police didn’t know anything about it until yesterday. I think this bill needed a lot more work.”
Democrats, who opposed the bill, also expressed frustration over training requirements.
“All of that in 24, 25 hours. This is madness,” Sen. Cecil Thomas, D-Cincinnati, said. “We’re talking about someone coming into an active shooting situation.”
The bill requires school districts to notify the public that “the board or governing body has authorized one or more persons to go armed within a school.”
In 2013, the year after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, more than 30 states introduced legislation relating to arming teachers or other school staff, according to the Council of State Governments.
And Florida passed a similar law after the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Contributing: The Associated Press
