Can we all admit we have gone past the point of insanity?
One schools superintendent has a novel way to keep his students safe from school shooters: arming them with rocks.
David Helsel, superintendent of a school district in northeast Pennsylvania, explained his plan to a legislative education committee last week, drawing a flurry of local media coverage.
“Every classroom has been equipped with a five-gallon bucket of river stone,” Helsel explained about his Blue Mountain School District in Schuylkill County, northeast of Harrisburg, in a video broadcast by ABC affiliate 16 WNEP. “If an armed intruder attempts to gain entrance into any of our classrooms, they will face a classroom full of students armed with rocks, and they will be stoned.”
Helsel’s comments come amid a new chapter in the public debate about mass shootings after a man killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Fla. Despite polls showing that large numbers of Americans support stricter gun-control measures, Congress has not produced any significant legislation, and schools and other officials have looked to other solutions. President Trump floated an NRA-backed idea of arming teachers.
Helsel told local news reporters that students in his district routinely drilled on shooter simulations and were given active-shooting training through a program known as ALICE, short for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate.
According to ABC, ALICE protocol involves evacuating students and barricading classroom doors for those who can’t safely leave. In at least one school district, in Redmond, Wash., ALICE training also involved guidance for children to distract an intruder.
Helsel described the bucket of rocks, which will be kept in classroom closets, as a “last ditch” option to use as an alternative to students hiding passively under desks.
“At one time, I just had the idea of river stone,” Helsel said. “They’re the right size for hands, you can throw them very hard, and they will create or cause pain, which can distract.”
His schools have been using the idea, called “go buckets,” for the past two years, according to BuzzFee