Montoursville, Pa. — The Montoursville-area school board heard public arguments at its Tuesday meeting about the possibility of adding armed security guards to district buildings in the wake of the Uvalde shooting.
The council will take the final vote on adding armed guards on Nov. 8.
At the October 25 meeting, the council approved two resolutions on adding armed guards.
The first resolution, approved by a 7-2 vote, proposed a job description for armed security personnel. The second resolution, approved by a 6-3 vote, detailed the job description for the captain of the security guards, a separate enforcement team already operating in the district.
Interviews for the position of captain should take place before November 8. On-call interviews are scheduled for November 9-10. The plan would be to hire four full-time guards and two part-time guards.
Pay rates are yet to be discussed. However, the captaincy should be around $30 an hour to stay competitive with other districts, according to District Assistant Superintendent Dan Taormina.
Snell did not support endorsing the captain’s description as he felt the School Resource Officer (SRO) should fill the position.
Taormina pointed out that the SRO is not an employee of the school and instead works for the Montoursville Police Department. If the SRO were to act as captain of the guards, the district would face liability issues, according to Taormina.
Board member Ron Snell, who voted in favor of the security officer job description but against the captain job description, said voting on job descriptions before approving a comprehensive measure to introducing armed guards into schools was to “put the cart before the horse”. .”
Board members Susan Beery and Dottie Mathers, who both voted against the measures, agreed with Snell’s assessment, saying they felt there was not enough information available to move forward at this time.
Mathers said she initially supported adding armed guards when she was “emotional” after Uvalde, but after doing some research her stance changed.
Job descriptions have been voted on now so that a job posting can be posted and the interview process can begin, according to board chairman David Shimmel. The process is being accelerated to allow possible hires to undergo training for December, Shimmel added. This would allow them to start in January 2023.
Taormina said there was no harm in having an unused “job title” on the books if the council decided to vote against the blanket measure to add armed guards.
Board member Todd Badger, who supported both measures at the meeting, said he wanted to visit the schools and see their safety situation before making his final decision on November 8. He also asked if they could get feedback from the students before that. vote.
Taormina was hesitant to ask students under the age of 15, but said they could eventually look for ways to get feedback from high school students.
graph showing the distribution of parent responses to the MASD armed guard survey.
The district previously solicited input from parents through an email survey, but received limited feedback. MASD sent out 1,597 surveys and received 546 responses. Of these responses, 69.8% of parents were in favor of having armed security.
Two students from the Montoursville secondary school gave their opinion during the meeting. Both were against adding security guards to the district.
Zachary Smith, the council’s student representative, said he felt addressing the mental health needs of students was more important than adding armed security to the district.
Sean Ren, a sophomore at Montoursville High School, said armed guards could eventually encourage mass shooters to come to school instead of acting as a deterrent. Ren, like Smith, asked why the students weren’t involved in the discussion.
Another community member spoke out against the introduction of armed guards for similar reasons. Five other people came to the meeting to speak in favor of the measure.
John Houseknecht, an unarmed guard in the district, said “people concerned about guns need to get a little more worldly,” pointing to the number of armed police officers at Penn State’s recent game.
“Kids should be fine with armed guards,” Houseknecht said. “If they don’t, it’s on the parents.”
