Lawmakers Talk School Security

Missouri leaders will get a chance to debate safety inside schools. Just last Thursday, one day before the Connecticut shootings, ABC 17 News learned one state senator filed a bill requiring extra training for teachers if there’s an active shooter or dangerous intruder inside a school.Senator Dan Brown (R)-Rolla tells us this bill was meant to get lawmakers talking about what can be done to make our schools more secure. But now this bill is taking on a more important role. Some believe this is something they might want to enact quickly.Currently as the bill sits, school districts would be required to train teachers on how to respond to an armed intruder or active shooter on school grounds. Teachers would have to participate in a simulated active shooter or intruder drill at least once a year. The training would be done by instructors trained through the Department of Public Safety.”Kids need to be moving and trying to hide and throwing whatever they can at someone that means them harm,” Brown explains. “It’s a little bit different thinking than we’ve had in the past on how to protect kids.”Lawmakers say they never thought they would have to come up with a bill to increase security in schools, but they never thought someone would target an elementary school either. They tell us incidents like the one in Connecticut is forcing them to come up new ways to protect children.The bill requires this training to start training by July 2014, but lawmakers believe this may have to happen much sooner than that.”Our goal is to protect kids and if that means armed guards and we hire retired policeman, you’d almost hate to go that far, but if that’s what it’s going to take we got to protect kids,” Brown says.We reached out to Congresswomen to see if they were going to increase school safety. Vicky Hartzler released this statement to us:”There will be plenty of time in the weeks and months ahead to address issues of how best to protect our children.”