Teachers Are Asking for This Instead of Guns

As you’ve all probably heard by now, President Trump is suggesting that one possible remedy for shootings like the one in Florida this week is to give teachers guns. (Though he later refined that to “concealed guns to gun adept teachers with military or special training experience.”) Totally different.

Then today, teachers responded with a new campaign calling for arms of a different kind. “The vast majority of school personnel are uninterested in carrying a weapon into a building full of hundreds or thousands of children each day,” Olivia Bertels, one of the founders of  the new movement #ArmMeWith explained to USA Today.

Other teachers quickly picked up on this hashtag, sharing their own ArmMeWith Instagrams. You can check some of them out below:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BfgCbPynbVW/

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#armmewith the resources our schools actually need 😢💔 I will never carry a gun and my children will never attend a school in which teachers carry guns. Period. #jointhemovement

A post shared by Kate Olson (@kate.olson.reads) on Feb 22, 2018 at 6:51am PST

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How does it get to this point – of so much tragedy – yet priorities still have not changed? This teacher community has come up with nearly 5,000 solutions, but every single one of them comes back to a need for a country and it’s leaders who truly value education. I really believe we aren’t asking for anything extreme. The fact that we don’t already have the time, funding and resources to cater to our students’ social and emotional needs is devastating. Like so many other teachers, I try to incorporate as much social-emotional learning into the school day as possible, but truly- how can there ever be enough TIME for this with the pressures from state testing, minutes that need to be met on different programs, and huge class sizes? How can one school counselor possibly be considered ample RESOURCES and meet the needs of the hundreds of students she serves each day? And finally, how can we accomplish any of this when FUNDING is constantly be taken away from education? When our political leaders are constantly de-prioritizing our youth? So please, #ArmMeWith time, funding and resources to provide children the emotional support they need each and every day. * * * #enough #schoolsafetynow #education #socialemotionalhealth #notonemore #standup #iteachtoo #childrenslivesmatter #childrenmatter #teachersmatter #issuesineducation #teacherlife #teachercommunity

A post shared by Christina Connelly (@connellycreations) on Feb 22, 2018 at 8:38am PST