The Palm Beach County School District is carefully examining a proposal that may let staff members carry weapons on campus.
During a Thursday meeting of the Palm Beach County Legislative Delegation, Palm Beach Schools Superintendent Mike Burke said the district is taking a “fresh look” at the Coach Aaron Feis Guardian Program, a statewide initiative which trains school employees to use guns in the event of a school shooting. The program, which began in 2018, is named after a coach and unarmed security monitor who was one of 17 killed in the Parkland shooting.
Although Palm Beach County has not taken part in the program, Burke stated that he is interested in sending “a small cadre of people through the school guardian training as kind of as a pilot [program] to allow us to better examine it and see if it may make sense.
The heads of the Department of Education and a state safety commission declared that expanding the guardian program would be a top priority in August. Burke stated that as a result, they want to “find out more about the program knowing it could become a necessity.”
The program would require participants to go through 180 hours of training, which would include a heavy focus on marksmanship and target practice, Burke said.
Burke noted that some high school campuses can encompass “40 acres,” making it challenging to effectively patrol the entire campus, and said that the program could serve as a supplement to school police officers who already work on Palm Beach County campuses.
Burke said that there were “a lot of acres to cover, even if we only have two or three [school police] officers.” “It could be helpful to have in terms if there is an assistant principal or a coach like the program’s namesake, Aaron Feis, who might have that background.”
The School Board has not yet been formally presented with the guardian program addition for Palm Beach County to consider.
Broward began training guardians in 2018 and hopes to expand its armed security force. The district has about 70 armed guardians to supplement school resource officers. Applicants are required to have at least two years armed security guard experience in the past decade, or two years in the military or law enforcement.
The school district, however, passed a resolution in 2019 preventing teachers from participating in the program.
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