By a 4-2 vote, Cobb County School Board, overseeing the second-largest school district in Georgia, has authorized non-police personnel to carry weapons in schools, they say, to compensate for a lack of trained police officers and resource officers for the schools, Reuters reports.
The policy does not allow teachers to be armed, but lets virtually any other school personnel, from janitors to administrators to school nurses, to pack heat so that when a schoolyard fight breaks out, staff members can feel safe to eliminate any threat to the themselves.
The school sheriffs will undergo the same amount of training as a school resource officers in the use of weapons, which will come on top of doing their normal job duties such as cleaning toilets, making mimeographs and patching up the bullet wounds that ended schoolyard fights.