Gov. Bill Lee said earlier this month he’s open to arming teachers to help prevent gun violence in schools, but not everyone agrees that arming teachers is the best solution to a national problem.

In an interview with Chalkbeat Tennessee following the May mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Lee said legislation regarding teachers and guns would have to be just right for him to let it become law.

“I have said before that I would be in favor of a strategy that includes training and vetting and a very strategic and appropriate plan for (arming teachers),” he said. “There are a lot of details that have to be right for that to be considered. But if lawmakers brought it forth, I would certainly consider it.”

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Evidence shows, however, that when teachers have guns, the risk of gun violence increases.

Also, large majorities of teachers, students and parents oppose putting guns in the hands of teachers.

“It’s so obviously a bad idea,” Kathryn Vaughn, a teacher in Tipton County and president of the local teachers union. “We’re not a trained fighting force.”

Many elected officials instead prefer school safety solutions that involve “hardening” schools with armed security and a smaller emphasis on mental health.

Still, others have another idea.

Restorative justice

Some schools are finding success in reducing violence and improving student outcomes with an alternative known as restorative justice practices, a trauma-informed approach to solving interpersonal conflicts among students.

Cathy Emerson, a licensed school psychologist who works in several Memphis schools, describes restorative justice as a “less punitive approach” that helps break the school-to-prison pipeline.

Instead of making students feel ashamed and guilty when they act out physically or verbally, this approach emphasizes de-escalation, calming down and communicating as a group, often in a circle.

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“When done with fidelity, it is a school-wide, community-wide approach — even families are brought into it,” Emerson said.

Over time, students get better at communicating and regulating their emotions. Research shows their grades improve, they get suspended less, and they interact less with the criminal justice system.

“It shifts the lens to: ‘You are harming (someone) or have done something that brought harm to our community,’ and I think that’s the big mindset shift,” she said. “You still hold students and youth accountable for their actions.”

Tim Green, of the Memphis Restorative Justice Coalition, said he does the work because of the disparity in suspensions and expulsions among Black and Brown students as opposed to white students. He said students dealing with trauma and poor mental health were often punished without the root causes being addressed.

“There were no discussions. It was very punitive,” he said. Restorative practices help students “repair harm that’s been done (and) come to a common understanding of what happened.”

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Law enforcement and mental health

Most elected Republicans oppose the regulations sought by gun safety advocates, such as a ban on assault rifles, raising the age to purchase a gun, removing background-check loopholes and requiring safe storage.

Consequently, their solutions focus on law enforcement and mental health.

After the Uvalde shooting, Lee signed an executive order related to school safety, but it did not allocate new funds or mention guns. Instead, it sought to ensure schools are using resources already available to them.

Republicans tend to blame the people who commit the violence rather than their easy access to weapons. Republicans in the General Assembly have allocated hundreds of millions to school safety in recent years.

“We can’t control what an 18-year-old who decides to go in and shoot 19 children (can do),” Lee said at a press conference in Memphis. “We’re not looking at gun laws right now.”

Lee, state House Majority Leader William Lamberth (R-Portland) and others argued last year’s permitless carry law made life easier for law-abiding citizens while increasing penalties for gun theft.

Tennessee has an above-average rate of gun violence, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, as well as looser-than-average gun laws. Everytown gives the state credit for laws that keep guns out of the wrong hands.

Lee also created the K-12 Mental Health Trust Fund last year, making a one-time allocation of $250 million from which the investment income will fund mental health care for students.

And last weekend, U.S. senators broke decades-old gridlock on gun laws when they struck a bipartisan deal on firearm and school safety, including the 10 Republicans necessary to overcome procedural hurdles. The deal expands background checks and red flag laws while also allocating billions to school safety and mental health, but has a long way to go before becoming law.

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Vaughn said teachers are getting mixed messages from Lee and other Tennessee Republicans, who in the past two legislative sessions have passed laws empowering parents to ban books and limiting classroom discussions of race, gender and history.

“They’re gonna trust us with weapons, but not textbooks,” Vaughn said. “Are we the protectors of these children, or are we groomers?”

School resource officers may not be effective

It’s not clear whether school resource officers and other school-safety measures work.

A 2019 study cited by the Giffords Law Center cast doubt on the effectiveness of school resource officers, finding that the presence of school resource officers did not make school shootings any less deadly.

Furthermore, the Giffords Law Center article, which listed incidents of mishandled guns in schools, stated: “There is no evidence that armed teachers would be any more effective … On the contrary, they would likely increase, rather than decrease, students’ exposure to gun violence in schools.”

According to Giffords, 80% of teachers and 70% of teenagers and parents oppose arming teachers.

Memphis-Shelby County Schools declined to comment on the idea of arming teachers since a bill has not been introduced. The Memphis-Shelby County Education Association did not respond to requests for comment.

The General Assembly advanced, but did not pass, legislation in 2018 that would have allowed teachers to carry guns in schools — with permits and training. Lee’s predecessor, former Gov. Bill Haslam, opposed the bill, as did his Department of Education.

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Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed similar legislation recently, on the same day a permitless carry bill went into effect, and a bill in the Louisiana state legislature failed this month.

Lee’s education commissioner, Penny Schwinn, will not say if she agrees with the governor. The spokesman for TDOE has failed to respond to multiple emails asking if Schwinn supports arming teachers while answering other questions posed in the same emails.

Haywood County Schools Superintendent Joey Hassell opposes the idea, saying his schools rely on armed school resource officers while also implementing restorative practices at Haywood High School and a “positive behavior support model” at the middle school.

“I have serious reservations about arming teachers,” Hassell said in an email. “There are so many variables within a school environment that the idea of arming teachers is not as simple as it sounds. Arming teachers could result in a number of unintended consequences. Our district has a partnership with our city’s police department, and we have school resource officers on our campuses.”

“The solution,” he said, “lies in safer, sound practices like ensuring adequate funding for school resource officers on all campuses as well as funding to provide districts the opportunity to secure and monitor buildings.”

Carol Buckley Frazier, an activist with the Tennessee chapter of Moms Demand Action, noted that schools are not the only places where mass shootings take place, so school-specific solutions wouldn’t stop shootings at grocery stores, movie theaters, churches or other locations.

She said proposed solutions have to do with “anything but the gun. And we know it is the gun.”

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‘I have the ability to calm my brain’

Restorative justice can’t stop violence on its own, and it does have critics who say it is too optimistic about repentance and forgiveness or that it doesn’t seek justice for victims — particularly outside the school setting.

But both anecdotal and scientific evidence show that students’ grades improve, and they get suspended and expelled less when they face accountability in this framework.

Green, who is running for the Shelby County Board of Education, said students at a Memphis middle school saw massive improvements after he helped to implement them. Over the course of a year, he said, more than 80% of students did not receive another suspension, and a similar percentage saw their grades improve by a whole letter.

He got to know one student because he was in trouble all the time. Whenever Green walked into the school’s central office, this student would be there, having gotten into a fight or an argument.

“It became a thing where every time I walked in the office, he would be in the office too,” he said.

Green convinced the skeptical student to join his elective class in which he implemented restorative methods. Students practiced affirmations and talked in circles.

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“He was saying, ‘Man, this is lame, I don’t want to do this,’” Green said.

But he kept coming to class, and he started to improve. Green said his grades improved so much that he won the “student of the month” award; his mom told Green that his behavior changed at home.

Emerson, who runs Sweetgrass Counseling and the Braid Foundation, also shared a story. She was observing a class in which a third-grade student was getting angry at a classmate. She said he had ADHD and was impulsive and easily triggered.

“I can see his fists are balling up,” she said. A few minutes later, he was “still mouthing off to another kid.”

She took him out of the classroom and helped him to calm down by drawing. When he cooled off, he talked through the issue with Emerson, and she told him about what was happening in his brain.

She told him about a “lid” which, when lifted, represented agitation and impulsiveness. She demonstrated this by making a fist to show the lid was closed, or lifting her fingers to show it was open.

They went back to class, and the kids apologized to each other and talked it out. After that, whenever Emerson saw him, he would show her his fist.

“This 9-year-old kid would see me and show me where his lid was,” she said. “I felt in that moment, I have equipped this child with an understanding of, ‘It’s my brain, and I have the ability to calm my brain so that I can make better decisions, and now I have a way to communicate that.’”