Parents: board endangered community

Tamaqua school district parents and anti-gun violence advocates held a news conference Friday to announce the filing of a lawsuit against the district over a controversial policy to arm teachers.

School board members who supported policy 705 were also on hand to speak to media from the Lehigh Valley, Wyoming Valley and beyond about the controversial policy.

Three Tamaqua area school district parents and a grandparent filed a lawsuit this week against the school district arguing that the policy to arm teachers violates state law.

Friday’s news conference was called by CeaseFirePA, a statewide anti-gun violence group. Executive Director Shira Goodman said the district is ignoring parents who have stated clearly that there are better ways to prevent gun violence in schools.

“We hope that the board will take heed from what its teachers, its parents and its students are telling them,” Goodman said.

In August, the district officially amended its policy regarding people authorized to carry firearms on school property. A large group of residents protested the change.

The parents’ suit is actually the second filed against the district over Policy 705. The union representing the district’s teachers filed a suit in December.

The parents’ lawsuit isn’t seeking any monetary award other than the legal fees for the case.

Koscak and Angela Flack appeared Friday at a news conference alongside represen- tatives from CeaseFirePA, an anti-gun violence group, and Tamaqua Citizens for Safe Schools.

School board President Larry Wittig and board member Nick Boyle, who proposed policy 705, defended the policy, which was passed by the board in July.

The lawsuit

Policy critics said that Pennsylvania law has clear rules for how schools can use armed personnel. Policy 705 violates those rules, according to Shira Goodman of CeaseFirePA.

“We do believe, as the complaint says, that the board members of the school district have exceeded their authority and endangered their community by adopting School board policy 705, an illegal policy which authorizes guns in the classroom and lethal force in the halls,” Goodman said.

Some residents said the district did not give adequate consideration to other options and passed Policy 705 without any input from residents.

“There were no public readings of the policy, no public announcement of the policy, the only public comment that was asked for was through a school board member’s personal Facebook page,” said Karen Tharp, a district parent.

Tharp pointed out that parents held a town hall in November where they presented the school board with alternatives to arming teachers. She said they refused to reconsider.

“The teachers and staff in this school district do not want guns in their school buildings, nor do the parents,” she said.

The parties

Holly Kosak, the mother of a Tamaqua Area High School student, is one of the four people who brought the suit. She expressed support for an armed police officer protecting the school. The district has said it cannot afford to pay one.

“I think if they took some time to do some more grant writing and some research, there’s got to be another way to pay for an officer and not ask our teachers to do something that’s out of their scope,” she said.

Angela M. Flack and her husband are two others. Between them, they have three children in the district. Flack said her family owns guns, and she is not one to put herself in the limelight, except when it comes to her kids. Flack said she feels that teachers have enough to deal with.

“The staff in our schools have taken positions and careers to make a difference in our children’s lives. We ask so much of them already,” she said.

Other parents echoed those concerns. Some said they were afraid that a child could be accidentally shot. On the other hand, they questioned whether a teacher would be able to pull the trigger if a former student entered the building with a gun.

Board members

The large media presence at Friday’s news conference also gave Tamaqua school board officials a chance to state their case.

Wittig suggested the news conference was a bid for free publicity for critics of the policy. However he and Nicholas Boyle, the board member who proposed the policy, got lots of time with reporters from around the state following the news conference.

Wittig said the board did look into preventive measures to keep a shooter out of the building. However, he said that none of those policies address what would happen if an active shooter actually got into the building.

“None of their suggestions addressed an active shooter in the building. None. It was all preventive, which is absolutely good. We’ve explored all of those, and we are moving forward on that,” Wittig said.

Boyle said he has not ignored the suggestions from parents and residents in the months since the policy was passed. He said he supports increasing mental health services and other preventive measures.

When asked to explain the rationale for the policy, Boyle said they are basically looking at preventing the worst possible situation, when all other preventive measures have failed.

He said teachers have a right to defend themselves from an attack when they are outside school grounds, and he doesn’t want to take away that right when they are on campus.

“I am not giving them the right. I am just not taking the right and allowing them to have the ability to defend themselves,” Boyle said.