NRA-Backed School Safety Review Recommends Arming Educators

WASHINGTON - A task force backed by the National Rifle Association has put forth a slate of recommendations to improve school safety, including a proposal to arm school personnel and train educators on how to police school campuses with the aim of reducing the response time during a school shooting.

Under the protection of armed private security guards at the National Press Club in Washington today, Asa Hutchinson, the director of the National School Shield Program, unveiled the panel's eight recommendations, including a proposal to create a model training program for armed school personnel: essentially resource officers trained in weapons retention, coordination with local law enforcement and battling intruders.

Hutchinson said the task force recommended arming school personnel, including teachers, provided that they pass a background check and complete a comprehensive training program.

"Teachers should teach, but if there is a personnel that has good experience, that has an interest in it and is willing to go through this training … then that is an appropriate resource that a school should be able to utilize," Hutchinson said.

The review not only analyzed practices already in place at some schools, but also examined how changes to technology and surveillance could improve school safety.

"We looked at the interior and exterior doors, access controls, architecture and design of the schools, and then we looked at the armed officers," Hutchinson said. "We believe that they make a difference in the various layers of security that add to school safety."

Mark Mattioli, whose son, James, was killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., late last year, praised the work of the task force and called on policy makers to put politics aside in the interest of the children.

"As parents, we send our kids off to school, and there are certain expectations, and obviously, in Sandy Hook, those expectations weren't met," Mattioli said. "I hope this doesn't, you know, lead to name- calling, but rather, this is recommendations for solutions, real solutions that will make our kids safer, and that's what we need.

"I'm putting it on you," he continued. "I'm putting it on the experts out there to do something with these recommendations, to implement solutions so people don't have to go through what I'm going through."

Hutchinson, a former U.S. Representative, U.S. Attorney, and Under Secretary for Border & Transportation Security at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, announced the task force's findings at a news conference in downtown Washington today, where he was guarded by a noticeable security presence.

"If you have the firearm on the presence of someone in the school that can reduce the response time, it will save lives. That is the objective," he said. "The presence of an armed security in a school is a layer that's just as important as the mental health component. If you have a mental health component without having other security, it's inadequate, and if you have the armed presence there without having locking doors, it's inadequate."

The NRA created the National School Shield Program last December in the wake of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting through its Education and Training Emergency Response Program. Since then, some critics have complained that the gun lobby has slowed efforts in Congress to enact new gun control legislation, including an assault weapons ban and universal background checks.

Rep. Mike Thompson, who chaired a Democratic House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, agreed that school safety is a critical element to reduce gun violence, but in a statement, he called for an inclusive approach to reduce gun violence.

"We should do everything we can to keep our kids safe, and that includes having school resource officers in those schools that want them, and urging our communities to develop safety plans in case of emergencies," Thompson, D-Calif., stated. "However, arming school personnel and training them for shootouts will only exacerbate problems."

The NRA reacted to the findings in a brief statement but declined to immediately endorse any of the recommendations.

"We need time to digest the full report," the NRA statement read. "We commend Asa Hutchinson for his rapid response in the aftermath of the Newtown tragedy, and we are certain the contributions he and his team have made will go a long way to making America's schools safer."

The National School Shield panel also recommended that states enact legislation to allow firearms to be carried by school personnel, schools implement an interagency agreement with local law enforcement to determine the difference between criminal offenses and routine school disciplinary issues, and an online self-assessment tool created by the task force where educators can scrutinize school safety performance and uncover gaps in their own security posture.

"This online assessment tool is available for any school, parochial, private or public school, free of charge on the website whenever it is deployed, and it will not be something the principal can fill out," Hutchinson said. "They'll be asked questions on access control. Are classroom doors kept locked during instructional times? Does the school enforce its visitor sign in and access control? Has a school staff been trained to question or challenge a visitor that's not properly badged? What actions are taken when authorized visitors are detected?"

Hutchinson also recommended that states implement education adequacy policies not to mandate what a school should do, but rather that they do something in terms of assessment and the development of an adequate plan. He also called on federal policymakers to improve federal coordination, which he said is burdened by overlapping and duplicative programs across the Departments of Education, Justice and Homeland Security.

"They need to have a lead agency and they need to have greater coordination," he said. "On the funding side, our recommendation is that the federal role is greater support for innovation, for technology and training grants."

The panel also put forward a recommendation for the National Rifle Association, calling on the National School Shield to transition into "an umbrella organization to advocate and support school safety across this nation" through a free web-based assessment.

Finally, the panel's eighth recommendation is to launch a pilot program on threat assessment and mental health to encourage information-sharing, produce a climate that reduces incidences of bullying and anti-social behavior, identify threats, and offer counseling support.

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Obama renews offer to cut social safety nets

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama raised anew the issue of cutting entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security as a way out of damaging budget cuts, a White House official said on Sunday, as both sides in Washington tried to limit a fiscal crisis that may soon hit millions of Americans.

Signaling he might be ready to explore a compromise to end automatic spending cuts that began late Friday, Obama mentioned reforming these entitlement programs in calls with lawmakers from both parties on Saturday afternoon.

"He's reaching out to Democrats who understand we have to make serious progress on long-term entitlement reform and Republicans who realize that if we had that type of entitlement reform, they'd be willing to have tax reform that raises revenues to lower the deficit," White House senior economic official Gene Sperling said on Sunday on the CNN program "State of the Union."

Republicans have long argued that the only way to tame budget deficits over the long haul is by slowing the cost of sprawling social safety net programs.

These include the Social Security retirement program and Medicare and Medicaid healthcare programs for the elderly, disabled and poor that are becoming more expensive as a large segment of the U.S. population hits retirement age.

While Obama also has proposed some savings on these programs, he has insisted that significant new tax revenues be part of the deficit-reduction formula, an idea Republicans so far reject.

Budget fights in Congress took their most serious turn in years on Friday when $85 billion in indiscriminate spending cuts known as "sequestration" began to kick in after both parties failed to agree on how to stop them.

Democrats predict the automatic cuts could soon cause air-traffic delays, meat shortages as food safety inspections slow down, and hundreds of thousands of furloughs for federal workers.

As the budget battles rage on in Washington, sources said Obama plans to nominate on Monday Sylvia Mathews Burwell to head to White House Office of Management and Budget. A veteran of the Bill Clinton White House, Burwell is president of the Walmart Foundation, which handles the corporation's charitable efforts.

Neither Sperling nor White House spokesmen would provide further details on Obama's conversations on Saturday with members of Congress, and they did not identify the lawmakers to whom the president spoke.

Obama's mention of entitlement reform may help bring Republicans to the table to halt the cuts. Republican leaders also made soothing noises on Sunday about the need to avoid a government shutdown on March 27, when funding runs out for most federal programs.

BOEHNER'S MAXIMUM EFFORT

House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, interviewed on NBC's "Meet the Press," said he "absolutely" would do whatever it takes to keep the government operating. Toward that end, he will seek House passage this week of a "continuing resolution" to fund the government through September 30, when the fiscal year ends.

Lately, some rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans have been sending signals that they are willing to compromise to end a two-year-old deadlock over tax and entitlement reforms.

Last week, conservative Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said he was open to raising $600 billion in new tax revenue if Democrats accepted significant changes to Medicare and Medicaid as part of a long-term budget deal.

A few days later, liberal Democratic Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland told Reuters that he had discussed with Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid the possibility of replacing the automatic spending cuts with a mix of entitlement reforms and tax increases.

"Democrats know we have to do entitlement reforms and Republicans know they have to do revenues (increases)," Cardin said.

Now that they are in place, the $85 billion in spending cuts must be carried out by September 30 if no alternative is found. Half of those cuts would hit the military with the rest scattered over thousands of other domestic programs.

Economists have warned that such a heavy dose of belt tightening over such a short period will slow U.S. economic growth and potentially cost 750,000 jobs.

Speaking of the search for alternatives, Boehner said on "Meet the Press:" "I don't think anyone quite understands how it gets resolved."

No matter how Obama and Congress resolve the 2013 battle, this round of automatic spending cuts is only one of a decade's worth of annual cuts totaling $1.2 trillion mandated by the sequestration law.

DEEP DIVISIONS STILL

Deep divisions between Democrats and Republicans have soured previous negotiations.

Slamming the door on Democrats' demands for new tax hikes, Boehner said that Obama "got $650 billion of higher taxes on the American people on January the first. How much more does he want?" He was referring to the higher tax rate that began in the new year on households making more than $450,000 a year.

"It's time for the president and Senate Democrats to get serious about the long-term spending problem that we have," Boehner said.

In the meantime, both Democrats and Republicans were hoping to win the immediate fight over the automatic spending cuts so that they are best positioned in any upcoming battles over long-term budget deficits.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell on Sunday played down the severity of the automatic cuts, describing them as modest.

"We're willing to talk to him (Obama) about reconfiguring the same amount of spending reduction over the next six months," McConnell said on CNN. "The American people look at this and say: 'Gee, I've had to cut my budget more than this,' - probably on numerous occasions over the last four years because we've had such a tepid economy now for four long years."

At the heart of Washington's persistent fiscal crises is disagreement over how to slash the budget deficit and gain control of the $16.7 trillion national debt, bloated over the years by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and government stimulus for the ailing economy.

Government red ink also rose over the last decade after the enactment of across-the-board tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 secured by President George W. Bush.

(Additional reporting by Will Dunham and Philip Barbara; Editing by Alistair Bell, Philip Barbara and Eric Beech)

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