A Teacher Speaks #ArmTeachers

When I saw what happened at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school in Florida on Valentine's Day, I cried.
But when I heard what the President of the United States was proposing as a solution, I was stunned beyond tears.

In reponse to the President's proposal to arm teachers, my granddaughter, herself a teacher, posted the following words on Facebook:

The teachers have been begging to be armed. Arm us! Arm us with pencils, pens, crayons and markers. Arm us with notebooks, binders and folders. Arm us with enough desks for our 30+ students and a room big enough for the desks, and heat in the winter so our students can stay awake and fans in the spring and fall so our students can concentrate.

Arm us with a budget for the child who comes to school late and hungry or the child who has already read every book in our one shelf library twice. Or arm us with a liveable wage so that we can afford a discreet drawer full of nutrition and a collection of challenging literature. Arm us with evidence based practices and the latest technology.

Arm us with your confidence in our professional ability and your support for our professional growth and our personal self-care. Arm us with a culture that does not toss us out as overpaid crybabies who only work the bare minimum and lounge by the pool all summer, who value us and the national treasures, the most precious commodities, who smile at us each morning, who come to us for hugs and breakfast and lunch, who seek us for help and comfort and understanding, who lash out at us verbally or physically on a Wednesday and know that Thursday will be a new day when we will show up still loving them.

Arm us with a culture who sees us, hears us, asks us on the front lines what the solutions could be and then dares to try it our way. Arm us! ARM US! With all these tools, we beg you to arm us.

And you've come offering a loaded gun.

My memoir, Dear Elvis, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE