FARMINGTON — The Regional School Unit 9 board of directors discussed policies last Tuesday regarding clothing and apparel featuring language in support of the Second Amendment during the superintendent’s report.
In his report, Superintendent Christian Elkington shared an article from K-12 Dive about the pace in which school shootings are occurring in 2023 compared to the previous year.
The article states, “If trends from the past five decades continue for the remainder of the year, there would be about 400 shootings in 2023, outpacing last year’s record high of 273.”
The article goes on to state: “The mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, that took the lives of six — including three children — on March 27 brought the year’s school shooting count to 89, with 75 total victims injured or killed. By comparison, there were 80 shootings with 65 total victims killed or wounded by March 27, 2022.”
Elkington said he shared the article to stress to the board and school staff ways to secure weapons and to be aware of any signs of concerns among staff and students.
“I had sent a letter out to parents and I have gun owners in my family and all of them use either a gun safe or gun locks,” he said. He also shared with the parents websites and resources to help them with securing their weapons.
“It is a key that the safety around gun starts with the gun owners,” he said.
At the beginning of the meeting, Chairperson Carol Coles shared a policy from section B of the RSU 9 policy manual, specifically BCA: Board Member Code of Ethics, Section A, which says: Board members must think of children first and base all decisions on the effect on children, their education, and their training.
“Members of this board are in a unique position, having been elected to the RSU 9 board of directors,” she said. “We are not representatives from our towns. Instead, we became members of an executive body that oversees a system of public education by executing the laws enacted by the Legislature and governing the school district. The seriousness with which we each must take our role cannot be overstated, as our job here includes being role models for our student representatives, our district’s families, our staff, and most importantly, our students who are our children.”
Coles addressed the dress code policy, saying board members, as role models, are to adhere to the same policy students must follow. After providing an overview of that policy and what it specifically bans, Cole explained her reasoning for focusing on this policy.
“Given the numerous school shootings in our nation, and the fear that this brings to us all, clothing depicting weapons should not be worn by board members at meetings, or any time that they are acting in their capacity as school board members,” she said.
“When political views are shared verbally or through the wearing of clothing, it is a loud voice, disrupting our board, our process in our purpose, we have all taken this rise to our best selves in our role as members of this board.”
According to Elkington, some questions arose after a previous meeting from several board members along with a member of the audience, and Coles decided it would be wise to make the answer clear at this meeting.
Director Alexander Creznic of Farmington took issue with the opening remarks from Coles, as well as the article Elkington had shared.
“About the article and about the prelude to our board meeting this evening,” Creznic said, “Are students going to get in trouble for wearing T-shirts that have the Second Amendment to the Constitution on those shirts?”
“It’s in our policy that shirts that support guns are not allowed in the schools,” Elkington said. “It’s gone in front of the Supreme Court and schools can have some control over those kinds of things that they felt that are threatening to the school.”
“So, a piece of the Constitution is not allowed to be worn on a shirt by a student because somebody has offense to that part of the Constitution? Am I hearing that correctly?” Creznic asked.
Elkington clarified that it is only the depictions of firearms that are not allowed, but the words of the Second Amendment are allowed if they do not share a depiction of a firearm.
“The policy as written that I read from earlier, a student/parent handbook, is around depicting weaponry,” Coles said. “It’s not around the words of the Constitution.”
“I just think it would be nice if people, school board, whatever, would consider the rights of a child to be safe in a school at least equal to the rights of someone owning a gun,” Director J. Wayne Kinney of Farmington said. “Children are just being massacred, and it’s not because of what they teach in school, it’s because the person holding the gun.”
“We’ve got to consider the first duty of government which is to keep people safe,” he added.
“There is no duty of government to keep people safe,” Creznic objected. “Fundamentally, no people that are free are not necessarily 100% safe. Safety is absolutely no justification to take away a fundamental human right.”
“It would be different if it was your kid,” Kinney interjected..
“That is unfair, totally unfair,” Creznic said.
Coles called a point of order, stating, “I am going to insist that people be respectful in this discussion. I think it’s an important one.
“We have a very long night ahead of us,” she continued. “We still have a lot of reports, but I would like to see the dialogue continue, but it needs to be done in a respectful way. And I want everyone to take a little breath, please, because this is a very emotional, and multifaceted issue. And we all are very emotionally involved in it. And we represent a wide, wide variety of beliefs on this issue.”
The discussion concluded with comments from student representative Abigail Goodspeed.
“I would just like to say that as a member of the student body, and particularly the student body here at Mt. Blue,” Goodspeed said, “hearing a board member, and just the public in general, saying and implying that they care more about what the Constitution says than keeping students like myself and my fellow community and friends safe is truly heartbreaking and hard to hear.”
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