School district moving long arms inside to meet possible active shooter threat (VIDEO)

The board of an Atlanta-area school district has approved a plan for school resource officers to store their long arms inside a safe on campus. The Fayette County School System, which serves over 20,000 public K-12 students in and around Atlanta, will be installing a gun safe in each SRO’s office.

Alarmed and monitored, the safe will allow the officers to bring their long arms inside the building. “It’s just another layer of protection,” Melinda Berry-Dreisbach spokesman for Fayette County Schools, told 11Alive.com

Officials say the unspecified long arms have always been on campus, but before were locked in the trunk of the SRO’s car, which would force the officer to leave the school building to retrieve it in the case of an active shooter situation.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says the school board voted 5-0 in favor of the proposal, which had the endorsement of the district’s safety team and local police chiefs. “I wish we weren’t having this conversation,” Superintendent Joseph Barrow, Jr., said,” but it’s a new reality and we have to prepare for it.”

While law enforcement agencies will provide the firearms, the school system will foot the $2,000-per-school bill for the safes.

Similarly, the Santa Fe School District in Texas, site of a high-profile campus shooting that left 10 dead earlier this year, has moved to harden their campus with a host of security upgrades to their facilities to include accepting eight donated AR-15s for their own SROs.

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