During Wednesday's listening session President Trump proposed arming certain teachers in an attempt to make schools safer. Thursday he expanded on that idea, suggesting teachers who are armed receive bonuses.
Recent gun control debates have centered around teachers as the main defense to school shootings. How do some of our teachers feel about this call to arms? The teachers WWL-TV spoke to were stunned by this new proposal.
"We've been talking about this a lot in the teacher's lounge recently, it's been a topic of conversation and not a single teacher I know thinks this is a good idea," Ben Franklin teacher Greg Swanson said.
Former KIPP teacher Will Burch agreed. He taught math and Special Education for three years and now works for Kickboard, which supports school culture and climate across the country. Thinking back to his time as a teacher, he believes being armed would be the last thing his students would need.
"My job was to support them socially and emotionally and a lot of them were already impacted by gun violence and it was really difficult for me to imagine having those conversations with students with a gun on me," Burch said.
Instead, teachers recommend investing in proactive measures that could stop a student before it's too late.
"For my students it was really difficult for them to get the grief and trauma counseling and there was never enough of it to go around," Burch said.
Swanson is seeing the same issues and needs at Ben Franklin.
"Arm us with more social workers, more counselors, arm us with smaller classrooms so that we can get to know our troubled students, get to know those families to prevent tragedies like this from happening," Swanson said. "Arming us with guns isn't going to solve the problem, it's just going to make it worse."
As the debate goes on, most teachers in New Orleans are making their roles clear right now.
"My job is not to shoot intruders coming into the school," Swanson said.