Ohio teachers and other school personnel cannot carry firearms on school grounds without prior peace-officer training or experience, the Ohio Supreme Court has ruled. The 4-3 ruling overturns a Butler County school district policy allowing school employees to voluntarily carry concealed firearms so long as they have a conceal-carry permit and undergo active shooter training. The policy change came after a 14-year-old student opened fire at Madison Junior-Senior High School in 2016, injuring four.
The state’s high court sided with several parents who sued the school district, claiming that a state law has far higher training requirements in place to carry a gun in schools. The law they cited states that no school “shall employ a person as a special police officer, security guard, or other position in which such person goes armed while on duty,” unless that person has completed either peace-officer training or served at least 20 years as an active-duty officer.
The school district — as well as Republican Attorney General Dave Yost, in a supportive legal brief — argued that the requirement only applies to school employees who serve in safety or security positions. The parents asserted it applies to every school employee who is armed while on the job.
Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican who wrote the majority opinion in the case, sided with the parents’ reading of state law. The Ohio General Assembly, when writing the law, could have stated that the training/experience requirement only applies to security staff, O’Connor continued, but it didn’t.
“That an employee might have been hired to teach, to coach, or to perform other primarily non-security functions does not alter the fact that an employee who carries a weapon while performing his or her job ‘goes armed while on duty,’” O’Connor wrote. O’Connor also disagreed with arguments pointing to another part of Ohio law allowing people to bring deadly weapons into a school if they have written permission from school authorities. That law doesn’t override the training/experience requirement for employees, she held.
O’Connor was joined by the three Democrats on the court — Justices Michael P. Donnelly, Melody J. Stewart, and Jennifer Brunner. Justices Sharon Kennedy, Pat Fischer, and Pat DeWine, all Republicans, each wrote dissenting opinions.
Kennedy wrote in her dissent that the Ohio law allowing weapons to be brought into schools with written permission from authorities is “the authorizing statute.” She flipped O’Connor’s argument on its head, saying if the legislature intended to require all school employees to get peace-officer training before carrying a firearm on school grounds, it would have written state law that way.
The Republican-controlled Ohio Senate also passed a bill last fall allowing school personnel to carry firearms without peace-officer training, but the measure didn’t pass the Ohio House before last year’s session ended. A similar bill, House Bill 99, has been introduced this session, but so far it’s stalled in committee.
