Wyoming district: No guns in schools despite testimony from Trump education pick
The superintendent for the Wyoming school district that one of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees recently cited during her confirmation hearing said that despite what you may have heard, there are no guns in the building.
Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for education secretary, declined to say that guns have no place in schools during her Tuesday hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
During a tense exchange with Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., DeVos brought up Wapiti Elementary School in rural Wyoming as an example of a place that would need to have firearms in the building to protect against grizzly bears.
When contacted by Yahoo News on Thursday, Ray Schulte, the superintendent of Park County School District No. 6, said there are plenty of grizzlies in his region but that they do not have guns on schools property because of a state prohibition.
“We don’t have guns on school property,” he said. “Schools are gun-free zones in Wyoming. However, every year our state Legislature will talk about changing the rules and allowing guns on school property, which has absolutely nothing to do with grizzly bears that I’m aware of. It has to do with addressing the concern that legislators have about schools being ‘soft targets.’”
Schulte said he was surprised when he heard that DeVos mentioned Wapiti during a congressional hearing. Nevertheless, like DeVos, he said a single-gun policy might not be appropriate for every single school district.
“The gun issue is an extremely difficult topic. It’s just difficult,” he said. “I don’t think with guns in schools that one school fits every state or every school district. And certainly there are some school districts that arm their employees, and if that’s what they think they need to do, I would support them.”
Murphy’s outspoken support for greater gun control only strengthened in December 2012, when a mass shooter attacked Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn, killing 20 children and six faculty members. He was a state lawmaker at the time.
On Tuesday, he asked DeVos if she thinks guns have “any place in or around schools.”
“I think that is best left to locales and states to decide,” she responded.
“You cannot say definitively today that guns shouldn’t be in schools?” he shot back.
DeVos did not answer the question directly. Instead, she invoked a story that Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., told her about how a school in Wapiti has a fence to ward off grizzly bears.
“Well, I will refer back to Sen. Enzi and the school that he was talking about in Wapiti, Wyo. I think probably there, I would imagine that there’s probably a gun in a school to protect from potential grizzlies.”
Murphy then asked if she would support Trump should he move forward with his campaign proposal to ban gun-free school zones.
“Um, I will support what the president-elect does,” she said.
Schulte confirmed that fences were erected about 15 years ago to keep grizzlies out because they would wander through the playgrounds. He said encountering a grizzly bear is a very serious issue but reiterated that it has nothing to do with having guns in schools.
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