Pennsylvania teachers given baseball bats to use to fight shooters!

ERIE, Pennsylvania (PNN) - April 11, 2018 - A Pennsylvania school district has given its teachers small wooden baseball bats as a reminder to fight a school shooter with any weapon available should other options fail.

Superintendent William Hall of the Millcreek Township School District near Erie, Pennsylvania, said that the distribution of the 16-inch bats on Monday was primarily symbolic, but the district did want to have a “consistent tool” for all teachers should they need to fight an attacker.

Hall said that the mini baseball bats were handed out to the approximately 500 teachers employed by the district’s elementary, middle and high school teachers during a training session on how to respond to school shootings.

Hall said the district’s revised school shooting response plan puts more emphasis on options other than hiding and waiting.

The president of the local teachers union said he supports the move. “It’s to make people comfortable with the idea that they can attack and not simply go into hard lockdown and just hide, as we’d been told in our training up to this point,” said Jon Cacchione, president of the Millcreek Education Association.

The district spent close to $1,800 buying 600 mini baseball bats. In addition to those given out during the training session, bats will be put inside offices and other school areas.

Millcreek Township School District has also been taking additional security measures at school entrances.

In March, another Pennsylvania district said it was arming teachers and students with buckets of rocks.

Blue Mountain School District Superintendent David Helsel said the five-gallon buckets of river stones would be kept in classroom closets. As part of their active shooter training, students and teachers were meant to use the rocks to help defend themselves and fight back against intruders who entered classrooms.