A handful of Palm Beach County charter schools are taking steps to arm members of their own staffs rather than pay for a police officer or security guard to patrol their campuses, school district officials say.

The district’s police chief told school board members this week that "several" charters plan to allow an employee to carry a gun on campus to comply with a year-old requirement that all Florida public schools be protected by an armed guard.

Any attempts by local charter schools to arm a teacher or other employee through the state’s "guardian program" would have been blocked last year by the school board and Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, who opposed arming educators and refused to certify any to wield guns on campus.

But district officials say a change to state law means local sheriffs and school boards can no longer prevent educators from being armed in the county’s 51 charters, which are financed by public tax dollars but are privately operated.

"We will not have guardians on our (district-operated) school campuses," Deputy Schools Superintendent Keith Oswald said Thursday. "But there have been a couple of charter schools who have requested the guardian program, and it’s our interpretation of the statute that the district has to provide the option."

If any of the county’s charter schools move forward with their plans, it would bring the divisive question of whether to arm public-school educators onto the county’s campuses for the first time since the Parkland school shooting last year ignited a national debate about the practice.

It wasn’t clear this week how many charters are looking to arm a staff member through the state’s program, formally known as the Coach Aaron Feis Guardian Program.

School District Police Chief Frank Kitzerow told board members Wednesday that "several" schools plan to do so, while Oswald characterized the number of schools as "a handful."

Among the participating schools identified by the district: the Montessori Academy of Early Enrichment, a 190-student school located in a shopping plaza in Greenacres; and the Academy for Positive Learning, a 120-student campus in Lake Worth.

It was not clear if the schools intend to arm a teacher or a non-classroom employee. Attempts to reach the principals of each school Thursday were unsuccessful.

For a school to arm a staff member, the employee has to be trained and certified by a local sheriff’s office.

A bill signed into law in May by Gov. Ron DeSantis appears to remove a sheriff’s discretion to deny them certification, saying that "if a local school board has voted by a majority to implement a guardian program, the sheriff in that county shall establish a guardian program to provide training."

Bradshaw said Thursday that he prefers that charter schools use full-time officers or security guards, but that he is ready to provide training for school employees once a request is made.

"We’ll try to talk them into something else, but if they’re adamant we’re ready to go," he said.

The county’s roughly 180 district-operated public schools are currently patrolled by armed law enforcement officers, the majority of them members of the school district’s police department.

Last year, several charter schools used licensed security guards or municipal police officers on overtime details. Currently, all county charters are being guarded by police while security guards receive mandatory training.

Continuing to use full-time guards is the best bet for public schools, Bradshaw said, since a person with other responsibilities on campus can’t concentrate fully on security.

"The optimum situation is they get a security guard," he said. "Part of protecting schools, buildings, airports is the fact that you have uniformed personnel there and that is their sole responsibility."

But hiring a full-time security guard or officer for an entire academic year can be an onerous expense for charters, many of which have small budgets and staffs.

Just finding an available security guard or officer is often challenging for small schools, said Lynn Norman-Teck, executive director of the Florida Charter School Alliance.

"Imagine you’re a teacher and you see $95,000 to $110,000 go out the door just for security," Norman-Teck said. "If you’re in a community where you feel comfortable with staff as a guardian, then that’s the way you’ve got to go."

Schools in some parts of the state began designating their own employees as armed guardians last year when state lawmakers created the program after the Parkland massacre, but the state’s largest counties rejected the option.

Though President Donald Trump endorsed the idea of arming teachers, then-Gov. Rick Scott opposed it, and teachers were barred last year from participating.

But changes to the law this year allow teachers to become guardians in addition to other school employees.

At a school board meeting Wednesday, district officials told board members they would ask them to vote in upcoming weeks to formally ask Bradshaw to begin training.

"That’s what the law requires, and we’re working with the legal department to make that process happen," Kitzerow said.

Oswald, the deputy superintendent, said arming teachers or other school employees could raise a host of worries but that it was now a decision for each individual charter.

"Charter schools became charters because they wanted autonomy," he said. "That’s really a decision that’s up to them.

"For us," he said, "we do have concerns. We don’t want teachers armed for a variety of reasons around safety, because their first job is teaching."

amarra@pbpost.com

@AMarraPBPost