To protect their students from mass-shooters, a Pennsylvania school district spent $1,800 to arm all 500 of its teachers with a tiny, 16-inch baseball bat.

“It is the last resort,” Millcreek Schools Superintendent William Hall told CBS, “but it is an option and something we want people to be aware of.”

Hall admits the bats are primarily “symbolic,” but that they were handed out in reaction to the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting.

“We passed them out, with the goal being we wanted every room to have one of these,” he said. “Unfortunately, we’re in a day and age where one might need to use them to protect ourselves and our kids.”

The bats were only passed out after an in-service training day on how to deal with a mass-shooting event.

A supporter of the idea, Millcreek Education Association president Jon Cacchione, told CBS, “This is a tool to have in the event we have nothing else. Part of the formula now is to fight back, and so I think the bats that were provided for the staff were symbolic of that.”

The bats will be locked up.

The school district is also surveying parents to see how they feel about arming qualified staffers with guns. Hall says, “It was about 70 percent to 30 percent that people would favor that, but we’re not really actively planning that right now.”

Last month it was another school district in Pennsylvania that equipped every classroom with a five gallon bucket of rocks to be used in self-defense in the event of a mass shooting. The idea being that the shooter will face a classroom full of kids chucking rocks at him.

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