Dive Brief:

• Amid calls to train and arm educators, teachers are calling for another type of weapon in the effort to prevent school violence and mass shootings — more educational resources, such as instructional materials, funding and school counselors, according to CNN.

• The #ArmMeWith hashtag is being used in response to President Donald Trump’s position that equipping educators with guns would deter school shooters.

• In the first two days after the hashtag was created, more than 5,000 teachers participated. “If I wanted a job where I was responsible for carrying a firearm, I would have taken a different career path," Brittany Wheaton, an English teacher in Utah and one of the two educators who started the campaign, told CNN.

Dive Insight:

As students contemplate whether or not to risk unexcused absences, suspensions or other consequences if they participate in walkouts advocating for gun control, some teachers are taking the opportunity to draw attention to the resources that they think would allow them to better serve students. One teacher in the CNN piece said he would want to be armed with smaller class sizes so he could get to know students better and recognize if they are “in crisis.”

Some schools, however, have already implemented what the president is suggesting. The Fairview R-XI School District in Missouri, for example, partnered with a security company to train teachers interested in carrying weapons, and several other schools in the state have followed the district’s example. Officials in the Fairview district said the reason for arming teachers at one school is because of its remote location and how long it would take a sheriff’s deputy to get there “if there was an event.”