Join Priscilla Rahn as she converses with Laura Carno, the Executive Director of Faster Colorado, about the pressing need for adequate school safety measures in America. Throughout this episode, they explore various facets of school security, focusing on how armed school staff can play a critical role in emergency situations. They delve into the complexities and challenges of current school safety policies and why catalysts for change are necessary. Priscilla and Laura also discuss the successful strategies in place, offering listeners a comprehensive understanding of how educational environments can be fortified to ensure the protection of our students.
00:24:38 Parental and Public Trust in School Safety
00:25:29 Conclusion and Where to Find More Information
SPEAKER 02 :
Welcome to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Rahn. She’s a master educator and author, leading the conversation to restore the American mind through wisdom, virtue, and truth.
SPEAKER 01 :
Welcome, welcome, everybody. Come on in to Restoring Education in America. I’m so excited that you’ve decided to join the conversation today. You know, we talk about all things education, and I can’t think of anything more important than talking about the safety of our children. And so I’m going to bring my special guest, my good friend to the stage. Hello, Laura. How are you?
SPEAKER 03 :
Hi, I’m doing great. How are you?
SPEAKER 01 :
I’m great. I’m so excited to have this conversation around school safety and all of the wonderful work that you’re doing. But for those people who may not know who you are, I’m going to share a little bit of your bio. So today, my special guest is Laura Carno. She is a former senior fellow at Independent Women’s Forum and the executive director of Faster Colorado, which is an organization that trains armed school staffers. Laura also runs Springstaxpayers.com, an organization that keeps an eye on politicians and local government in the Pikes Peak region. She has been involved in campaigns and causes in Colorado since 2008, including helping to recall two state senators in 2013 and educating Coloradans on then-Senator Mark Udall’s lies and leadership failures through her Udall Lied campaign. When tragedy strikes in a school shooting, Laura has become a go-to for state and national media to bring a calm, reasoned approach to school safety. and how armed security teams can keep children safe. In 2011, she graduated from LPR, and she won the Leaders in Action Award in 2014. Laura appears regularly in Colorado and national media on National Review, The Hill, America’s First Freedom, CNN Headline News, USA Today, and Fox News channels. She is the author of the book, Government Ruins Nearly Everything, Reclaiming Social Issues from Uncivil Servants. Laura lives in the amazing Albert County with her amazing husband, Bill. What a bio. Yes, that’s a lot. No wonder I’m tired. Exactly. Well, you know what they say, the busiest people get the most done and you’re a rock star. And it’s hard to think that someone may not know who you are because you’re just everywhere doing amazing work. And I first met you through LPR. I graduated in 2023. And as a teacher, I was starting to learn about this whole conversation around school safety. In speech on school safety. And I used you as a model to write letters to school boards across Colorado to urge them to please take a look at Faster Colorado because we were starting to see an uptick in the amount of school shootings across America. But your organization, Faster Colorado, trains individuals on school safety. Talk a
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. And let me put it into some context for your listeners. So in Colorado, it has been law for over 20 years for schools to be able to say, we would like to have armed security, whether it’s, you know, school resource officers or private security or school staff that has been legal for 20 years. And the mechanism is, here in Colorado is that school boards or charter school boards can make that authorization. So once a school has decided to go down that route, their insurance company says, hey, we’ll insure your armed team, but you’ve got to get a certain kind of training. And that’s where Faster Colorado comes in is we provide that annual training and the annual requalification. It is by no means all of the training they get during the year in between their annual classes, but it’s that that’s required by the insurance company. And then in between their annual classes with Faster, their school board says, here’s what you have to do weekly, here’s what you have to do monthly, here’s what you need to do quarterly. So school boards have gotten very, very serious over the years about making sure that those teams are getting lots of training. And so at Faster, what we did, and we just completed our ninth training year. I can’t believe we’ve been doing it this long. But what we’ve done at Faster is brought together the best instructors in Colorado. They are active duty law enforcement instructors, and they are just the best of the best. Not only are they training law enforcement, but most of them do some kind of competitive shooting as well. They are masters of their craft. just a great bunch of instructors we have.
SPEAKER 01 :
So that’s what we’re up to here at Faster. You know, I still teach in a public school. I teach in Denver public schools and we have SROs, but we don’t have SROs in all of the schools. At one point during the COVID lockdowns, the school board got rid of SROs completely. And then they brought them back only at the high school level. But we’re seeing a lot of children in the middle school. I teach middle school where they’re bringing weapons to school as well. And Seconds count when you’re looking at big city districts like a Denver or Chicago. I mean, you’ve got crime happening all the time. And to get a call at a school, you hope that police officers will come. But we’ve seen even some failures like in Uvalde where there’s been some breakdowns and we love our law enforcement. Like we’re totally pro law enforcement, but they can’t be everywhere. Every time there’s there’s flaws, there’s gaps in the time. How do you respond when people push back and say, no, we want only law enforcement in our schools? Is that enough?
SPEAKER 03 :
yeah and that’s a really good point so on september 10th a lot of people around the country don’t know that there was a school shooting in evergreen colorado they don’t know it because it was within that same hour that charlie kirk was assassinated which you know obviously took over the national news cycle for a very long time but colorado has had a lot of school shootings as we all know and evergreen was the latest one what was very interesting about that one priscilla is that there was a school resource officer assigned to that campus but the nature of them they are cops that if something happens nearby they might have to leave which is what happened in evergreen and this sro needed to leave to go attend to a traffic accident No fault of theirs. This is how the process works. The shooter chose to wait until the SRO left to start shooting. Not the second after he left, but… He wasn’t there. And it’s very obvious to everybody, including people with potential bad intent, when the SRO is there. The person, like I said, is law enforcement. They’re in a uniform. They are driving a cop car. And so that’s why some schools have gone from… SROs alone to a school resource officer plus additional armed staff. And not every school district can afford a school resource officer like a lot of the rural districts that are very small. But we have faster trained schools that have armed staff and a school resource officer and i really like that that you know sort of multiple layers because school safety really is a multi-layered conversation you have you know perimeter you have door doors locked you have you have um all kinds of things you’re making sure that if there’s a concerning student that they’re the right things that are there to assess what kind of help does the student need so they don’t turn into somebody violent it’s not it’s not a one and done armed people and you know, move on with your life.
SPEAKER 01 :
If you’re just tuning in, my special guest today is Laura Carno from Faster Colorado. We’re talking about school safety and some of the options that we see are working. And I think as a teacher, we’re not trained on triage or stop the bleed. What we get is, you Well, we haven’t, thankfully with training, we haven’t had fire issues in schools. I can’t remember the last time we had a student death from a fire because once a month we regularly train on how to exit a building. We are doing lockout and lockdown, but that’s totally different. That’s not the same as training for an active shooter who may have had access to a student or a teacher on either stop the bleed immediately or how to harden your classroom because we have older buildings that The doors don’t necessarily stop a bullet. And what happens if a student is actually in your classroom? And so those are the types of trainings that I think as teachers, unfortunately, we need to have in order to be able to respond while we’re waiting for first responders to come. Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, super great point. There is training to lock down, lock out, flee the premises. I mean, there’s all kinds of training going on out there that’s good and necessary. But our question is, who is stopping the killing? Because if we are locking down and there are good statistics about a very minimal number of students injured or killed in locked rooms. You’ve already kind of messed that up. But those are good practices, especially in areas that the killing isn’t happening in a school. It’s just a very good protective measure. But if we’re doing that because somebody is on our campus shooting innocent people, the question is who is going to stop that person? And if we’re waiting for responding law enforcement, Your point is completely valid that there are going to be people injured. Who do we have on staff that knows how to stop the bleed, who knows how to apply tourniquets and chest seals and pack wounds and things that our soldiers learned on the battlefield. to keep soldiers alive long enough to get to actual medical care. And at Faster, their insurance company doesn’t say they have to take a medical course like that. We give them a little bit of an appetizer of it and send them home with a personal tourniquet so that at least they’ve got something for themselves to self-rescue if something happens. But We leave them with, we gave you this much, just a little bit, and you need to go get a class that does really a lot more. And the guy that we have teaching our medical is a SWAT medic. So he is a member of a fire station who goes in with SWAT teams. And so he is really at the worst of the worst scenes. And that’s the right guy to be teaching our armed staff on what to do if, God forbid, something happens.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah. It’s time for school districts and school leaders to level up. We ask our sports coaches to take CPR first aid. Yeah. Okay. But that’s not at the level that we need to be prepared. We need to be like, my dad was in the army, so I grew up like an army brat, you know, got to be prepared always. So I think at this point, until school districts get on board with supporting teachers and training us. We’re going to have to take on our own professional development, take advantage of some of this training that Faster is offering so that we can individually be prepared. Because my biggest goal is to make sure my students go home safely at the end of the school day. That is my commitment. And sadly, so many of us teachers, we realize we’re living in a day and age where we may take a bullet. for our students, to protect them. That’s the risk we take every single day when we go to school, when there is no protection, there’s no training, and we’re at the mercy. You can’t fight a bullet without being prepared with another firearm to protect your students. But let’s talk about some of the things we’ve learned as graduates of Leadership Program of the Rockies. It’s an amazing program that teaches us about the proper role of government and liberty. And in your book, Chapter five of your book, Government Ruins Nearly Everything, you ask some really good questions in that chapter, two of which are, can the government fix failing schools and can the government fix gun violence? So Laura, based on like what you’ve observed and after you’ve published your book, where has the government, have they made any progress? Are they making things worse? And what alternatives do you see are working in this practice area?
SPEAKER 03 :
yeah and and you know let’s let’s start with education you know obviously you’re um very aware of what goes on in education and where we see where we see government having the heaviest hand it tends to be government department of education as an example saying here is a template we will copy paste it and put it onto every student every school every state everything And that’s a very heavy hand by a government who doesn’t know the name of your children, doesn’t know their interests, the way they learn, none of that. And that has caused schools to have standards that may be too difficult for some children who need additional support and too easy for other children who really need to be challenged. And so where government has that really heavy hand, schools kind of, again, generally speaking, there’s exceptions out there, but schools generally fall to the middle and there’s mediocre schools. We’ve got huge percentages of seniors in high school that need remedial math and reading before they go to college. That’s just not okay. especially with the trillions of dollars that have been spent on education at the federal level, that experiment has been a failure. But when you look at states like Colorado and other states that have really good charter school laws that allow parents in a neighborhood to come together and say, hey, we’d like a school that focuses on um you know science and technology we want a school that focuses on arts there are schools that focus on kids on the autism spectrum um i write in my book about a school a charter school that focuses on kids with um you know adhd and those kind of things so that interruptions are par for the course uh they are um they’re not an interruption of the day that they they train they teach around that but charter schools are really this beautiful story of parents saying we need something a little different we’re going to have super local control we don’t need um federal government telling us what to do and so it’s a much lighter hand of government and so when when you look at the the performance between you know the heavy hand of government and a lighter hand of government The lighter touch, those kids are performing really, really well compared to kind of the mediocrity or, you know, lots of remedial instruction to be able to even start college. So the outcomes are very, very clear that a much lighter touch of government definitely leads to improved everything. And I’d love for people to look at the story of Colorado charter schools and there’s some good proof there.
SPEAKER 01 :
when President Trump signed his executive order to end the Department of Education, bringing it back to the States, I applauded that. I thought this is a really great opportunity to force that local control conversation. And I think for parents who might be nervous about guns being in the schools, if you talk to them one-on-one and you talk about what’s going on these days, And how we do already have trained educators who can still carry, especially in Douglas and Elbert counties in Colorado. I mean, it’s a common thing to take the time to practice and be safe. And I have actually persuaded a couple of parents who are very much on the left and anti-gun to say, well, Priscilla, it’s you. Like, I trust you. I would trust you to protect my children. And I think… Well, if you would trust me, there are many, many more me’s out there. There are many, many more teachers who are, like you said, even former law enforcement, former military, who are going into the education space, who are trained and very level-headed. I think people are concerned about, well, I don’t know the mental capacity of a teacher carrying a gun. Will they overreact? And I’m sure you’ve heard that, you know, the mental stability of someone or the fear. What are some of the other concerns and fears you’ve heard from parents who are in opposition to having teachers or other workers in the school conceal carry?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, and I’ll address that first. Teachers or other workers, it is… uh any school employee which allows the school districts that are implementing this to have a real thorough vetting process and and i think that’s the thing that a lot of people don’t know when they hear about faster colorado the focus is on they are at the range teaching people to stop active killers, which is true. But that is a tiny portion of what we do and what schools do in order to get ready to have an armed security team. So first of all, the schools have really good vetting processes. When I look back nine years to where it was back then, school boards have gotten way more requiring, which is a great thing, on formalizing those vetting processes. And so there are written applications and panel interviews. Some of these panel interviews include members of local law enforcement, that sort of thing. And then when the team members come to our training classes, so all of our instructors are accustomed to training cops and looking for anything that, do we have somebody who seems a little too eager to be a part of this team that is looking for when they get to shoot versus when they have to shoot, things like that that are very attitudinal. And we have the ability to provide that feedback back to schools. It’s only happened a couple of times in nine years because the schools do a really good job of vetting. And let’s remember, these are people who’ve already had background checks for schools. They have an additional background check when they get their concealed carry permit. Then they go through this vetting process. And I look at it as a continued vetting when they come to our class. In addition, so many administrators at schools now, when they run people through our faster classes, they make sure an administrator is at class also so that if there’s any… Any weird things to be observed, they are there to see it personally. So it’s a policy that they take really, really seriously. And I think that’s a part that kind of happens behind closed doors. So a lot of people don’t see it. But having been a part of this process for nine years, I’ve really seen the improvement in formalizing those processes. And I feel really good about the people that come through our FASTER program each year.
SPEAKER 01 :
My guest today is Laura Carno of Faster Colorado, and she works really hard to make sure our schools are safe. She trains individuals and gets the word out that this process is available for anybody that’s willing to do something a little bit different in our schools and keep our kids safe. I know you’ve done a lot of work, Laura, with holding politicians accountable. And, you know, we have the Second Amendment. Well, actually, I don’t like to call it the Second Amendment. I like to say our right to keep and bear arms because, you know, then people will say it’s a Second Amendment right. No, it’s our inalienable right to keep and bear arms. And we can go down a list of things we protect. with firearms. And our politicians are at the top of that list, but yet we won’t take the time to really invest in protecting our children, which is our most important asset. Seems very hypocritical to me, always has been hypocritical. And the very politicians who fight against even citizens concealed carrying will hire armed protection for themselves. rules for thee and not for me. And how did we get here where we have allowed politicians to keep strangling us as citizens in this arena of public policy to say, we’re going to protect post offices and banks and the state capital and airlines and all of these places, but we won’t protect schools. What do we need to do?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, you’re exactly right. It makes zero sense to say this building over here is okay to have armed guards. And by the way, this now extends to department stores. I had a friend tell me that he was in a department store and there was a guard standing there by the lingerie department. And he said, I was just thinking about what you do. And he was talking to me about this. I was thinking about what you do. And I thought maybe our children are a little bit more important than the lingerie. And it was just such an interesting visual to think about. But I think where we went wrong, Priscilla, is we got the idea of government upside down over the decades and centuries. That people today, maybe not me and you or other graduates of the leadership program of the Rockies, but we think that government is here to tell us how we may live and what we are allowed to do and those kinds of things but that’s not the way our documents are written it really restricts what government is allowed to do to us and so so i like to to start with um when we talk about school safety these are our children and grandchildren We hire a school through tax dollars, but we hire a school to teach our children and to keep them safe and whatever, play football, do plays, whatever we want to go on with our children. But it is the right and responsibility of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children. It’s not the job of government. Children don’t belong to the government. They belong to the family. And so if we look at it that way, just like if we were going to buy something else, we’re going to buy another service, we’re going to buy soccer lessons or ballet lessons or a new computer or We, the parents, are making that decision on what we’re going to buy for our child. There’s no office of government tennis shoes that says, well, you can only have this kind of tennis shoe. You can’t have this kind of tennis shoe. There would be a revolt if the government controlled our tennis shoe purchases. But we, society, are okay with government saying, well, your education must look like this. regardless of what you parents think. And so we really need to turn that on its head and say, wait a second, we’ve remembered now. We’ve remembered that we are in charge. We’ve created this government. We created the founding documents. We’ve created those restrictions on how much government can intrude into our lives. And we’re stopping right here. We’re not doing this anymore. And this is where you saw during COVID so many parents pull their kids out of school and say, gosh, I’m getting some insight into what’s going on in that classroom and I don’t like it. And since I’m buying it, I’m not doing this anymore. So you saw the increase in homeschooling and micro schools and churches starting up schools because of the demand there. for something different for kids. So I like the charter school movement from that standpoint, because it’s parents getting more involved. And I think it makes the neighborhood public schools much better because they say, oh, hang on a second. We’re losing some students to this other thing. Why don’t we beef up our science? Why don’t we beef up our music programs so that they can continue to meet the needs and maybe see the parents as customers of this education that they’re selling?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, it seems like we need to improve our trust too, because I’ve even noticed that some people are hesitant or thinking about having more firearms around children because they don’t trust the adults. And we don’t trust the government. We don’t trust each other. And so that’s a whole additional conversation about what we need to do to change the mindset around this conversation, because I know I feel a lot safer when I go to a venue and I see that there’s law enforcement there. Actually, for me, it doesn’t make me nervous anymore. It used to before I learned about before I became a gun owner myself, but now being a gun owner and practicing, I’m very comfortable around firearms. So when I see someone and a venue, that’s a police officer, I’m like, thank you so much for being here. I feel so much safer. And I noticed when I go to a venue and there isn’t one and I’m like, OK, where am I? How do I how do I get out if there’s an emergency? Like I have to know, like all my safety channels. But anyway, Laura, I’m looking at the time and we have to land our plane. And I’ve so thoroughly enjoyed talking to you and sharing what you do with everyone. Please real quickly tell everybody where they can find you.
SPEAKER 03 :
Sure. Folks can find us at fastercolorado.org. And I’d recommend you go there, read the about us, look at the bios of our team. So you can see really what kind of experience we’re bringing in that instructor team because they really do make a difference.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you, Laura. And to my listeners, thanks for listening in today and catch me next time. And remember, educating the mind without the heart is no education. So seek wisdom, cultivate virtue and speak truth.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thanks for tuning in to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Rahn. Visit PriscillaRahn.com to connect or learn how you can sponsor future episodes to keep this message of faith, freedom, and education on the air.
