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St. Vrain school board will vote on long rifle storage proposal

Boulder County Sheriff’s Office wants to store firearms at Niwot High and Lyons Middle Senior
SVVSD Admin (3 of 3)
SVVSD administration building

The St. Vrain Valley School District board will decide next week whether to move forward with a proposal to store long range rifles at two schools.

The board held a second workshop Wednesday about keeping rifles at Niwot High School and Lyons Middle Senior High School, which has been proposed by the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office as a preventative measure against school shootings.

The vote scheduled for the Oct. 26 board meeting would be to move forward conceptually with forming the plan to put rifles in the schools. If it passes, the board plans to vote again on implementation after seeing a detailed proposal.

At an August school board workshop, the sheriff’s office cited the isolation of the two schools as a major reason to keep the long rifles inside. While school resource officers have access to this type of gun in their car, in the event of a school shooter emergency it would likely be too far away to be useful, while response times by other officers might take too long.

Additionally, the handguns that SROs keep on their person are only meant for short range use. The hallways of Niwot and Lyons mean that a shooter could be nearly 100 yards away, rendering handguns inaccurate and unreliable.

The sheriff’s office and St. Vrain Superintendent Don Haddad reiterated that the long rifles stored in these schools adds another tool to the several levels of safety already in place.

Haddad shared his recommendation that the school board move forward with the sheriff’s office request, emphasizing his desire to follow the recommendations of the local experts in law enforcement.

“I think what’s really unfortunate is that we even have to have this conversation,” he said. “That our schools should be safe havens for our students and our teachers and our staff. Unfortunately, schools are the recipients of some of the flaws we have in our society.”

Board member Joie Siegrist recalled when a similar proposal was brought to the school board a few years ago. At that time, the board chose not to move forward with storing rifles at schools, but she pointed to the changes since then.

“Since that time there have been many more school shootings and public shootings,” she said to a representative of the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office. “I support moving forward with this and I’m going to share that with you now. I can’t speak for the rest of the board; we’re all individuals … You are tasked with keeping our students safe and I want you to have the tools that you need in order to do that.”

Board President Karen Ragland also expressed her support. The other school board members did not speak in favor or against the proposal.

If the board votes to move forward at next week’s meeting, the guns would not be immediately placed in the schools. The district still has work to do to ensure the long rifles would be entirely secure inside the school, like reinforcements to the rooms they will be kept in that could only be accessed with a law enforcement ID along with alarms and a biometric safe.

The protocols to keep these guns in the schools would also need to be reviewed and approved by the school board before being fully implemented.