NEW YORK When teachers return for a new school term in the tiny Texas farming town of Harrold, they can bring an extra tool of the trade alongside books, pens and worksheets. To defend pupils from any gun-toting maniacs, they can carry loaded pistols into the classroom.

With barely 300 residents, the remote rural community in the state`s northern dustbowl has appalled gun control advocates by becoming the first in the US to allow its teachers to bear concealed firearms.

Harrold`s school board maintains that the move is necessary because the town is 40km from the nearest sheriff`s office, making it hard to get swift help in an emergency. Its location just metres from a major highway, America`s north-south interstate 287, makes it a potential “target” for armed maniacs.

“We are 30 minutes from law enforcement,” Harrold`s school superintendent, David Thweatt, said. “How long do you think it would take to kill all 150 of us? It would be a bloodbath.”

Carefully selected teachers are to be trained in crisis management including handling hostage situations. Thweatt said “When you have good guys with guns, the bad guys do less damage.”

More than a dozen mass shooting tragedies have hit US educational establishments over a decade, including the Columbine massacre which claimed 15 lives at a Colorado high school in 1999 and last year`s Virginia Tech massacre which left 33 people dead. When pressed on such cases, the powerful pro-gun lobby often argues that Congress sent out a message of vulnerability in a 1990 law which banned guns in schools although the law was declared unconstitutional and overturned by the Supreme Court five years later.

“We`ve had a very disturbing trend of school shootings in the US,” said Thweatt. “It is my belief this is caused by making schools gun-free zones. When schools were made gun-free zones, they became targets for people who wanted to rack up the body count.”

As is commonplace in America, Harrold`s school already has tough security including card-swipe entry for rooms and screening for visitors. Armed teachers must get a state gun licence and will be required to use bullets of a type less liable to ricochet off walls or desks. But teachers` unions in Texas have expressed horror.

“It`s a disaster waiting to happen,” Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers said. She described it as the sort of manoeuvre that makes Texas a laughing stock “It`s up there with the worst ideas in the history of education.”

Ken Trump, an Ohio-based specialist in advising school boards on security, suggested it would be more sensible to hire security guards than to give guns to “minimally supervised, minimally trained” teachers. “You could have a gun accidentally taken away, or a gun could be dislodged or discharged while a teacher`s breaking up a fight in the cafeteria,” said Trump.

While not quite in the wild West, Harrold can lay historical claim to be a frontier community. Named after a rancher called Ephraim Harrold, the town has its roots as a railway terminus during the 1880s, it was the westernmost point of a line which eventually ran from the heart of Texas to Denver in Colorado`s Rocky Mountains.

The town`s school, which has 110 students from kindergarten up to the age of 18, offers courses with a farming bent such as agricultural metal fabrication, soil sciences and horticulture.

Harrold`s gun policy was praised by the pro-gun nationwide Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. Its chairman, Alan Gottlieb, said the town`s school buildings would be safer “Allowing armed staff and teachers will provide a last line of defence if other security measures at the school fail.”

He argued that teachers would be able to respond faster to a classroom shooting than a security guard “Officers can`t be everywhere and in an emergency, every second counts.”

Harrold`s school board is unapologetic about the controversy. Thweatt said the thick brick walls of Harrold`s school protected pupils from tornadoes and the school authorities had a duty to protect children for human attacks.

“When you hear about these shootings, the reports always start out with `this is a sleepy little place, nobody thought this would ever happen here`,” said Thweatt.—Dawn/ The Guardian News Service