As Guilford County Schools continue to debate whether or not schools should have SROS —and whether or not they should be armed with Tasers —– look what’s happening out at Eastern Guilford High School:

There are unhappy parents at any school, but the discontent at Eastern was strong enough that the school system arranged a full-dress event to respond to it, complete with (Superintendent Mo) Green and the school board members, which is unusual.

The spark that drew the parents to Eastern was the Dec. 18 arrest of an Eastern student for having a loaded .380-caliber semiautomatic handgun in his locker at the school.

According to Guilford County Sheriff BJ Barnes, the sheriff’s deputy serving at Eastern arrested Isaiah Neal Crawford, 17, of 1912 McKnight Mill Road, Greensboro, after finding the handgun in the locker loaded, with a round in the chamber. Barnes said Crawford was charged with possession of a firearm on school property.

I recently had a another phone conversation with a respected and politically-sympatico blogger who questioned the $2.9 million for SROs, considering the fact that he’s seen more than a few of them doing nothing. I say that with all the millions the school system fritters away that $2.9 million is a drop in the bucket for SROs.

School board member Sandra Alexander said “the science and the data suggest it’s only a matter of time that an officer is going to use a Taser on a student and that child is going to die.” I’ll suggest that empirical evidence dictates that if a student dies, it’ll be at the hand of another student, not a school resource officer. Heaven forbid said fictitious student would just keep shooting, with no one there to take him down. The question is how effective a Taser would be versus a semi-automatic handgun.