PA District Arms Classrooms With Buckets of Rocks
In a school safety effort ripped straight from the Old Testament, one Pennsylvania district has equipped its classrooms with five-gallon buckets of rocks. BuzzFeed News spoke with David Helsel, Schuylkill County's Blue Mountain School District superintendent, who explained that the "go buckets" are intended as a last-resort tool to allow students and teachers to fight back against armed intruders.
"If you have a 5-gallon bucket full of river stones, and we have 25 students and a teacher, it will serve as a deterrent," Helsel told BuzzFeed. "If it hits the top of [the shooter] it would not only injure them but possibly kill the intruder," he said. "Under the given circumstances, it is a better response than passively crawling under a desk and allowing someone to break into the classroom."
The district's "go buckets" were not implemented in response to the recent shooting at Parkland, Florida's Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school, and have been in classrooms for two years. Luckily, they've not used the stones yet, so the efficacy of having kids cluster around a bucket, trying to grab for rocks while a shooter with a military-grade rifle prowls their hallways remains untested. But this? This is what kids are marching for today-to not have to share their classrooms with weapons, even weapons from the Stone Age.
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