No, Sidwell Friends School has no armed guards
Sidwell Friends School. (Gerald Martineau/The Washington Post)
The National Rifle Association is airing a television ad (and has on its website thisfour-minute video) that says the private school that President Obama’s daughters attend, Sidwell Friends School, has 11 armed guards. It doesn’t.
In fact, it has no armed guards. My Post colleague Glenn Kessler, who writes The Fact Checker column, wrote about the issue here and quoted Ellis Turner, associate head of Sidwell Friends, as saying: “Sidwell Friends security officers do not carry guns.”
Parents and students say they have never seen one either.
The president’s children are protected by Secret Service agents, which is required by federal law, but that is not the same thing as armed school resource officers.
Who's next?
Gregory Michie is a teacher at a Chicago public school who returned to the classroom this past fall after a dozen years working as a teacher educator. Here is what he has found in regards to standardized testing. Michie is also a senior research associate at the Center for Policy Studies and Social Justice at Concordia University Chicago. His latest book is "We Don't Need Another Hero: Struggle, Hope, and Possibility in the Age of High-Stakes Schooling."
By Gregory Michie
When I returned to the classroom in September after spending 12 years as a teacher educator, I thought I understood pretty clearly the damage that testing was doing in our schools. I'd spent time in dozens of Chicago school buildings and well over a hundred classrooms during the previous decade, and I'd seen the testing push get more and more intense.
But being in a school all day, every day for the past four months has given me a new perspective. I've realized