“Now We’re A Hard Target”: An Idaho Town Makes The Case For Guns In School

Look out the window of Superintendent Greg Alexander’s office in Garden Valley, Idaho, and you’ll see the football field — where, if you wait patiently, you’ll also see one of the herds of elk that fill the valley, their winter antlers blurring with the mountains behind. Alexander has a video of them that he likes to show off, as he did one morning in January. The elk stream by for a solid minute before you hear Alexander’s deep, linebacker voice boom from behind the camera: “Yep, I work here.”

As the video ends, Alexander tells me to turn and look over my right shoulder. I see something that looks like a wall — the specifics of which he’s requested I not describe — but which he informs me is, in fact, a camouflaged safe. Inside that safe, there’s a rifle.

“That’s how close these safes are,” he says. “And it’s been sitting here this whole time we’ve been speaking. You didn’t notice. It’s simple, it’s locked, and I have the ability to get into it. Without electricity, I can still get into it. At Sandy Hook, they put millions of dollars into security, they had all that stuff to help make the school safer, and you just feel awful that it didn’t.”

"If I can’t take care of our kids by saying I’m going to call the police, then I’ve got to figure out a different way.”

Those safes are the reason that the Garden Valley School District, enrollment 235, has recently found itself in the national news. For the last year, select Garden Valley teachers and administrators have been training to handle rifles in safes placed in undisclosed locations (outside, in hallways, or in classrooms) across the school, which houses grades K through 12. Open and concealed carry is “permitted” in schools in some capacity by 18 states, but formalized programs remain rare. Garden Valley’s is one of very few that does not involve teachers actually carrying guns in the classroom.

There have been 169 school shootings in the three years since 26 were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, and many see it as logical to work toward fewer guns in the classroom, not more. On the satirical site Wonkette, a representative comment declared: "'Rural Idaho student/teacher/administrator shot by student/teacher/administrator with official school gun’ watch starts now.”

But the specifics of Garden Valley’s situation — its isolation, its particular approach to training — shifts the debates that normally swirl around guns in schools, reframing them in terms of practicality. As a blogger in the Spokesman-Review averred, “This might be an exception to the rule re: how I feel about guns on campus.”

“On any given day, the police could be 45 minutes away,” Alexander told me. “And a gun situation could happen in between two and five minutes. So how are we going to deal with that? We want our kids to stay safe. So if I can’t take care of them by saying I’m going to call the police, then I’ve got to figure out a different way.”

Downtown Crouch, Idaho, a minute's drive from Garden Valley High School, on Feb. 10, 2016.

Joe Jaszewski for Buzzfeed News

Situated just over an hour away from Boise, Garden Valley couldn’t feel farther from the state’s urban center. Ten miles out of the city, the highways narrow to two lanes; the shadows from the mountains get deeper; passing opportunities become perilous and rare. Keep on Highway 55 and you’ll hit Boise County — which, confusingly, does not include the city of Boise — an area about the size of Delaware, with a total population just over 7,000. From there, the road hugs the Payette River until it forks in two, and Garden Valley unfurls in the space between.

“We have a geographically challenged county,” Janet Juroch, a reporter for the local paper, the Idaho World, told me. “From here to Idaho City, it’s over a dirt road! And it’s a good dirt road, but it’s an hour drive on a good day. You can’t go more than 25 miles an hour, and it just beats you to death.”

But Idaho City is the county seat — and the closest police station. Officers patrol through the area, but patrons at the local bar say they only really come around when they know there’s a theme night at the bar; after Ugly Sweater Night this past December, cop cars hovered around the entrance.

Idahoans have been fleeing the “big city” of Boise for the Garden Valley area for decades. There are thick, isolated woods in every direction, multiple natural hot springs, and golfing at Terrace Lakes, the Dirty Dancing–style development that, during the winter, hosts a game called “snolf”: hitting a tennis ball, in the snow, with an implement of the player’s choice.

Routes and distances between Garden Valley and the closest police department in Idaho City.

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Cell phone service in the valley is weak and at times nonexistent. As a result, no one, not even teens, walks around with their eyes glued to their phone. Because of the size of the school, Garden Valley plays eight-man football — a version of the sport, popular in small towns, in which defense is a low priority and the scores run high. Alexander’s biggest concern isn’t threats of violence, but absences: When a parent just can’t get their kid to school, either because of weather or a broken-down vehicle. “Some parents decide to live out in Primitive,” he told me. “It’s called Primitive — that tells you something right there. They have to plow their own stuff, do their own snowplowing. You have no idea how far up they are in those trees.”

In Idaho, where the state has continued to slash the budget and decrease taxes, districts rely heavily on bonds, or "levies," to fund new buildings and run the district on a year-to-year basis. These bonds must pass by a two-thirds supermajority, and in a district like Garden Valley — filled with snowbirds and residents who own massive swaths of land — it’s incredibly difficult to muscle one through the process. That started to change about ten years ago, when the valley’s so-called old-timers, whose family names can be found on the names of streams and buttes that crosshatch the county, became increasingly outnumbered by a mix of retirees (some from Idaho; most from California, a name that’s uttered like a dirty word), “new blood,” and telecommuters whose jobs allow them to relocate.

Surveying the political landscape, you can see how it took nine tries to pass the bond to fund a new school. But now that it’s completed, you can also see how the town rallies around it. On a Friday in late January, the bleachers of the school gym were filled for a home basketball game. The next day, the school would host the funeral of Orpha Ward, a woman who’d graduated from the high school in 1942 — and mother of Alan Ward, who serves as county commissioner, school board member, sawmiller, and, if you believe the blogs that cover the intricacies of local politics, one of the most controversial figures in the community. He’s also, according to those who know such things, the man responsible for the guns initiative.

A herd of elk wander on to Banks Lowman Road in Garden Valley, Idaho, on Feb. 10, 2016.

Joe Jaszewski for BuzzFeed News

Ward drives a massive flatbed Dodge Ram that, like every other vehicle in the county, bears splatters of gravel and dirt and slush. (The best way to tell an out-of-towner in these parts, people say, is by the cleanliness of their car.) He wears a plain chamois shirt and well-worn jeans; when he walks into Wild Bill’s — a coffee shop that doubles as the best place in town to find internet — half the customers say hello.

Ward speaks in a steady meter, his speech peppered with “well, now, you know.” When asked about the genesis of the guns program, his memory is imprecise. “I don’t know if it was after Newtown. All of them were just so awful,” he tells me over a cup of coffee that cost a buck. “But living in this community all my life, I felt some responsibility to try and make sure that couldn’t happen. Newtown was just unimaginable. They’re all unimaginable. But that one in particular, though...”

School board member and County Commissioner Alan Ward.

Boise County / Via boisecounty.us

He pauses, blinks back tears. “I'll be honest with you. The gun program, I certainly pushed for it. Every month the school board would invite people in and talk about whether we should have concealed carry or a gun safe/storage deal. We talked about the composition of the building and what would be efficient and not too powerful, how far the sighting distances are. There’s just a horrific amount to it.”

“It was all very well-calculated,” he adds. “And coming from a board and a group of people who really cared. Not in any way off the cuff.”

After Sandy Hook, many schools began conversations about how to better protect their students. Nearly a year after the shooting, Garden Valley presented a plan to the Idaho State School Boards Association requesting a firearm training program, available to all school employees, through the state police academy. The proposal was voted down, but around that same time, Ward found himself delivering a load of firewood to Steven Ryan, who lives in the far western edge of the county. Ryan’s résumé includes 23 years on the police force and a term as a SWAT team commander; he currently trains police officers and members of the military across the U.S. on “active shooter” situations. “I sure’d want him on my side in a battle, I’ll tell you that,” Ward says. “That man can shoot.”

Ward asked Ryan, whose email signature is “The only thing that can stop a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun,” for his thoughts on the issues facing Garden Valley, and Ryan prepared a presentation for the board — including a slide indicating the states with the lowest number of school shootings (at the top of the list: Idaho: 0 shootings; 0 dead).

“People think guns in schools and think handguns,” Ryan says. “But a handgun is really hard to shoot without hurting someone. So I talked them out of that. Instead, we went with a handgun-caliber rifle: a Beretta Storm 9 mm, which is very accurate, with very little felt recoil for the shooter.”

Students don’t know the location of the safes or who, exactly, has received training.

The board discussed the policy for several months before voting unanimously, in October 2014, to approve it. The next five months were spent refining the wording; acquiring the rifles (at least four, which were purchased, at $680 apiece, from a Boise gun store); installing safes, donated from a local machine shop; and scheduling training sessions. By May 2015, the safes, each of which is camouflaged in a different way, were in place. (Students don’t know the location of the safes or who, exactly, has received training, but as one resident told me, “I’ve been to the gun range, so I know who they are.”)

Soon after, the news went national. Like the signs that will soon be posted at the entrance to the school declaring it “armed,” the publicity was intended to announce, on no uncertain terms, that the school was ready to defend itself. “The fact that we’re prepared to respond so quickly is the real deterrent,” Ward told me. “Those who may do something know that they would be met with resistance.”

According to Ryan, “When we talk about making our schools safer for our children, we talk about target hardening. In an urban environment, you have ready access to resource officers and police, which means [an attacker] knows they only have so long until law enforcement responds. But when you get away from that urban environment, they think, I can do a lot of damage before cops get here. A lot of attackers intend to [commit] suicide, so they’ll analyze the situation and say, 'I’m gonna go someplace where they haven’t prepared.'"

“When you look at active threat situations,” Ryan says, “lives are measured in quarter seconds. Any quarter second lost is a life lost.”

Ryan came up with a specific plan for the teachers, each of whom goes through a vetting process, and trains three or four times a year. “I’m big on basics: first and foremost, how to safely use a gun. I teach them the tactics and techniques to be safe in a crowded, chaotic school environment. If they have to shoot the gun, they don’t want to miss — you don’t want to shoot the wrong person. So we work on marksmanship.”

Beretta Storm 9 mm rifle

Beretta

For a recent training, teachers spent a full day working on scenarios using airsoft guns, which pelt the target with stinging air, and role-playing as “actual adversaries” to ramp up the stress quotient. “Nothing can compare to actually having someone shoot at you,” Ryan says. “But you want to put them under similar stress so they can learn to respond.” Representatives from the sheriff’s office also attend the trainings, in part to avoid a scenario in which law enforcement arrives and cannot distinguish between the “good guy with the gun” and an armed shooter.

“Steve has such a gentle approach,” Ward told me, noting that Ryan is paid only for his travel expenses. “He doesn’t have to do this. He does it out of the goodness of his heart, and he’ll tell you it’s for the community.”

From the next table over, a seventysomething man in coveralls turns, stands up, and shakes Ward’s hand. “Looks like you’re surviving that job,” he says, referring to Ward’s relatively new post as county commissioner. “I couldn’t handle it, I tell you,” he continues. “I’d wanna kill somebody!”

“When you look at active threat situations, lives are measured in quarter seconds. Any quarter second lost is a life lost.”

“Well, you can’t do that,” Ward chuckles.

Ward drives the quick seven minutes over to the school, which is set back from the main road by a quarter-mile entrance road. White buses marked FIRE PATROL are parked like matchsticks in an enclosed lot. Like so many areas in the Northwest, the area’s been hit hard by wildfire; five years ago, a blaze devoured the hillside when someone at the skinny-dipper hot springs tried to set her toilet paper on fire so as to “leave no trace.”

The school is shaped like a massive plus sign. On one side, the artwork of elementary school students and Khan Academy achievement certificates line the walls. On the other end of the hallway, three chimes indicate a class change, and middle and high school kids yell and push and flirt as they move through the single hallway. For budget reasons, classes run just four days a week. Fifty-eight percent of the students in Garden Valley are on free or reduced-cost lunches — 10% higher than the state average for Idaho. Alexander describes the school as “a very white community”; according to census data, the county is 95.4% caucasian.

Above the blue lockers that line the walls, there are composites of every graduating class going back to 1930. Ward searches for his mother’s name but doesn’t take the time to find his. He graduated, but barely: “I never was too good at school.” We reach the end of the hallway, and Ward leans in, speaking in a hushed tone so as not to disturb a group of elementary students circled around a teacher 10 feet away. “You see here, how you can see all the way from this end to the other? It’s a straight shot. That’s why we’ve got rifles.”

Garden Valley School

Joe Jaszewski for BuzzFeed News