A school district in eastern Pennsylvania has decided to put a “bucket of rocks” in each classroom in order to defend against armed intruders, a local CBS affiliate reported this week.
“Every classroom has been equipped with a five-gallon bucket of river stone,” Blue Mountain School District Superintendent Dr. David Helsel told a Pennsylvania House Education Committee last week, CBS46 reported.
“If an armed intruder attempts to gain entrance into any of our classrooms, they will face a classroom full students armed with rocks and they will be stoned,” he said.
The stones are the “right size to be thrown hard and cause pain and a distraction,” the superintendent said, CBS reported.
Helsel said the buckets of stones are not the sole strategy against armed attackers; rather, they’re a “last resort,” CBS reported, and students and teachers have received active shooter training.
A Blue Mountain High School student told CBS46 that “rocks are better than books and pencils,” but a college student told WNEP the situation was “comical.”
A parent also told WNEP that the buckets of rocks are “absurd.”
Blue Mountain School District is in Schuylkill County in eastern Pennsylvania, and it contains five schools and at least 190 non-teaching staff and more than 200 faculty.
