At the beginning of March, the NC Department of Public Instruction (DPI) sent out its monthly educator survey. March’s survey had two questions, exclusively on guns in the classroom.

This survey was fundamentally flawed from the get-go, as the link to the survey was open to more than just educators. In addition, anyone using an incognito web window could take the survey as many times as they wanted.

I asked Superintendent Johnson if this survey was intended to be public but received no response. I also requested the raw results from DPI, which I did receive.

WRAL made matters worse and jumped the gun, so to speak, in reporting early results.

In case the image in the above tweet was hard to read, here’s a close up:

The first question was “Would you like to carry a firearm at school?”

Here are the responses:

Yes  5615 (24.75%)
No 14869 (65.53% )
Not Sure  2207 (9.73%)

23 respondents skipped the question.

The second question was “Assuming they had extra training, would you like to have certain teachers or administrators at your school to have access to firearms?”

Here are the responses:

Yes  9268 (40.83%)
No  11214 (49.40%)
Not Sure 2219 ( 9.77%)

13 respondents skipped the question.

Question two is arguably more telling than question one. While educators seem to not want to be armed themselves, more seem to want to have training and someone on staff who is armed.

Given the survey was wide open to the public and anyone could take it multiple times if they used an incognito window,  I asked DPI a follow-up question: Was any data (repeating IP addresses or repeated incognito window sessions) scrubbed from the final results?

I have not yet received a reply to this question.