In the days after the shooting at Apalachee High School, five companies reached out to officials in the small school system northeast of Atlanta, trying to get them to buy technology that screens for weapons at school entrances.
“Let the metal detector emails begin,” one district employee wrote in a message to her co-workers two days after authorities said a 14-year-old student shot and killed four other people at his school, the deadliest school shooting in state history.
Parents and community members have since come to school board meetings in Barrow County to implore the district’s leaders to purchase weapons detectors, among other immediate measures.
Despite the demand for metal detectors, school safety experts, citing research, question their effectiveness to prevent mass shootings. And experts note that few school districts nationwide use detectors.
Less than 10% of schools in the U.S. screen students daily with metal detectors, according to the most recent federal data. They can be expensive, and often require multiple staff members to operate effectively.
But in the face of pressure to do something, school officials often turn to hardware or technology as something visible they can add to schools after a community is rocked by a shooting. Barrow County Schools already had wand detectors at all of its sites for use if needed, but does not currently require all students to pass through free-standing metal detectors upon arriving at school.
Barrow officials met with representatives from Evolv, a company that provides AI-assisted weapons detection systems to schools, in September, messages obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through the Georgia Open Records Act showed. The machines themselves cost upward of $30,000, which doesn’t include the software, installation or maintenance.
Evolv has been the subject of federal probes into its marketing tactics, and a class action lawsuit that accuses company executives of overstating the device’s capabilities. In Charlotte, North Carolina, the system created issues when it falsely identified school-issued laptops as weapons, The Charlotte Observer reported. Several news outlets reported the Utica City School District in upstate New York phased out the system, which cost $3 million, in November 2022 after discovering it struggled to detect knives, according to news reports.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Still, the technology is common across metro Atlanta, used in locations like Lenox Square and Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Several school systems have purchased the technology in recent years, including DeKalb, the state’s third-largest school system. The DeKalb County School District agreed in 2023 to pay more than $8 million over four years to use Evolv weapons detectors in about 40 schools.
DeKalb’s chief of staff Elijah Palmer said in an emailed statement that the system has “proven reliable and serves as a deterrent against bringing weapons onto school properties.” So far this school year, the system has found one handgun. That’s down from four in the 2023-2024 school year, and 24 in the 2022-2023 school year before the system’s implementation.
AI-assisted detectors are the latest iteration, but metal detectors have long been used in public spaces. Several studies in recent years concluded that there’s no clear evidence to suggest metal detectors prevent school violence. Further, rather than preventing violence in schools, studies indicate metal detectors can send the message to students that schools are not safe. And comparatively, schools are safe: Less than 1% of homicides in the U.S. in 2022 occurred in schools, according to estimates from the FBI.
“The research doesn’t show that they’re all that effective at even detecting weapons,” said Anthony Petrosino, the director of the Justice and Prevention Research Center at WestEd, an education research group. “They’re sort of a symbolic thing that says we’ve got security here, we’re not going to let any guns through.”
Often, that’s what the community is looking for. Layla Renee Contreras, who has a sister and mother at Apalachee High, organized Change for Chee after the shooting. The advocacy group started a petition signed by more than 1,400 people calling for a delayed start date, a clear bag policy and weapons detectors.
“Here we are, still waiting for meaningful action,” Contreras said at a recent school board meeting.
Credit: Photo provided
Credit: Photo provided
Around the same time as parents were asking the board for visible security measures, five different weapons detection or metal detector companies contacted Barrow County’s top school officials in the three weeks after the shooting, emails reviewed by the AJC showed. Those messages built upon dozens of sales pitches sent in the previous 12 months.
The pitches were from a number of companies, and included everything from invitations to demonstrations, direct emails to district staff and, in one case, the offer of free devices after the shooting. They claimed to have low rates of false positives, referenced other Georgia counties that used the technology or assured the recipient the technology was “relatively inexpensive, flexible and easy to operate.”
“School security has become a multibillion-dollar industry based on an inflated fear of school shootings,” said Dewey Cornell, a professor at the University of Virginia and director of the Virginia Youth Violence Project. “Even if we made our schools perfectly secure fortresses, most fatal school shootings occur outside the school building.”
In Barrow County, district administrators are reviewing potential safety enhancements, including metal or weapons detectors, with school-based committees. They plan to send out a community survey soon and to present recommendations to the board in early 2025, district spokeswoman Nicole Valles said.
Experts hope they’ll prioritize prevention over reaction.
“The whole idea of weapon detection is really too late,” said Cornell, who developed the Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines. “Prevention has to start before there’s a gun in the school.”
Researchers and security experts recommend districts invest in more staff who can build relationships with students, and systems that can help them if they’re struggling.
Georgia has one of the worst student-to-school psychologist ratios in the country, according to the most recent data available from the National Association of School Psychologists. The recommended ratio is 500 students to one psychologist. Georgia’s ratio is 1 psychologist for every 2,077 students.
In the case of Apalachee High, multiple adults knew the 14-year-old who is accused of killing four people at the school was struggling.
“Really it’s a systems problem,” Cornell said, “of sharing information and having support systems available to work with these troubled young people long before they show up with a gun.”
Credit: John Spink
Credit: John Spink
Credit: John Spink
Credit: John Spink
Credit: John Spink
Credit: John Spink
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