Reid Baeur was finishing his lunch break at his high school in the Atlanta area last year when an alarm began blaring through the hallways, warning of an emergency. Reid, then in sixth grade, had never heard the school’s “code red” warning.
It was part of a new $5 million crisis management service purchased by the Cobb County School District in Marietta, Georgia. District officials had promoted the system, called AlertPoint, as “state-of-the-art technology” that could save students’ lives in the event of a school shooting.
That day, however, AlertPoint went haywire and sent false alarms to schools in one of the country’s largest districts, resulting in lockdowns and terrifying students.
“Everyone was just really scared,” said Reid, now 13. Fearing for his life, he said, he turned off all the lights in his class and instructed his classmates to squat along a wall, out of sight of the windows. “One kid even tried to call 911,” he said.
Schools have struggled with how to prevent and deal with mass shootings since 1999, when two gunmen armed with semi-automatic weapons killed 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. It has become a nerve-wracking process to avert similar attacks. mission for tens of thousands of school leaders in the United States.
Security concerns are helping fuel a multi-billion dollar industry of school security products. Some manufacturers sell weapon detection scanners and wireless panic buttons for school districts. Others offer high-resolution cameras and software that can identify students’ faces, track their locations, and track their online activities — enabling classroom surveillance tools common to law enforcement officers.
In 2021, schools and colleges in the United States spent an estimated $3.1 billion on security products and services, compared to $2.7 million in 2017, according to Omdia, a market research firm. Security trade groups have lobbied for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal and state funding for security measures in schools. The gun laws passed by Congress last week include an additional $300 million to bolster security in schools.
Safety and technology directors from half a dozen school districts said in interviews that some products were vital. One pointed to security camera systems that had helped his district monitor and gauge the severity of school fires. Others mentioned crisis alert technology that school staff can use to call for help during an emergency.
The district officials expressed differing opinions about the sophisticated sounding systems – such as high-tech threat detectors – that promise to increase security through the use of artificial intelligence.
But there’s little hard evidence to suggest that safety technologies have prevented or reduced catastrophic school events like mass shootings, according to a 2016 report on school safety technology by researchers at Johns Hopkins University.
Read more about artificial intelligence
“There can be a tendency to grab the latest technology and make it look like you’re doing something really protective and very innovative,” said Brian Casey, the technology director for Stevens Point Area Public School District in Wisconsin. “We really need to step back and look at it and say, what benefit are we getting out of this? And what are the costs?”
Civil liberties experts warn that the proliferation of surveillance technologies such as weapon detectors could make some students feel less safe. They say the tools also do nothing to address what many consider to be the root causes of school shootings: the widespread availability of assault weapons and a national mental health crisis.
“A lot of this technology serves as a distraction,” said Chris Harris, the policy director for the Austin Justice Coalition, a Texas racial justice group.
Wesley Watts, the superintendent of West Baton Rouge Parish Schools, a Louisiana district of about 4,200 students, said creating a supportive school culture is more important to safety than security technology. Still, certain tools can give schools “an extra layer of security,” he said.
His district recently started using video analytics from a start-up called ZeroEyes that scans school CCTV footage for weapons. The company, founded by US military veterans, said it used so-called machine learning to train its system to recognize about 300 types of assault rifles and other firearms.
ZeroEyes also employs former military and law enforcement officers who check any weapon images the system detects before notifying a school. The company says the human review process ensures that school officials do not receive false gun warnings.
The ZeroEyes service can cost $5,000 per month for a single high school with 200 cameras. Mr Watts, whose district uses the service for 250 school cameras, said the cost was worth it.
Several months ago, the inspector said, ZeroEyes discovered a young man with a gun outside near a high school job. Shortly afterwards, the company’s reviewers identified the object as an Airsoft pistol, a plastic toy replica. That allowed district staff to intervene directly with the student without calling the police, Mr. Watts.
“That makes it worth having for me, even if there weren’t any real weapons,” said Mr. Watts.
The ZeroEyes technology has limited applications. It’s meant to detect visible weapons while in use — not in a holster or hidden under jackets, said Mike Lahiff, the CEO of ZeroEyes.
Other districts have run into trouble with new security tools.
In 2019, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, one of the largest U.S. school districts with more than 140,000 students, introduced an emergency alert system. It came from Centegix, an Atlanta-based company that promised its wearable panic badges would provide all school employees “a direct way to notify the appropriate staff and authorities” of emergencies or other incidents.
The district spent more than $1.1 million on the system. But it later sued Centegix to recover the money after an investigation by The Charlotte Observer detailed flaws in the badge service.
Among other issues, the badges “repeatedly failed” to notify staff, sent erroneous critical warning messages and caused “significant delays in critical safety information,” according to legal documents filed in the case. The district settled with Centegix for $475,000.
Mary Ford, Centegix’s chief marketing officer, said schools in Charlotte had piloted the alert system and the company was addressing issues that arose. The company has issued more than 100,000 warnings, she added, and worked with nearly 200 school districts, retaining 99 percent of those customers, excluding Charlotte-Mecklenburg.
This spring, following an increase in student weapons seized, Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools introduced another security system: walk-through weapon scanners costing $5 million for 52 scanners in 21 high schools.
The scanners come from Evolv Technology, a Massachusetts start-up that said it had used machine learning to train its system to recognize magnetic fields around guns and other concealed weapons. “You don’t have to stop,” says the company’s website, “no emptying or removing bags.”
But common student items have routinely detonated Evolv scanners, including laptops, umbrellas, three-ring binders, spiral-bound notebooks and metal water bottles.
In an instructional video about the scanners posted to YouTube in April, Matthew Garcia, dean of students at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Butler High School, recommends that students remove those items from their bags and carry them. Then Mr. Garcia showed the students how to avoid activating the system—by walking through an Evolv scanner in the school lobby and holding a laptop with his arms stretched above his head.
Brian Schultz, the chief operations officer of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, said the scanners were more accurate and much quicker to use in large high schools than traditional metal detectors. He said the need for students to remove items from their bags was a “short-term inconvenience” to improve school safety.
“There will never be one perfect solution.” Mr. Schultz said, adding that the district was taking a “layered” approach to safety, including cameras, security officers and an increasing number of school-based mental health personnel.
Mike Ellenbogen, the chief innovation officer at Evolv, said the company was working with school districts on ways to make the scanning system run more smoothly.
Cobb County was the first school district in Georgia to use AlertPoint, an alarm system developed by a local start-up. District officials said AlertPoint’s wearable panic badges would help school workers quickly call for a lockdown or call for help in an emergency.
Then, in February 2021, the AlertPoint system sent false alarms across the district, leading to closures at all Cobb County schools. District officials initially said AlertPoint was not working properly. A few weeks later, they announced that hackers had deliberately activated the false alerts.
At a school board meeting this month, Chris Ragsdale, the district’s superintendent, said the system had worked until the cyberattack.
But Heather Tolley-Baeur, Reid’s mother and co-founder of a local watchdog group that monitors school spending, said she blamed district leaders for deploying unproven technology.
The Cobb County School District did not respond to specific questions about the security measures. In a statement, Nan Kiel, a district spokeswoman, said: “To keep our students and staff safe, we are keeping operational details about our schools private.” (The school district is the subject of a grand jury investigation into certain past purchases, including millions of dollars spent on UV lamps intended to clean classrooms during the pandemic, according to The Marietta Daily Journal.)
This month, schools in Cobb County announced they were installing new crisis warning technology from Centegix, the company whose warning badges were failing at schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. Palm Beach, Florida, another major school district, also announced a deal with the company.
