MESA, AZ — More school districts are looking to stop weapons from coming onto campus. Mesa Public Schools, Arizona’s largest school district, hopes to test out weapons detectors and add even more security measures.
In a board meeting on Tuesday night, school district technology as well as safety and security leaders proposed some recommendations to the governing board. One included adding weapons detectors at its schools, but first hoping to test out a pilot at Skyline High School.
The district said it chose Skyline High because of the campus size and the smaller student population.
“We believe we've got it nailed down to about three entry points on our campus. We have the staff to implement and oversee it,” Skyline High School Principal Gregory Mendez said at the board meeting.
District staff went to Verrado High School in the Agua Fria Union High School District to see how the weapons detectors work. ABC15 went to Verrado High in April, taking a look at the system as the district worked to expand it to all schools. AFUHSD officials recently told ABC15 they’ve had zero known weapons on campus since they put in the detectors.
More Arizona school districts are looking into using the security measure. The Phoenix Union High School District and its board recently voted to start a pilot project for the weapons detectors at two of its high schools in the coming weeks.
GXC, Inc., a company that’s helping put them in schools, says the systems are being used more widely now, even at large, populated events. CEO Genaro Cavazos said more districts have been reaching out.
“It's more like schools are understanding that they'd rather be at that level of protection to kind of create that consistency. And if something's going to happen, at least they know it's less likely to happen here because we've done something proactively,” Cavazos said.
Danielle Alvarez, a Mesa mom, has two children attending Holmes Elementary. On Monday, the school went into lockdown due to an unrelated police situation just minutes away. Alvarez believes weapons detectors would be another layer to keeping her children safe.
“If that means my child gets to come home to me at the end of the day, that's all that matters to me,” she said.
Mesa Public Schools said with the weapons detectors proposal, they would use them at junior high schools and high schools. District officials said if they have weapons on campus, that’s usually where they see them. It’s possible they could put them in elementary schools but not at the start of the rollout.
If the board approves the pilot project for the weapons detectors, they will start it sometime in the second semester. It is currently unknown how long the pilot project would be done and if and when it would go to more schools.
The district also hopes to partner with the City of Mesa and the police department, wanting to give them access to school security cameras only in the event of an emergency. If an emergency were to happen, the police department would be able to log into the district’s security camera and see what’s happening in real-time.
“We had an incident at Skyline last year where somebody called in an active shooter in the cafeteria, and the calvary was coming… If we had the real-time crime center access to our cameras, they could've downgraded that immediately because they would've seen there's nothing going on in the cafeteria,” Moore said.
Gilbert Public Schools and the Gilbert Police Department have that partnership already. It started last school year, and police tell ABC15 it hasn’t logged into the school’s camera system since starting it because there haven’t been any big incidents.
Officer Levi Leyba, a public information officer with Gilbert Police, said the district shares its camera system with the police department through a secure cloud access portal provided by the security camera company the district uses. If there’s an emergency, the police department can connect to the camera and access it from the police department’s dispatch center through a secure log-in. They would be able to see any events in real time.
Leyba said to ensure compliance with the district’s agreement, the district’s surveillance system can produce audit logs detailing who is accessing the security system and the date and time.
Mesa Public Schools also plans to roll out a system to help track students on the bus and know when they get on and get off. Students would just get an ID and then tap it into a system on the bus. The district said there’s no tracking or GPS on the ID. It can be similar to IDs that schools use to get into a building.
The district is also working through a pilot project at Red Mountain High School to help deter vape use in the bathrooms. Since rolling it out at one of the bathrooms at the high school, school administrators have been getting alerts that students are vaping. On average, the school said it's receiving about 15 alerts a day.
The sensors can detect the chemicals that come from vapes. District leaders say students have relayed issues with using the bathrooms in part due to other students vaping.
The school board will meet again the last week of November and could vote on the weapons detectors, vape sensors and agreement with the city for the security camera access.
