MESA, AZ — Mesa Public Schools will add more safety measures to its junior high and high school campuses in the next few months.
In Tuesday night’s board meeting, the board voted 4-0 to start piloting weapons detectors at Skyline High School, as well as expand the use of vape sensors. School officials say Skyline is a good school to test out the detectors since they do not have as many students as other schools but also have a bigger campus square footage-wise.
Allen Moore, the district’s director of school safety and security, said they hope to start rolling out the weapons detectors at Skyline in January and then to other high schools and junior highs following that. The point of the pilot is to test out protocols and ensure operations go smoothly.
“We’re hoping that by spring break in March, we’ll have all the bugs worked out and then we can start rolling them out as the products come in,” he said.
While Moore understands the weapons detectors won’t stop guns from coming on campus “100%,” he said it will help. The district has had a few instances where kids brought guns on campus in the last year.
“In my opinion, one’s more than enough,” he said of guns on campuses. “We don’t want any guns on campuses. We really want our schools to be gun-free zones.”
The district will also be expanding the use of vape detectors to its other high schools and junior high schools. Moore said some students have told administrators they do not feel safe going to the bathrooms since other students vape in them.
MPS is currently piloting them in the bathrooms at Red Mountain High School. Moore said school administrators are getting alerts that they’re going off, hoping to deter kids from vaping in the bathrooms, where there is no supervision or cameras.
“I’m not really interested in catching kids. I’m interested in stopping kids. I want to put signs up. I want to make it well known that we have vape sensors in all our bathrooms and the bathrooms are no longer a safe place for you to go to if you smoke vape,” Moore said.
