More Arizona school districts turn to weapons detectors

MESA, AZ — It’s something many have walked through - a weapons detector. You walk through them at a concert, or a sporting event, and now more Arizona schools are starting to use them.

For a month now at Skyline High School in Mesa, students are getting used to a new norm. Weapons detectors are now set up at the entrances of the school. The weapons detectors are also portable and can be calibrated to different sensitivity levels and detect small knives up to firearms, depending on how a district decides to set them.

When going through the detectors, students do have to take out their binders and laptops since it could trigger the system as it looks for metals. As for those large water tumblers, they can detect if something is inside them, according to Mesa Public Schools’ safety and security director, Allen Moore.

The district started the pilot at Skyline High but plans to roll it out to other high schools by graduation date and to be used during graduation. Eventually, they’ll bring it to junior highs and even look at using them at elementary schools, Moore said.

“Once they leave their kids with us, it's our job to keep their kids 100 percent safe,” said Jay Cryder, an assistant principal with Skyline.

Skyline was chosen for its pilot due to its large square footage and smaller school population. The school had to dwindle down the number of its entrances for students to use the weapons detectors, and soon the district’s other high schools will have to do the same.

While Skyline has not had any instances of guns on campuses recently, according to Moore, the district has had situations where guns were on a school campus in the past.

“In a way, it’s kind of sad we even have to be talking about this, but this is the world we live in. There's been instances around the country, around the world and we have to be proactive,” Moore said.

Since rolling out the system, Moore and Cryder said they have not detected a gun or knives with it.

“I believe they found a couple [of] scissors,” Moore said. Cryder added they were able to detect some vapes as well.

Before getting their own weapons detectors, the district observed them being used at Agua Fria Union High School District (AFUHSD). The district was one of the first in Valley to roll them out.

An AFUHSD spokesperson told ABC15 they have found knives from the weapons detectors but they have not detected a firearm with it.

The Maricopa Unified School District put out the weapons detectors in December in its high schools and has had one incident where they say a licensed firearm holder, a parent, “was not aware of our no-weapons policy. The detectors alerted us, and the individual left responsibly to secure his weapon before returning to sign out his child.”

The Phoenix Union High School District started testing the detectors at two of its schools in November. The district could not tell ABC15 how many, if any, instances came up where a weapon was detected, saying they are doing a study with the Grand Canyon Institute and plan to have a full-data analysis at the end of the pilot. PXU said the pilot should end in December.

The Casa Grande Union High School District governing board recently gave approval to purchase weapons detectors, too. The district has had a few instances in the past few years of students bringing guns onto campus.

“We just really want to do what we can and be more proactive and just and you know, hopefully, we can deter students from making that decision,” said Jennifer Kortsen, a public relations spokesperson for CGUHSD.

However, the approach of using weapons detectors does have its critics.

When more of them started to pop up a few years ago across the country, the ACLU said in part, “Surveillance can’t be the answer to the gun problem,” and also said it could disrupt education.

It has been a learning curve for districts at the start, but at this point, district officials ABC15 has talked with say they feel the detectors work and are only used when students get on campus.

Soon, more school districts could choose to add weapons detectors. Both Moore and Cryder say they’ve had officials from other districts observe their system.

All the five school districts ABC15 listed are using GXC Inc.’s CEIA OPENGATE system.

“We have a lot of school districts that we're in conversations within and around Arizona and they haven't gone public yet,” said Jonathan Sands with GXC Inc.

School officials also believe the weapons detectors are not the only solution; they say it’s just another layer in addition to school resource officers and security guards.

“Anything that we do on our campus is not going to 100% make it fool-proof. I think everything that we've done is best practices,” Cryder said.