Schools Are Spending Billions on High-Tech Defense for Mass Shootings

Reid Bauer was finishing lunch period last year at his middle school in the Atlanta area when an alarm began blaring through the halls, warning of an emergency. Reid, then in sixth grade, had never heard the school’s “code red” alert before.

It was part of a new $5 million crisis management service that the Cobb County School District in Marietta, Ga., had purchased. District officials had promoted the system, called AlertPoint, as “state-of-the art technology” that could help save students’ lives in the event of a school shooting.

That day, however, AlertPoint went haywire, sending false alarms to schools across one of the nation’s largest districts, causing lockdowns and frightening students.

“Everybody was just really scared,” said Reid, now 13. Fearing for his life, he said, he turned off all the lights in his classroom and instructed his classmates to crouch along one wall, out of sight of the windows. “One kid actually tried calling 911,” he said.

Schools have been struggling with how to hinder, and handle, mass shootings since 1999, when two gunmen armed with semiautomatic weapons killed 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. Trying to avert similar attacks has become a nerve-racking mission for tens of thousands of school leaders in the United States.

Safety anxieties are helping to fuel a multibillion-dollar industry of school security products. Some manufacturers sell gun-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 monitor their online activities — bringing into classrooms the kind of surveillance tools widely used by law enforcement.

In 2021, schools and colleges in the United States spent an estimated $3.1 billion on security products and services, compared with $2.7 million in 2017, according to Omdia, a market-research company. Security trade groups have lobbied for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal and state funding for school safety measures. The gun legislation that Congress passed last week includes an additional $300 million to bolster school security.

Security and technology directors at half a dozen school districts said in interviews that some products were vital. One pointed to security camera systems that had helped his district observe and gauge the severity of school fires. Others mentioned crisis-alert technology that the school staff may use to summon help during an emergency.

The district officials offered more varied opinions on the sophisticated-sounding systems — like high-tech threat detectors — that promise to heighten security through the use of artificial intelligence.

But there is little hard evidence to suggest that safety technologies have prevented or mitigated catastrophic school events like mass shootings, according to a 2016 report on school safety technology by researchers at Johns Hopkins University.

“There can be a tendency to grab the latest technology and make it appear that you are doing something really protective and very innovative,” said Brian Casey, the technology director at Stevens Point Area Public School District in Wisconsin. “We really have to take a step back and look at it and say: What benefit are we getting out of this? And what’s the cost?”

Civil liberty experts warn that the spread of surveillance technologies like gun detectors may make some students feel less safe. They say the tools also do nothing to address what many consider to be the underlying causes of school shootings: the widespread availability of assault weapons and a national mental health crisis.

“Much of this tech serves the function of a distraction,” said Chris Harris, the policy director for the Austin Justice Coalition, a racial justice group in Texas.

Wesley Watts, the superintendent of West Baton Rouge Parish Schools, a district in Louisiana with about 4,200 students, said that creating a supportive school culture was more important for safety than security technology. Even so, certain tools may give schools “an extra layer of security,” he said.

His district recently began using video analysis from a start-up called ZeroEyes that scans school camera feeds, looking for guns. The company, founded by U.S. 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 personnel who check any gun images the system detects before notifying a school. The company says its human review process ensures school officials will not receive false gun alerts.

The ZeroEyes service can cost $5,000 per month for a single high school with 200 cameras. Mr. Watts, whose district uses the service across 250 school cameras, said the cost was worth it.

Several months ago, the superintendent said,…