By Cindy Von Quednow, CNN
(CNN) — They’re drones that are launched remotely, can break through windows, help clear classrooms and have an embedded speakerphone to communicate with teachers and police. All that before disorienting and incapacitating a potential school shooter in about a minute.
The tiny and quick drones are being deployed in an increasing number of school districts – part of a growing school security industry as parents and schools find new ways to protect students and staff from carnage.
Though it’s hard to put an exact figure on the industry, it’s estimated to be in the billions. Justin Marston, the co-founder and CEO of Campus Guardian Angel, says he estimates between $3 and $4 billion is spent annually on securing schools with tools such as his drones, school resource officers and metal detectors; the Urban Institute think tank estimated $2.62 billion was spent on school resource officers alone in 2023.
It’s all aimed at preventing the unique and devastating reality in the United States of shootings in schools.
Parents who lost children in mass shootings are driving awareness and helping push for improved security measures in schools to try to reduce the threat, and they’re part of the reason the school safety industry has grown to what it is today.
“I think every parent will want to feel that there is some type of capability at their child’s school to confront and stop an active shooter threat versus having to wait the five to eight minutes for the police to get there,” Marston said.
The drones, Marston says, are just a “lump of plastic” – but they’re able to go up against people who are armed and can neutralize them in just 60 seconds. They’re nimble and can provide law enforcement with real-time feedback in an active shooter situation thanks to mounted point of view cameras.
The drones are used in three counties in Florida – funded in part by over $1 million from state allocations – along with five schools in Georgia, where they were funded by the state legislature, Marston said. This month, they’re being deployed for the first time in Colorado, and Marston said they could be going to schools in Texas soon, as school districts have expressed interest and are looking for ways to fund them, CNN affiliate KSAT reported.
The school in Colorado where the drones will be deployed is in the same county as another school where, in 2019, two shooters killed one student and injured eight others.
All four states have experience with high-profile school shootings – Parkland, Apalachee, Uvalde and Columbine.
Hardened security
It was the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that accelerated the multi-billion-dollar security industry, said Jennifer DePaoli, a senior researcher at the Learning Policy Institute, an education research and policy advocacy nonprofit.
The shooting left 17 students and faculty dead and spurred a national reckoning with gun violence in schools and campus safety.
In fact, states poured at least $960 million into student safety in the months following the massacre, according to The 74, a nonprofit news outlet focused on US education.
An example of parent-led change emerged from the Parkland shooting: Florida’s Alyssa’s Law, named after Alyssa Alhadeff, a 14-year-old who was killed. Her parents helped create the law, which requires public schools to install a silent panic alarm system directly linked to law enforcement. Proponents say such a system can reduce response time in the face of gun violence or a medical emergency.
Alyssa’s mother, Lori Alhadeff, advocates for schools nationwide to adopt the systems. Only a dozen other states – New Jersey, New York, Texas, Tennessee, Utah, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Georgia, Washington, Oregon, Virginia and West Virginia – have enacted their own versions.
It’s one example of “school hardening,” which refers to the installation of physical security measures. Other hardening methods, including metal detectors, automatic door locks and security cameras, have been in use at schools across the nation for years. But the measures aren’t foolproof, and there have been incidents of students with guns evading security when a metal detector wasn’t working, or they simply went in through another door.
In January 2025, AI gun detection software – one of the latest efforts to halt violence in schools – failed to detect a student’s gun before he killed a 16-year-old girl at a school in Nashville and fatally shot himself, district officials said at the time. The technology, used in all Metro Nashville Public Schools, didn’t spot the weapon because the shooter wasn’t close enough to cameras for the system to get an accurate read and activate the alarm, the district said.
In separate incidents last October, a student brought a loaded gun to a school in Mobile, Alabama, and bypassed a metal detector on campus before being arrested, CNN affiliate WALA reported, while in Baltimore County, Maryland, an AI-driven security system led to a false positive by flagging a student’s empty bag of chips as a possible firearm.
In 2021, a teen was arrested after wounding two students and injuring two others in a shooting at a high school in Newport News, Virginia. While the campus had metal detectors, they were turned off the morning of the shooting; administrators told CNN the detectors were used during random spot checks rather than daily screenings because they caused delays and bottlenecks.
Security training as one solution
Like physical hardening of schools, active shooter training happens before an actual event. But while one reacts to a weapon being brought onto campus – such as alarms going off – training prepares law enforcement officers to respond.
The Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) at Texas State University, which was founded by former SWAT officers and receives almost all of its funding from the state and the federal government, provides training across the country for civilians and first responders. It starts with an orientation of the topic and goes all the way to live action, scenario-based training, executive director Pete Blair told CNN.
“We’ve done training in more than 9,000 police agencies across the country. We’ve reached more than 250,000 first responders,” Blair said, and that includes some school resource officers.
The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department’s response during the 2023 shooting at The Covenant School was hailed as an example of training successfully put to use.
Video released by police after the shooting showed two officers charging into the school and killing the shooter, who’d just fatally shot three 9-year-olds and three adults and was firing from a window.
Within three minutes of arriving, the officers had killed the attacker.
The police department was “doing our training for some time and taking it very seriously, and they were able to respond effectively,” Blair said.
Quick response times are key to saving lives during an active shooting on campus.
During a 2021 mass shooting at a school in Oxford, Michigan, police responded within minutes of the emergency calls and disarmed a 15-year-old boy in a shooting that killed four students and injured seven others.
“As they were coming down the hall, they saw him. He put his hands up, they took a gun and they took him into custody,” the local sheriff said at the time.
In 2019, deputies arrived at a Denver-area STEM school while shooting was still going on inside, the local sheriff said at the time. Law enforcement arrived within two minutes, officials said, before engaging the two shooters and arresting them.
Preventative measures
Some prefer taking a softer security approach that starts in the classroom, with measures that focus on student supervision, threat assessment and management, and suicide prevention.
“Those three things are all relatively inexpensive compared to a lot of the things people are unfortunately spending money on, and all of them provide, in my experience, a higher level of protection than a lot of those other approaches,” said Michael Dorn, executive director of Safe Havens International, a nonprofit that conducts safety assessments and consulting for schools, government agencies and other organizations. “And they bear fruit even if we never have somebody in the school who would even think about carrying out that type of attack.”
These measures improve a sense of safety on campus, and students feel their mental health needs are being met, Dorn said.
“People want simple solutions to complex problems, and they just don’t exist. It doesn’t mean they’re not solvable, but it means we have to be thoughtful about how we spend our time, energy, and budget – the three things no school system, or independent school, or faith-based school has an excess of,” said Dorn, adding he’s still a proponent of technology such as cameras that detect loitering and AI tools to help with student supervision.
Students have now grown up in an era where preparation for a school shooting is as routine as a fire drill, and while safety measures could make students feel safer in schools, sometimes they can also do the opposite, said DePaoli, of the Learning Policy Institute.
“A lot of these physical hardening measures, they really only hit on one part of it, and that’s physical safety. They don’t really look at how they’re impacting students’ sense of psychological safety, and I think that’s where we get really cautious,” she said.
The school security industry is mostly built on the idea that a school shooting will happen, she said, and that schools must physically prepare to react to an unfolding tragedy, rather than focus on preventing one.
There also isn’t enough data on newer technologies and their effectiveness in making schools safer, DePaoli said. That can make it difficult to justify the cost of implementing them in schools.
Most of the funds spent by states after the Parkland shooting went to security upgrades and school resource officers, but also mental health programs, violence prevention, emergency planning and anonymous phone and texting tip lines, The 74 reported.
That includes federal funds as well as states investing more money directly to school districts to make their own decisions on how to invest in school safety, DePaoli said.
What can work?
Providing mental health support can be effective in helping students get their needs addressed, said DePaoli. And there also has to be trust between students and teachers and among students.
Proactive methods are not just good for school safety, but they’re also good for student learning in general, DePaoli said.
“It makes me really nervous when you hear that billions and billions of dollars are being spent on things that we just don’t know that actually work,” she said.
Marston’s company has applied for grants to evaluate the efficacy of its drones.
“The things that we have done with the FBI and others so far have been very positive, but we would like to see a broader study with more formalized methods that ultimately is published in a peer-reviewed journal,” he said.
State officials have to ask themselves how much they are willing to invest in school safety, Marston said, and understand that having school resource officers at every campus is more expensive than the technology that exists today.
He envisions the technology could one day be commonplace in school buildings.
“The goal is just like sprinklers. You wouldn’t send your kids to a school that didn’t have a sprinkler system. Five years from now, you wouldn’t send them to a school that doesn’t have an active shooter suppression system,” he said.
Campus Guardian Angel says once the drones are in a school, they can cut law enforcement response time by crucial minutes. The drones rip through the hallways scanning for a threat before disorienting a suspect using flashing lights and subduing them using pepper balls or by ramming into their body, the company says. Live video is relayed to law enforcement, giving them a clear picture of what’s going on before officers enter the school.
Simply having drones on campus could serve as a deterrent against potential shooters, Marston said.
“If ultimately the work that I do in this company can help eradicate mass shootings and make every kid safe and make every parent feel better, you know, it will be the most meaningful thing that I do in my life, my career,” Marston said.
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