10/26/2024
** Salem-Keizer to put weapon detectors in all its high schools **
The Salem-Keizer School District will become the first in Oregon to install weapons detectors at all six of its comprehensive high schools at a cost of at least $1.5 million, Superintendent Andrea Castañeda said Friday.
The district is likely to expand the technology to its middle schools as well, she said.
About half of the cost will be covered by money from a settlement with the va**ng company Juul, with the remainder coming from Salem-Keizer’s risk management fund.
Conversations about school security and safety systems have been a sensitive topic in Oregon for nearly 30 years, since a 15-year-old student at Thurston High School outside of Springfield opened fire in the school’s cafeteria in 1998, killing two classmates and wounding 25 others.
But until now, no school district in the state has installed weapons detection systems — familiar to
anyone who has been to the airport, a concert or major league sporting event — at all of its high schools. Only about 6% of high schools nationwide use the technology, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and most are large urban high schools serving a high percentage of diverse students from low-income backgrounds.
Salem-Keizer, the second largest school district in Oregon, generally fits that profile. Forty-six percent of its student body is Latino, and 16% of its students live below the poverty line, as is typical in large urban districts such those in Miami, Las Vegas and Denver. (In Portland and Beaverton, Oregon’s two other largest districts, child poverty is only half that high.)
Salem-Keizer already has installed weapon detectors at one of its high schools and plans to install them at a second in the coming weeks.
“While there are many things I would like us to be first in, I wish this wasn’t the thing,” Castañeda said in an interview. “But it might be the case that school systems in Oregon are now in the early stages of (realizing) what many in other states have already: That additional safety layers are not only possible, but a matter of fundamental importance. A one-time investment in a comprehensive layer of safety is well worth the value that it brings to our system, and the peace of mind it brings to our staff and students.”
STUDENT CONCERNS
Salem began piloting the weapons detectors at the 2,133-student South Salem High last spring after a shooting at a park three blocks from the school killed 16-year-old Jose Vazquez-Valenzuela, a South Salem sophomore, and wounded two other teens. The shooting occurred on a Thursday afternoon, during a school day. Another 16-year-old student from South Salem, Nathaniel Shauntae McCrae Jr., was arrested on second-degree murder and attempted murder charges.
Students, in particular, were initially skeptical about the detection system, the district’s internal surveys suggested, saying they thought it would make them late to class. About half of the 679 South Salem High students surveyed before the system went in told the district that they thought having to go through a detection system when they arrived at school would make them feel less welcome at school; only 35% thought they would feel safer as a result.
This fall, internal surveys suggest that those positions have thawed. Forty-eight percent of the 1,066 South Salem students who took a survey in the fall told the district that they felt safer at school because of the system, while the number who said that passing through the weapons detectors made them feel less welcome at school had fallen to about a third.
Staff were more enthusiastic: Of the 50 employees who took a fall survey, 72% said that they felt safer as a result of the system.
Castañeda said she was well-aware of the school of thought that weapons detection systems are mere safety theater, hardware that’s cheaper than investing in more mental health supports for students, for example — or, on a far broader scale, passing meaningful gun control legislation. The technology is far from the only solution to a complicated problem that has disproportionately fallen to schools, she said.
“But I offer the perspective that the feeling of safety is so fundamental to learning that if there are measures we can take (to increase that), it is not theatrical,” Castañeda said. “It is a prerequisite for learning.”
PORTLAND AREA SCHOOLS
Like Portland Public Schools, Salem-Keizer stopped paying for armed school resource officers in 2020, amidst coast-to-coast unrest over the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis and the subsequent national examination of racial bias in law enforcement practices.
Both districts have since grappled with spurts of gun-related violence in the vicinity of their schools. Portland experimented in the fall of 2023 with a mobile weapons detection system at a football game between McDaniel and Lincoln High Schools, not long after a shooting in the parking lot during a basketball game at Franklin High School.
But Portland went no further, director of security and emergency services Molly Romey said.
“We have not been able to find a solution for the staffing requirements to run the system,” Romey said. “Each detection unit requires a minimum of three people to safely run the unit. Internally, we do not have the resources or funding to staff the systems and still provide safety support at athletic contests.”
Student activists in Portland area school districts have consistently called for a focus on adding mental health supports, including hiring more social workers who can connect students and their families with community services, as well as broader gun control measures, like increasing the age at which Oregonians can purchase semi-automatic long guns.
Jorge Sanchez-Bautista, a McDaniel High School senior who has urged Portland school board members to do more to counter gun violence, said he could understand and even empathize with Salem-Keizer’s decision to turn to weapons detectors. But he questioned how it would play out.
“Let’s say that they found a gun, how does that process look?” Sanchez-Bautista asked. “That’s my big question. What if it was a white student versus a student of color? How would it be dealt with by the folks that are scanning and by the administration? How do you make sure that they are not biased?”
PART OF THE ROUTINE
Since the pilot began at South Salem, over the course of more than 56,000 scans, no guns have been detected, Castañeda said. But the system did detect knives and v**e pens, which officials confiscated.
Sofia Castellanos, a senior at South Salem, said she’d been stopped routinely since the system went in, often because of a musical instrument in her bag, and that the interactions with security officials had been pleasant and matter-of-fact.
“I would much rather get stopped for my umbrella setting the weapons detector off than a gun just going through,” she said. “It’s just, like, you open your backpack pockets and they dig through a little bit and that’s it.”
Her fellow students were skeptical and worried about being late to class, Castellanos said, but these days, she said students seem to accept it as part of their daily routine, particularly the freshmen class, who’ve never known a different system.
The district’s early disciplinary data from the first month of the school year shows a significant decrease in behavior incidents at South Salem when compared to prior years.
SPURT OF INCIDENTS
Statewide, this fall has been peppered with school safety incidents. Several were social media threats that proved baseless but still resulted in police investigations, shuttered schools, canceled events or prompted community-wide alarm.
Others ended with the arrest of students.
For example, a 12-year-old student at Pilot Butte Middle School in Bend was arrested Monday after brandishing a loaded handgun at school, according to police. An 11-year-old at Skyridge Middle School in Camas was arrested after bringing a gun to school on Sept. 25, police said.
And a teenager at Gresham High was taken into custody on Sept. 20 after police said they brought a gun into their school. Gresham High’s principal resigned this week amid concerns over her handling of that incident.
SPENDING ON SAFETY
An increasing number of Oregon school districts have made safety-related investments in the last decade or so, part of a nationwide spending spree on security.
Portland Public Schools has installed surveillance cameras at all of its schools and says it has installed new hardware on classroom doors to allow them to be locked from inside in the event of a threat. In addition to safe and secure entryways, all of the district’s schools are equipped with lockdown hardware, which allows all perimeter and classroom doors to be locked with the touch of a button.
A school district in Klamath Falls has experimented with linking artificial intelligence technology to its security cameras, to try to flag anyone carrying a gun onto school property. The Redmond School District in Central Oregon updated entryways in elementary schools: Visitors now get buzzed into a vestibule where a front office employee can view them before buzzing them through a second locked door.
Logistically, installing the weapons detection systems, made by California-based Evolv, at Salem-Keizer high schools has been complicated, Castaneda said. Some of its sprawling high schools have more than 80 entrances, and crews spent weeks installing alarm systems to dissuade students and staff from using entry points other than the main entrances where the weapon detections systems are located.
The next of the district’s high schools to get its system will be McKay High, with its four other comprehensive high schools to follow over the course of the school year.
[email protected]
