The Schenectady Board of Education has approved new security measures that will put weapons detection systems in place.
Since the beginning of the school year, Schenectady has experienced safety issues and parental concerns. There have been schoolyard fights, pre-teens charged with making threats on social media against the district, a student bringing a BB gun to school and two students injured in a knife fight on school grounds. The school board has openly discussed concerns at meetings and held a listening session with parents and caregivers.
District Director of School Climate and Safety Jeff Russo put forth a proposition that the district use its recent $500,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security to bolster student safety.
"We basically wrote out what we thought we needed," said Russo.
Weapons detection systems are coming to four district schools after a 6-1 school board vote approved the plan for purchase and installation.
Board member Jamaica Miles has been a staunch opponent of having police and metal detectors at Schenectady High. She addressed the panel shortly before she cast the dissenting vote.
"I'm concerned that if we move forward with weapons detection, that it goes against the DEI policy that we currently have, specifically within the DEI policy 8140, paraphrasing some of it, 'inequities associated with aspects of their identities and marginalization of any people or groups of people, whether intentional or not, have no place in our schools, our district or our community,'" said Miles, who argued the board has data that says the weapons detection initiative is "going to disproportionately impact all the marginalized people."
Russo says the Request For Proposals have been sent out.
"When I was doing my examinations to see what technology was out there, I did compare four different companies," Russo said. It's kind of where I landed with one being a traditional metal detector, and then three others that fell into the realm of what they now call an AI weapons detection system. And what that entails is a couple of towers, generally, that you walk past. And with AI technology, it actually works in conjunction with a tablet that then shows the outline of a person, and it highlights where the detection is, whether it's a weapon of mass destruction, a gun, a pipe bomb, they can find various types of weapons. The one thing that all weapons detection systems struggle with is really knives, knives can be tricky, because they're smaller and they don't have a specific shape to them, like a barrel of a gun."
Russo says new AI technology is often used in conjunction with other screening techniques.
"We don't search bags routinely. We definitely do not want to get in the habit of searching through everybody's bag. We definitely want to pick the best technology for what we need, which is to get all of our students into the building safely," said Russo.
Will all the tension in the air Russo says he would like to expedite the selection process and have the screening equipment in place by the new year.
"Once we put this out to the companies and those respond that are interested, we're going to invite them here for what we'll call a safety fair. We're hoping to have a safety fair towards the end of October where we can invite the public in to kind of view these different systems and see what they do, see what they're good at, see what they're not good at. So again, that'd be towards the end of October. Once we have our safety fair and get some input on what people like and don't like, we would look to make a selection and hopefully implement, you know, it would require us to hire a few more staff. It would require us to train. We'd be looking at probably the holiday break towards the end of December, and as far as an implementation goes. And so for the new year, we would be looking to open up our high school with the weapons detection system," Russo said.
Once installed, operational and after working out any kinks, Russo says installations would follow at the district's three middle schools.
