Henrico Schools to place weapons scanners in all high schools by first day of school

Henrico Schools will have weapons detectors at all high schools by the first day of school, Aug. 21, school system officials said Wednesday.

Two main entrances of high schools will each have two to three weapons detectors staffed by school security officers, school resource officers, or school administrators. Officials hope to place them in middle schools next and then elementary schools to cover all 73 schools at some point during the 2023-2024 school year.

The number of weapons scanners placed at each school will be determined by the number of students, according to HCPS Chief of Operations Lenny Pritchard. Schools will prioritize putting scanners at the entrances students use the most, such as main entrances, bus loops, entrances near parking lots or parent drop-off areas. Not all entrances will have weapons scanners.

HCPS finalized the process and began purchasing detectors a month ago. The decision follows several incidents at Henrico Schools during which students brought weapons to school campuses, including an incident in May when a student at Longdale Elementary brought a gun to school.

While weapons detectors will be set up by the first day of school, the school system is still working to hire more SSOs to oversee the devices. As of Aug. 7, HCPS still had 54 vacant SSO positions throughout the county.

“Staffing is the number one issue when you’re talking about weapons detection technology in schools,” HCPS School Safety Manager John Casullo said.

Every student who enters the school will walk through the scanners with their belongings but take out their laptops, which would activate the scanner, and place them on a rolling tray table. Two scanner units can process 800 students within 30 minutes, according to Pritchard.

If a scanner activates – with a beeping sound going off and the green light turning red – the student will put his or her backpack on the rolling table and walk through the scanner again. If the scanner continues to sound, SSOs will pull the student to a nearby table to conduct a wand scan. If the backpack is what set the scanner off, the SSO will search through the student’s bag.

Apart from laptops, large metal water bottles may set off the detector, but smaller items such as a phone or keys will not.

“It’s a more sophisticated system – you don’t have to unload all of your pockets, you can just walk through,” HCPS spokesperson Eileen Cox said. “It’s just those big things, like those big Stanley water bottles, laptops, those will all be pushed through on the table.”

Casullo said that officials chose scanners that were “less intrusive” and “more efficient” to ensure that students and staff were comfortable.

“We’re trying to make sure that we’re not building fortresses,” he said. “We are still educators in our schools. We want to maintain that school environment, that positive school environment.”

After field testing at six Henrico schools, including one elementary school, Pritchard said he received positive feedback from the students who tried out the detectors.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen on the first day, but I do know that at the schools we visited it was very well received,” he said. “Kids were actually thanking us, telling us, ‘thank you for doing this.’”

Pritchard said he expects schools to “condense student traffic” into the entrances with scanners. The scanners will also be used at large school sport events, such as basketball or football games, but cannot be used for every extracurricular activity. Hermitage High School experienced a shots-fired incident at a football game in 2021.

SSOs, SROs, and school administrators attended training sessions to learn about the weapons detectors on Wednesday, with instruction from the company that sold the equipment. Weapons scanners will not cover the areas outside the school building, despite findings from the K-12 School Shooting Database that 70% of school shootings started outside school doors. SROs will be on duty to deal with any incidents outside of the building, according to Pritchard.

Henrico parents will have the chance to see the new scanners at school open houses, according to Casullo. HCPS also will send parents videos and other communications to familiarize them with the technology.

Although Casullo said the detectors have received “tremendous support” from the community, parents have pushed the school system to quicken the process of implementing the detectors in all schools.

“Many of our families were asking us back when we first started this process, ‘why can’t we move faster?’” Casullo said. “And at the end of the day, we wanted to make sure that we were doing our due diligence, to make sure that we’d done our research.”

Staffing shortages have also slowed down the process, but HCPS is actively recruiting more SSOs before the start of school, according to Pritchard.

The main goal is to make sure that students and staff feel safe coming to school, according to Casullo.

“Everything that we do from a safety standpoint is for them,” Casullo said about students. “We don’t want them to go to school and be concerned, ‘am I going to be safe walking to that building everyday?’”

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Liana Hardy is the Citizen’s Report for America Corps member and education reporter. Support her work by making a tax-deductible contribution to the Citizen through RFA here.