Scanners in schools: Community turns out to see how they work at Smith High in Greensboro

The scanners are designed to detect and deter concealed guns from being brought into the buildings. A second community meeting is planned for Thursday at High Point Central High School from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.

“Really we want the community to come out and tell us what they think, tell us how they feel about it and a lot of our opinion will be based on that,” said Mike Richey, the district’s executive director of emergency management. “If the community is supportive of it, then we will probably go forward. If we do go forward, we would love to go forward fairly quickly, for the simple reason that any change goes much more smoothly when we put it in place before the school year comes.”

Guilford County Schools is borrowing the Evolv Express touchless body scanners before deciding whether to lease them for its traditional high schools across the district. Leaders expect that could cost between $750,000 and $1 million per year, with the money to come from the district’s federal COVID-19 relief dollars.

The number of scanners needed per school would depend on the configuration of the school. Richey said that Smith will eventually need two scanners, for two different entrances, and High Point Central may require three. For now, only one scanner is in place at each school.

Prince Canty, an assistant principal at Eastern High School, said he thinks the new scanners would add a layer of protection and security at his school. He visited Smith to learn more about them and give some thought to how scanners might be implemented at Eastern, including how to assign roles among staff and administrators.

Chanetta Arnold, a staff member at Greensboro’s SCALE school who also has a child at Smith, said she feels it would be safer for her child to have the device in place.

Smith alumnus Kim Stroud and her mother, Gail Stroud, were two community members who came out to see the scanners. They had a variety of questions for the county’s director of emergency management, Mike Richey, including how the district picked where the scanners would be.

Richey said Smith and High Point Central are hosting students from multiple schools for summer school, so they have a good number of students in the buildings and they are centrally located in Greensboro and High Point for the community meetings.

If district officials like how the scanners work in the high schools, he said, they may consider adding them in middle schools as well.

Both Kim and Gail Stroud said they thought it made sense to have the scanners in schools, due to school shootings across the country in recent years. But they expressed horror and frustration that they should ever be needed.

District leaders already were looking at getting the scanners prior to the recent shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Richey said the scanners are unlikely to prevent that sort of shooting, during which an adult gunman came in a back door bent on mass murder.

Most school shootings, however, don’t fit that profile.

At the most recent school board meeting, Richey shared an analysis by the Center for Homeland Defense and Security of data on school shootings from 1970 through the present. That data found that the most common reason for a school shooting was the escalation of a dispute, followed by accidental shootings and suicide attempts. Students were the most common assailants.

Under the district’s plans, students would walk through a scanner upon entering the school building. As they go through, a staff member would watch and listen at a nearby screen. If the scanner detects items that resemble a gun or disassembled parts of a gun, it beeps and brings up an image on the screen. That image includes a brief video clip of the person walking through, with an orange box showing where the scanner detects a possible gun or gun parts.

According to the Washington Post, the Evolv scanners create images using a light-emission technique known as active sensing and then use artificial intelligence to analyze the images.

Richey said the scanners do not display or record any images that would show a person’s body under their clothes.

He expects the scanners could flag items for about one out of every ten people, with the extreme majority of those harmless. Some laptops will set it off, he said, as well as umbrellas, camera equipment, or even a stack of three-ring binders.

Ana Perez, an assistant principal at Smith, said Tuesday that the school had just under 300 students and other people go through the scanner, with about 18 flagged, all of them for routine items like laptops and binders.

“One of the things we are going to tell them is that instead of carrying their laptops in their book bags, to come with them in their hands,” Perez said. “I imagine that, as we go, they will learn what to do and what not to do, so it is going to get better.”

Richey said if the scanner flags a person during morning arrival for a concealed item, the person at the screen will let the student know to walk over to a nearby table, where a second staff member will check their bag, or hip, or whatever area was flagged.

Later in the day, he said, the scanners will be monitored from within the school office by the staff typically in charge of letting people into the building with the door intercom system. Those staff members can ask the person to come to the office, or call for assistance, if a suspicious item is detected.

Akeyvion Millner, a rising junior, said he was surprised to discover the scanner when he came to school on Tuesday, but is happy the district is trying it.

“It’s about time they put scanners in,” he said Tuesday, referencing stories he’s seen on the national news about students who committed shootings with guns they brought to school. Millner said the scanner didn’t appear to be delaying students, beyond the wait they already have to scan their student IDs when they come into the building.