The Salem-Keizer School District will install weapons detection systems in all 12 of its middle schools, a year after the district became the first in the state to place the technology in all of its high schools.
District officials said Thursday that the systems, made by Massachusetts-based Evolv Technology, will cost about $1.2 million. The funds come from a settlement with the vaping company Juul, as well as from a capital bond passed in 2018, which earmarked funds for safety and security upgrades.
Only about 6% of high schools nationwide used the technology in the 2021-2022 school year, according to the most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Most were large urban high schools that serve a high number of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
Salem-Keizer fits that description: It is Oregon’s second-largest school district, nearly 50% of its student body is of Latino or Hispanic descent and at least 16% of its students come from families who live below the poverty line.
But current news stories from around the country show that expanding weapons detection systems into middle schools, while rare, is not unprecedented.
Still, it’s unusual in Oregon where no other district has yet followed Salem-Keizer’s lead and installed the walk-through weapons detection systems, which are familiar to anyone who has been through a screening system at an airport or a concert. Portland Public Schools piloted the use of the technology at football games in fall 2023, but did not adapt them for widespread use.
The school safety and security business has exploded in the past 25 years. National Public Radio reported earlier this month that it is now a $4 billion a year industry and counting, with everything from panic buttons to facial recognition technology being marketed to school districts.
In Salem, Chris Baldridge, the district’s director of safety and risk management services, told reporters on Thursday that Salem-Keizer decided to expand to middle schools after reviewing Marion County public safety data showing a decline in the ages of those facing weapons possession charges.
Work to install the systems will begin in late October and wrap up by April, he said. Baldridge did not provide a timeline of which of the district’s middle schools will be first in line to get the weapons detection systems, but said staff can only roll out one or two at a time, because of the time it takes to both install the technology and train those who operate the systems.
Early survey data of more than 1,000 students at South Salem High School who piloted the system in 2023 found that about half said it made them feel safer at school, up from about a third who guessed that it could help them feel more secure before the technology was installed. Staff were more enthusiastic: Of the 50 employees who took a survey after the technology’s installation, 72% said that they felt safer in school as a result of the system.
Danielle Neves, the district’s deputy superintendent of secondary instruction, said that as a Salem-Keizer middle school parent herself, she feels good about the new technology.
“It gives me another layer of knowing that the district is taking care of the students and the teachers in the building so they can focus on learning,” she said.
Her middle school son, she added, was most concerned about being late to class as a result of having to pass through the detection system during the morning.
As recently as 2012, school shootings were vanishingly rare in the United States, with just 20 reported that year, according to the K-12 school shooting database, a real-time tracker of such incidents maintained by David Riedman, a gun violence in schools researcher. By contrast, there were 350 such incidents in 2023, though that is still a tiny fraction of the 95,000-plus public schools in the country.
According to Riedman’s database, school shootings are most likely to happen in parking lots, or at the front of a school, not inside buildings.
Still, instances of weapons in schools do surface. Earlier this week, for example, the Ontario School District in eastern Oregon notified families that they had followed a tip and removed one weapon from a student before they entered Ontario High. A subsequent investigation found that another student was also in possession of a weapon.
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