When Osceola High School students return to campus for class Monday, they’ll enter through a weapons detector designed to eliminate threats of weapon violence on campus.
It is a pilot project for the program, but Osceola County School District officials say if it does ferret out things like guns on campus, it could spread to the district’s other high schools. They did a test run of the device on Friday.
Lester Yeates, the district’s director of safety, security and emergency management, said the detector, which has a positive track record of use in other school districts and at the theme parks, will check for “cues of coarse metals” found in guns and similar weapons.
“It’s a good device, the best on the market,” he said. “It’s been vetted in other school districts and has a track record of eliminating weapons threats. It’s another layer of security for our students and staff.”
In the morning, only students will walk through the detector; visitors to campus who enter through the main office will not. But the unit is lightweight and portable; it can be used to scan those who gather on campus, such as the football stadium or gymnasium for athletic events or the performing arts center for a play or concert.
Students will remove computers, large binders and eyeglass cases from their backpacks, walk through the device the retrieve those items. Backpacks that return an alert that “meets the density of a weapon” will be checked off to the side. It is not an X-ray machine and it collects no data.
School Board member Julius Melendez, who also sits on the district’s Security and Safety Task Force, said the measure, like another announced earlier in the week regarding random searches of students in random classes, came from came as a suggestion from the task force, and got approval of Yeates, who then put it into action. They said Osceola High was chosen because of a cross section of students in its community and proximity to the district office – Gateway High right down Bill Beck from the district was under construction when the contract was pursued.
“It all got a unanimous vote from the task force,” Melendez said.
They said OHS administrators have been trained in the device’s use; the school’s school resource officer (SRO) will not be involved in the entry process but, like in the random search process, can be called upon if there is a threat that requires law enforcement.
Yeates said if the detector returns positive results, he’d like to expand use to other high schools.
“We’re looking for on-time school starts, and a downtick in weapons violations,” he said.
