LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – The Clark County School District has gone to great lengths to make sure guns don’t make it onto its campuses. To avoid scenes like the one that played out at Florida State University Thursday, it’s using upgraded technology to screen for weapons at schools and at all varsity sporting events.
Guns on campus is an issue everywhere. CCSD police typically seize between 25 and 30 guns during a school year, but when officers confiscated 54 guns in one year, they realized they had to do something.
Last August, the district unveiled a new weapons screening system that was more efficient and more accurate. Today, Jae Beasley, CCSD’s Director of School Safety, explained how it works to the Nevada Department of Education’s monthly Statewide School Safety Committee.
“Let’s say in between the two the two bollards is like a lake of very calm water, and if you drop a pebble in that lake, it does the ripple effect. So when something of a certain density or a certain material goes through those, that’s when it picks it up.”
Beasley told the committee the bollard system is portable and flexible.
“You could set it on as low as, I would assume, toenail clippers, or something small like that and you can set it as high from that”
CCSD now runs searches at all of its major sporting events, but it also does them at less-expected times.
“It is best practice to utilize them in a randomized manner, so we randomized both things, the students and the schools to keep it open there,” shared Beasley.
“The random search program was set up for a certain number of students that pass through and maybe the tenth student taken, passed through the magnetometer, and searched,” said CCSD Police Chief, Henry M. Blackeye.
He also explained why it’s not feasible to screen every student as they come on campus.
“With 3,000 students in a school with a magnetometer, we would have to have ten of those, with ten staff members, and an additional ten staff members to help with the litigation, and a number of staff supporting that.”
Chief Blackeye said officers can now screen about a thousand people in an hour.
He told the committee his officers conduct random screenings routinely, but they keep it unpredictable so students can’t prepare. Screenings can happen at a school’s entrance, or officers may conduct them in individual classrooms. Typically, they clear the room and screen students as they come back in.
One downside of the new tech — it does take manpower. Beasley says that’s a consideration for school districts considering investing in similar tech.
“The price of the system is not nearly as cumbersome as the number of people it takes to run a system. So, you’re going to have to have somebody monitoring the system, somebody monitoring the table where they divest, and an administrator there to determine if there needs to be a secondary search, and a police officer there because if a weapon is found that becomes a police matter.”
Despite the labor, the system is paying off for the district, both on campus and at well-attended events.
“What we see right now is, the word gets out pretty quickly,” shared Beasley. “They do recognize it as a deterrent, they do divest their stuff in advance, knowing they can’t get by.”
He told committee members it’s not uncommon to find weapons discarded around the perimeters of a campus on screening days. He also said officers have seen spectators at sporting events return to their vehicles to disarm themselves.
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