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Lafayette Parish to use weapons detection machines on campus

Jul 03, 2023Jul 03, 2023

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The Lafayette Parish School System main office is pictured Monday, April 16, 2018, in Lafayette, La.

Middle and high students attending Lafayette Parish public schools will pass through a weapons detection system as they enter the school building beginning on the first day of school, which is Thursday for most students.

The Lafayette Parish School System purchased the CEIA OPENGATE machines for every campus. Middle and high school students will pass through them daily. Bookbags also may be randomly searched during the screening process, according to the student/parent handbook.

“There’s never one catch-all magical something. But this is just that extra layer,” said Assistant Superintendent of Administration and Operations Jennifer Gardner. “It just speaks to the testament of our board to support school safety.”

The screening system also will be used for all visitors at athletic events, like football games, and individual school administrators can decide if they need to be used for other on-campus events. Elementary schools also will have access to their own machines.

The Lafayette Parish School Board approved $2.3 million of its 2023-2024 budget to be dedicated to metal and weapon detectors.

The weapons detection system is portable with each pillar weighing about 25 pounds. It also is weather-proof and can be used outside even when it’s raining. Unlike metal detectors, the OPENGATE system will allow students or anyone else passing through to keep their keys, phones and other metals in their bags.

Some items, like instrument cases, will need to be inspected additionally because of the density of the metal, Gardner said. There will be tables nearby for inspecting bags that set off alarms and for inspecting those items. A pass-around routine will be implemented for Chromebooks, which are known to set off an alert.

The new systems will be used on the first day of school, which is beginning with a staggered start on Thursday and Friday. That will be a benefit as students and staff adjust to the new measure, Gardner said.

“There’s always an adjustment period,” she said. “With a staggered start, teaching and training the students to be able to flow through is going to be easier to train them to get through.”

Each school will have a team of people ready to support students as they encounter the systems, telling them how to hold their backpacks and what to do if an alarm goes off, Gardner said. Additionally, extra district staff also will be on campuses to help implement the systems.

The CEIA OPENGATE machines have a throughput rate of 2,000 to 2,500 people per hour. Gardner said when the district visited a school in Killean, Texas, that uses the same system, about 2,200 high school students filtered through in about 20 minutes.

A spokesperson for CEIA, Marilyn Thaxton, said in an email that the use of systems like OPENGATE has steadily increased in recent years, including at K-12 schools.

“With school systems looking at ways to expand or upgrade their safety measures, weapons and metal detectors offer one line of defense for deterring weapons and other threatening objects from entering school buildings and their athletic/special event facilities,” she said.

“For weapons detection, CEIA OPENGATE is an ideal choice for primary screening in school security checkpoints because it provides extremely high performance in terms of detection capability and transit flow. Potential threat objects are quickly and accurately detected while non-threatening personal items do not cause an alarm.”

CEIA has been around for more than 55 years, Thaxton said. OPENGATE is the latest detector created by CEIA after feedback from the NFL, professional sports stadiums and other event venues, Thaxton said. The OPENGATE is used in several school districts across the U.S., including in Caddo Parish where Lafayette Parish district officials visited to see it in action.

The OPENGATE system has a Department of Homeland Security SAFETY Act Designation, which is awarded after a DHS completes a detailed review and evaluation of the company’s experience, quality procedures, deployments, and the demonstrated capabilities and d effectiveness of the technology, Thaxton said.

But some school safety experts have raised concerns that weapons detectors have significant limitations and sometimes miss serious threats, according to reporting from The 74 Million.

Jaclyn Schildkraut, interim executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, told The 74 Million there’s limited evidence that suggests scanners are effective at preventing school shootings and other campus violence.

Weapons detectors offer little more than “a fancy, gimmicky name for a metal detector,” Schildkraut said.

“It may be a more sensitive metal detector, but it’s still a metal detector,” she said.

Schildkraut co-authored a 2019 research review that questioned the effectiveness of metal detectors looking to information on their use at airports. A 2017 report indicated the Transportation Security Administration averaged about 80% in failing to identify weapons during metal detector searches.

Of tracked violent incidents nationwide during the 2018-2019 school year, 6% involved an active shooter event in a school, according to data analyzed by The Educator’s School Safety Network, a national non-profit school safety organization. In all gun-related incidents, which included shots being fired on school grounds and a gun being found but not fired, the total was about 24% of events.

But 18% of events where violent aggressive behaviors were present in schools happened without the presence of gun, including large-scale student fights and dating violence. The most common tracked incidents were false reports or mock attacks. That combined with reports of a suspicious person in or near the school accounted for 34% of all incidents.

But Gardner reiterated that the metal detection systems are just one layer of security on a school’s campus.

With its eye on safety, the district also has implemented other measures including physical hardening to schools with fewer entry points and fences; a uniform system for visitor check-in; and continual professional development focused on safety.

“I don’t think there’s ever a box you can check that says, ‘I’ve checked every box and I have every piece of school safety there is,’” Gardner said. “That’s why I call it layers.”

Thaxton said that OPENGATE and other CEIA detectors meet stringent federal and international standards. It uses a number of security detection settings to recognize a variety of threat items.

“Items detected are based on detection levels/settings, which are determined by a variety of factors, including the customer’s security and safety process/procedures, along with the items required to be detected,” she said. “It’s also important to note that not all weapons detection systems are the same and have very different performance levels and adherence to federal and international standards. CEIA builds its detection levels around these standards to ensure the most consistent and overall highest level of detection capabilities.”

More information about the use of OPENGATE weapons detection systems on campus can be found in the LPSS student/parent handbook.

Email Ashley White at [email protected].

Students were cheerfully greeted Thursday with smiles, high-fives, music and a new in-person mascot as they arrived at Live Oak Elementary School.

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