Justin Marston
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CEO and Founder
March 20, 2025
Making Our Teachers Safe Again
March 20, 2025
According to the School Safety database, there have been around 1000 instances of school gun violence in the past 3 years, with 800 killed or wounded. Over the past 3 years in particular, the numbers of both shootings and killed or wounded have gone up dramatically – they are currently running at around 10 times the numbers per year of one decade ago – a 1000% increase. Yes, you read that right.
A school shooting is most teachers’ ultimate nightmare. They have to think not just about their own safety, but that of the children in their care. In our conversations with teachers, we have found that some will even rule out schools to teach at based on their floor plans and security measures in the context of an active shooter response.
It’s not only real school shooting events that terrorize teachers – false alarms can also cause trauma. In one credible threat alert in 2023 at Round Rock High School in Texas, teachers were left without any updates during a lockdown for 50 minutes. During that time, law enforcement officers kicked the toilet stalls in bathrooms, which sounded like gunfire, leading some teachers to think that there was an active shooter.
With school shootings rising and school districts under continuous budget strains, some teachers are being compelled to joining school guardian programs whereby they are eligible to carry firearms on the campuses where they teach. Even for teachers willing to take on this responsibility, there are still significant challenges:
- Hostage rescue is incredibly difficult. In the U.S. military, only the most elite special forces units are tasked with hostage rescue missions, and these units spend most of their days training for hostage rescue. Furthermore, when the military or police SWAT teams do hostage rescue, they are typically doing it in teams with some information on what they’re walking into. The ask for school guardians to do this alone with essentially zero information or situational awareness is exceedingly unrealistic.
- Teachers cannot undergo the training and repetition required to be effective. Most will receive only several days training, and given heavy teaching schedules, most do not have the time to spend hours on a shooting range practicing their aim.
- Risking one’s life in an active shooter situation requires certain personality aptitudes, and in the military this behavior is repeated in training and repetition to turn it into an instinct. Teachers do not have the time for this, and it’s not what they signed up for.
- The implications and repercussions of making a mistake are incredibly high. If a teacher shoots the wrong student in target evaluation, he or she will have to live with that mistake the rest of his orher life.
- Teaching is a difficult job, and teachers signed up to teach students, not to engage in armed combat. Pressuring teachers to become school guardians risks depleting the teacher talent pool, as teachers start to either retire or look for other jobs.
Asking teachers to be the first responder to active shooter events with no support or backup is truly setting them up to fail with an almost impossible task.
At Campus Guardian Angel, we are pioneering using less lethal drones as part of a managed service to improve school safety. We pre-stage boxes of drones throughout a school, with the number required based on the school layout and the need to ensure a drone can get anywhere in around 15 seconds. The drivers of this strategy are density and accessibility.
We pilot these drones remotely from our operations center in Austin – our pilots can control any drone in any school, and then confront a shooter with less lethal effects as quickly as we can. This gives other security response actors more time to arrive on scene, as well as better situational awareness and greater confidence in how to deal with the threat as they get there.
As part of our managed service, we have a digital twin of each school we protect, and we have access to all the school’s security cameras during an emergency. We do this so that we can identify and confront the threat as quickly as possible. Again, every second matters.
So what does this mean for teachers, including teachers who are signing up to be school guardians?
- Campus Guardian Angel becomes the first responder, not the school guardian – our drones clear the corners, engage the shooter and apply effects to degrade or incapacitate the shooter.
- Given Campus Guardian Angel’s enhanced situational awareness and the speed of the drones, we can find the shooter faster, and ultimately save lives of teachers and students – because during an active shooter event, every second counts.
- Linked to speed, during swatting events (false alarms), Campus Guardian Angel can help clear a school faster, allowing normalcy to return more quickly while reducing the financial burden of closing schools for longer periods due to gun risk.
- During both shootings and false alarms, Campus Guardian Angel will have a staff liaison in our operations team communicating with teachers and other staff via our mobile app, giving them a much better real-time picture of what’s happening, rather than just radio silence. Having a trained expert on-demand to fill the information vacuum can significantly reduce the trauma of active shooter events and false alarms.
- The risk to life for school guardians is greatly reduced, because we are not asking them to run into gunfire – we’re happy to let our drones do that instead. We can distract the shooter so he or she is a softer target, or we even incapacitate the shooter to the point that he or she has dropped his weapon.
- School guardians will no longer be required to make target evaluations, so the probability of a school guardian making a mistake in identifying the individual posing the threat decreases exponentially.
- School guardians are not responding alone. Campus Guardian Angel will be leading the response, and through speaker phones on our drones, we can talk to teachers to guide them through the process.
Asking a teacher to be a school guardian in a school equipped with Campus Guardian Angel is dramatically more reasonable than asking a teacher to be a school guardian with zero backup or support.
Being a teacher is one of the most challenging but also rewarding jobs out there, and education is vital to our country’s future. Let’s make our teachers safe again, with a system that is specifically designed to proactively save lives.
