Mesa Public Schools to install weapons detectors and vape sensors in schools

Arizona's largest school district will soon have weapons detectors and vape sensors in schools across the district.

Mesa Public Schools' governing board voted 4-0 to approve the measures on Tuesday night. Board member Kiana Sears was not present.

The funding for the weapons detectors and vape sensors was set aside in the district's 2023-24 capital budget, according to Holly Williams, the district's associate superintendent.

Vape sensors to be in bathrooms at 20 middle and high schools

The vape sensors will be installed in all bathrooms across 20 of the district's middle and high schools. It's an effort to stop kids from using e-cigarettes, which heat liquids that contain nicotine or other chemicals, including THC, the high-inducing compound found in marijuana.

Allen Moore, the district's safety and security director, said he wants to make bathrooms safe places for students to just use the facilities. The sensors detect e-cigarette vapor and alert a camera outside the bathroom, prompting a security guard to be dispatched to catch the student as they are exiting.

The vape sensors are an expansion of a pilot program at one of the district's high schools that began in September and led to 48 students getting caught in two months.

Punishments for students who are caught can include suspensions, as well as civil citations from police officers for students caught with THC.

Several public health groups, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, advise against suspending students in response to e-cigarette use. They say that punitive measures aren't effective ways to combat nicotine addiction among youth and instead recommend more supportive and educational measures.

The vape sensors cost about $1,600 each, plus installation costs, according to district spokesperson Jennifer Snyder.

What does it mean for students? Mesa schools look at adding vape sensors to bathrooms

Weapons detectors to be placed at high school entrances

The Mesa Public Schools governing board approved a second safety measure at its Nov. 28 meeting: weapons detectors at entrances to the district's high schools.

The detectors will be piloted at Skyline High School before being installed at the six other district high schools, Snyder said. Students and staff will have to walk through them before entering school.

Since August 2022, eight firearms have been found across the district's schools — six during the 2022-23 school year and two this school year, according to Snyder.

"Our students were shaken by certain incidents" last year, said Randy Mahlerwein, the district's assistant superintendent, during the Nov. 28 meeting.

The district owes it to students to create a safe environment "so they can come to school and do what they should be doing and being kids," he said.

The Opengate weapons detectors will be purchased from CEIA USA, which sells metal detecting equipment manufactured by its Italian parent company, CEIA SpA.

The detectors consist of two portable, 25-pound free-standing pillars that detect metal, though they are marketed as being designed for faster screening than the traditional metal detectors used in airports and prisons.

CEIA's K-12 National Sales Manager Tom McDermott said that Opengate detectors, at certain settings, look specifically for types of metals known to be in weapons so that students don't have to remove innocuous items like keys, cellphones and belts as they walk through them.

For that reason, the detectors, which CEIA began selling in March 2021, are less intrusive than traditional metal detectors, making it easier for schools to purchase them "without feeling like they're locking the school down," McDermott said.

Still, because schools can adjust the detectors' sensitivity levels, they can choose to detect all types of metals, which would mean that innocuous items would set off the detector. McDermott said that most schools are looking for mass casualty threats, like a gun with a magazine clip. At that sensitivity level, students have to remove their laptops from their backpacks, he said.

Mesa Public Schools is planning to program the detectors to detect firearms and large knives, Snyder said.

The detectors will cost the district about $20,000 each, she said.

Mesa's decision to purchase weapons detectors aligns with a national trend. According to Nikita Ermolaev, a research engineer at IPVM, a security and surveillance industry trade publication, over the past few years, there has been a "dramatic increase in the number of school districts that spend multiple million dollars on these kinds of systems for screening in their schools."

He's skeptical, though, of the title "weapons detectors," which implies the technology detects weapons, he said.

"If you are a school district that is concerned with detecting everything," including small box cutters and pocket knives, "you'll crank up the sensitivity very high," Ermolaev said. "And the downside of that is that you'll cause more false alarms on benign objects."

"There's a trade-off between the number of missed weapons and the number of false alerts," he said.

Several Arizona districts have installed weapons detectors

At Skyline, the detectors will be piloted at three entry points. Each one will be staffed with security guards, administrators and teachers, said Gregory Mendez, Skyline's principal, during a Nov. 14 governing board discussion. School police officers will be on call if an alarm goes off, he said.

"We have a practice of greeting every kid in the parking lot as they're walking in anyways," Mendez said. "It would just be one more thing they would walk through to come onto our campus."

Mesa Public Schools is not the first Arizona school district to pilot weapons detectors at its schools. The Phoenix Union High School District also decided in early November to pilot the Opengate detectors at two schools where a student brought a gun to campus in the past year.

McDermott said about 750 U.S. school districts have purchased CEIA's Opengate detectors.

In Arizona, three school districts have purchased them: Agua Fria Union High School District in the West Valley, Sunnyside School District in Tucson and Tempe Union High School District, he said. It's not clear how many school districts in the state have similar systems from other companies.

Agua Fria Union purchased Opengate detectors for all five of its high schools early this year, according to district spokesperson Megan Griego. Between July 2021 and January 2023, there were seven incidences of firearms found on campuses, she said. The district was alerted to those through reports from students. Since the detectors were installed, there have been none, she said.

Districts that pilot the detectors, like Mesa Public Schools and Phoenix Union, rent them for $1,500 per detector per month, according to McDermott. They receive 80% of that cost back if they ultimately decide to purchase them, he said.

At its next meeting on Dec. 12, the Mesa Public Schools governing board is set to vote on another safety update: an agreement with the Mesa Police Department to allow its Real Time Crime Center to have access to the district's approximately 3,000 camera views, specifically for emergencies and 911 calls.

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Madeleine Parrish covers K-12 education. Reach her at mparrish@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Weapons detectors, vape sensors coming to Mesa schools. What to know