Waterbury Board of Ed is considering high-tech weapons detectors for schools
Waterbury CT February 15, 2022
The Waterbury Board of Education’s plan to consider leasing more than a dozen high-tech weapons detection systems across the district’s middle and high schools in response to mass shootings has alarmed social and racial justice advocates.
In a non-binding request for proposal, the city is seeking contractor bids to install devices that function similar to metal detectors, but which use cameras, sensors and artificial intelligence to detect weapons as students, staff and visitors enter school buildings.
City officials say the systems could streamline school security and are more efficient than metal detectors. Education advocates, meanwhile, say the technology aims to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, and caution against a problematic expansion in surveillance of a population — students of color — that is already overpoliced.
“Schools and districts like Waterbury aren’t the ones that experience gun violence at the rate at which a piece of technology like this is designed to stop,” said Robert Goodrich, executive director of Waterbury-based Radical Advocates for Cross-Cultural Education.
“At it’s core, it is unacceptable for this level of surveillance to go on unchecked and unmonitored,” Goodrich said.
In a statement, Waterbury Public Schools cited a national uptick in the use of social media to make school threats as part of the reasoning for the plan.
“WPS is looking for new and innovative ways technology can help to prevent threats from occurring within our school grounds,” the statement says. “Safety within our schools is of upmost importance to us, and we will continue to protect our most valuable assets: students, teachers, administration and parents.”
A spokesperson for Waterbury Public Schools said the district will not be doing interviews on the matter until a bid is selected.
Ann Sweeney, president of the Waterbury Board of Education, said in a statement that the request for proposal “allows us to explore the new technology” as the board considers how best to make schools safer after “horrific events in schools” nationwide.
Connecticut schools received a wave of online threats following the Nov. 30 shooting at a Michigan high school that killed four students and wounded seven, prompting some schools to temporarily close.
“Whenever these incidents happen, our school board, and myself and our police officials, it’s unnerving [to us],” Waterbury Mayor Neil O’Leary said.
No guns have been located in Waterbury schools in at least five years, according to Waterbury police. O’Leary said that while these incidents are thankfully rare, “we want to be ahead of the curve and not behind it.”
Waterbury’s request for proposal, which was mainly authored by Dan Barry, the district’s security and school safety coordinator, goes further than metal detectors. The city is seeking systems that have cameras, advanced censors and can use artificial intelligence to generate 2D and 3D images of concealed weapons.
In the request document, the scope of work includes the installation of 16 single- and dual-lane systems in nine schools, including at three middle schools. An addendum clarified that the city would not use federal dollars to pay for the systems, contrary to the initial request document.
December’s threats moved Hamden’s superintendent to purchase metal detectors for Hamden High School, but it remains a rare step nationwide.
Fewer than 5% of U.S. schools conduct random metal detector checks, and even fewer conduct daily checks, according to government data from 2015-16. Evidence of their effectiveness in deterring violent behavior is mixed.
Examples of the systems include those produced by Waltham, Mass.-based Evolv Technology. Several professional sports stadiums now use the technology to screen fans, Business Wire reported.
An Illinois high school became one of the first to install the detectors and will pay a reported $237,000 per year for the next four years for eight dual-lane detectors.
Some Waterbury officials, including Waterbury Police Chief Fernando Spagnolo, have attended a demo to see the Evolv technology in action.
The city wants the systems to send emails or text messages to security personnel when a weapon is detected, and have the ability to connect to existing security systems.
Dr. Melissa Santos, division chief of pediatric psychology at Connecticut Children’s Hospital and associate professor of pediatrics at UConn, told The Courant that the wave of school threats was likely a symptom of the concurrent “mental health pandemic” contributing to occasional behavioral outbursts.
In an interview, Santos said she wants to see more resources that center on the emotional health of students and families. That includes conversations from an early age about how to identify and verbalize one’s feelings, to skills and strategies that kids can use in a moment of crisis.
“When we wait until kids are in crisis to have those conversations, we’ve lost so much opportunity to really be impactful and help them,” Santos said.
Advocates also said they have concerns over how the data will be managed, and the psychological impact of subjecting students to an escalation in surveillance.
Ginne-Rae Clay, president of the Greater Waterbury NAACP and interim executive director of the Connecticut’s Social Equity Council, said exposing students to “high-level weapons detection machinery” would send the wrong message. “It’s like you’re walking into combat,” she said.
Clay noted that she hadn’t seen the request document, but said she wishes there was a different way to protect students.
“I just don’t think it does anything for their psyche, not at all,” she said.
“Our basic protest is: What you’ve got isn’t working,” said Dan Barrett, legal director of the ACLU of Connecticut. “Why do you want to turn it up to 11? You’re just going to replicate the same system.”
Waterbury’s protocols for policing students was a focal point of a 2020 report by the state Office of the Child Advocate, which found that Waterbury school staff were calling the police on elementary and middle school students at high rates during the 2018-19 school year.
State Child Advocate Sarah Eagan said the report’s findings were “deeply concerning, even alarming.” Staff were too often deferring to police instead of crisis intervention services to handle child behavior, the report found. Children with disabilities, most often autism, were most frequently impacted by repeat calls.
Waterbury police made 326 school arrests during the 2018-19 school year, according to department data — nearly two arrests for every day of instruction.
It was an increase in 54 arrests from the previous year, even though the discipline rate fell from 16.9% to 14.6%, according to state data.
“We were all quite taken aback by [the report],” O’Leary said. “We recognize that those numbers seemed inappropriate, [and] we took appropriate action to train our school personnel and our police officers.”
O’Leary and Spagnolo both highlighted efforts the department has taken to strengthen the relationships between the community and the police, as well as between students and the department’s nine school resource officers.
Whether those efforts paid off remains to be seen. In 2019-20, police had made 134 school arrests before the onset of COVID-19 cut in-person instruction short in March. Police had made 132 arrests through the end of January 2022 — outpacing last year, but below the high in 2018-19.
A plurality of the arrests are typically for second-degree breach of peace, a charge that could range from fighting to using abusive language, according to the Center for Children’s Advocacy, and Black students were disproportionately affected.
Advocates say policing within Waterbury schools remains a work in progress, and that installing high-tech detectors will do nothing to help student behavior.
“The basic question still remains: What are you going to do to improve students’ health, and are you going to do anything to interrupt the cycle that currently exists wherein Black and Brown students aren’t allowed to be children, are treated as lawbreakers?” Barrett said.
courant.com
