The Wake County Public School System is taking a closer look at its event security procedures after recent fights and is reviewing different physical security upgrades.
The school board's Safety and Security Committee met on Tuesday and reviewed different possible physical security upgrades, including weapons detection systems that the district has declined to pursue in the past. The review took place during a closed session, and a board presentation noted other possible physical upgrades to consider, including alarms and types of door locks.
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The board also discussed event security and any possible enhancements to it that board members may suggest.
During the open committee meeting, board members asked about the feasibility and use of weapons detection systems. Kendrick Scott, the district's senior director of security, said he could share more details about that during closed session, when the board would see demonstrations of different tools.
District leadership has discussed weapons detection systems in the past but declined to recommend them to the school board, with some skepticism that they were the best use of district resources.
Superintendent Robert Taylor said Tuesday after the meeting that he's spoken with other school systems about their use of weapons detectors. He noted that the district would have to make changes to make them work, such as assigning people to run the machine potentially multiple times per day or prohibiting high school upperclassmen from leaving school for lunch if they cannot be rescanned.
"We don't go to the airport, flights are taking off, but then after that, you'll be able to walk in and out of [the airport]," Taylor said. So installing detectors would require behavior changes at schools, he said.
But when used properly, Taylor said the systems can work.
"Those systems are effective," Taylor said. "They all have sensitivities in terms of how you can dial it up and capture everything and dial it down [and] some things may get through."
WRAL has previously reported that while the detectors don't catch everything, they catch many weapons and can act as deterrents, driving down weapon possession in schools that have them.
Taylor said the district is more than just reactive to safety concerns, because it's finding ways to prevent issues and always examining events after they happen and figuring out whether anything needs to change to prevent repeat issues. He called weapons detection systems "both proactive and reactive."
"I get asked all the time, 'Why are we reactive?'" he said. "We are absolutely not reactive."
Outside of teaching and learning, he said, the district's top priority is keeping students safe.
Some community members have pushed the district for them, highlighting weapons found in schools and mass violence elsewhere.
A student used a knife to stab another student to death in 2023 at Southeast Raleigh Magnet High School. During a forum a week after the event, families were divided on whether schools should add weapons detectors.
Improving security at events
The district's Office of Security years ago developed a Large Event Plan, in coordination with administrators, athletics officials, school resource officers and others.
The plans are not new, but they're being revisited after recent events, Chairman Chris Heagarty said. Though most football games have gone smoothly, shots were fired after a football game in Raleigh last month, and fights forced an early end to games in Wake Forest last year.
Each event has an operation plan that outlines who is in uniform, when relevant staff will meet before the event, what everyone's assignments are, the location of every patrol vehicle, emergency procedures, equipment needed, communication methods and medical contacts.
Documents attached to the committee's agenda include a sample plan for a football game between two made-up rival high schools, offering insight into why leaders might pursue a plan. The summary of the sample plan says it's prompted by a rise in fights and "large-scale disturbances" at events in the area of the fictional high schools, which have attracted negative media attention and could discourage future attendance of the events.
The challenges of managing events have changed as technology and society have changed, Taylor said, noting greater social and emotional challenges in young people and the near-constant presence of smartphones, social media and messaging apps. All of those things affect safety, he said.
"So we want to make sure that any society, whether they are behavioral or technical, that we understand how that impacts the safety of a school and what we need to do to mitigate that," he said.
School board members on Tuesday urged the system to get more parents and community groups involved in event security, particularly to ensure more help, but also to know what the community needs.
"These are neighborhood schools, and there are unique challenges, there are unique assets that these neighborhood schools have," Board Member Christina Gordon said. "So are we really tapping into each community organization's ability to partner with us to make sure we are meeting the unique needs of that community?"
Scott said the event plans are made up to 10 days in advance and in consultation with the school's principal, who often mentions community groups that want to get involved. The district is happy to accept additional help if the volunteers are able to go through the volunteer approval process.
The school principal is who parents should contact about getting involved, district spokeswoman Lisa Luten said. The district can consider letting parents know that in future communications about parental involvement.
Other safety measures
The committee heard about other safety and security measures the district has undertaken or plans to undertake.
The school system plans to conduct another security assessment. Its last was in 2019, which was finalized in 2021.
The system will look at improvements to physical security infrastructure and upgrades to its reunification processes, for when parents reunite when their children following an incident at school, such as a weather event or other crisis. For the 2026-27 school year, the district is already set to shift to a new warning and lockdown system. It will move away from "code red" and "code yellow" to a colorless system that first communicates an action, such as "hold" or "lockdown," rather than a color with an implied action.
Since 2023, the district has launched a visitor screening system, bag rules for spectator events, mobile command vehicles for coordinating emergency response and cellphone app-based panic buttons for teachers.
The district has also joined the state's contracted program for reporting concerns anonymously, called the Say Something Anonymous Reporting System. That's an app students and teachers can use to report concerns for fellow students' behavior or other concerns.
The district is not requiring employees to install the Rave panic button app, because it is not providing them with cellphones to do so. Still, 3,488 of the district's staff have downloaded the Rave app, a fraction of the district's more than 11,000 educators. More than 11,000 staff members are signed up to receive notification of panic button trigger and lockdown via their personal cellphones.