Drones are the latest front in the billion-dollar school security industry
School districts across the United States are increasingly turning to a new kind of security tool: small, remote-operated drones designed to reach an active shooter before police can arrive. The devices can be launched from a distance, break through windows, help clear classrooms, carry an embedded speakerphone for communication with teachers and police, and stream live video to law enforcement. According to their maker, they can disorient and incapacitate a suspect in about a minute.
The drones are part of a sprawling school safety industry that has expanded dramatically since the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. While exact spending is hard to pin down, Justin Marston, co-founder and CEO of Campus Guardian Angel, estimates that $3 billion to $4 billion is spent annually on tools like his drones, school resource officers and metal detectors. The Urban Institute, a think tank, estimated that school resource officers alone cost $2.62 billion in 2023.
That investment reflects a distinctly American challenge: preventing shootings at K-12 schools. Parents who have lost children in such attacks have become powerful advocates for new safety measures, and their efforts have helped shape the market.
“I think every parent will want to feel that there is some type of capability at their child’s school to confront and stop an active shooter threat versus having to wait the five to eight minutes for the police to get there,” Marston said.
Marston describes the drones as “a lump of plastic,” but says they can go up against armed attackers and neutralize them in 60 seconds. They are nimble, equipped with point-of-view cameras, and can give law enforcement real-time feedback in an unfolding shooting.
According to Marston, the drones are already in use in three Florida counties — funded in part by more than $1 million in state money — and five schools in Georgia, where the state legislature paid for them. This month, they’re being deployed for the first time in Colorado, in the same county where two shooters killed one student and injured eight others at STEM School Highlands Ranch in 2019. Texas districts have also expressed interest, he said, and are looking for ways to fund the technology, CNN affiliate KSAT reported.
The states tied to the rollout — Florida, Georgia, Colorado and Texas — have all experienced high-profile school shootings: Parkland, Apalachee, Uvalde and Columbine.
The Parkland massacre, which left 17 students and staff dead, became a turning point for campus security. Jennifer DePaoli, a senior researcher at the Learning Policy Institute, says that shooting accelerated the multi-billion-dollar security industry. In the months that followed, states poured at least $960 million into student safety, according to The 74, a nonprofit outlet covering U.S. education.
One of the most visible changes came from Florida’s Alyssa’s Law, named for Alyssa Alhadeff, a 14-year-old killed at Parkland. Her parents helped push for the law, which requires public schools to install silent panic alarms that connect directly to law enforcement. Proponents say such systems can cut response time during gun violence or a medical emergency. Her mother, Lori Alhadeff, now advocates for similar systems nationwide. A dozen other states — New Jersey, New York, Texas, Tennessee, Utah, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Georgia, Washington, Oregon, Virginia and West Virginia — have adopted their own versions.
These measures are part of a broader approach known as “school hardening,” which involves physical security upgrades such as metal detectors, automatic door locks and surveillance cameras. The tools are widely used, but they are not foolproof.
In January 2025, an AI gun detection system used across Metro Nashville Public Schools failed to identify a student’s gun before he killed a 16-year-old girl and fatally shot himself, district officials said. The system did not activate because the shooter was not close enough to the cameras for an accurate read. In separate incidents last October, a student in Mobile, Alabama, carried a loaded gun past a metal detector before being arrested, CNN affiliate WALA reported, while an AI-driven security system in Baltimore County, Maryland, flagged a student’s empty bag of chips as a possible firearm.
In 2021, a teenager was arrested after wounding two students and injuring two others at a high school in Newport News, Virginia. The campus had metal detectors, but they were turned off that morning; administrators told CNN they were used for random spot checks rather than daily screenings because they caused delays and bottlenecks.
Physical hardening is only part of the equation. Active shooter training prepares officers and civilians to respond in real time, and it has become a fixture in many school districts.
The Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training program, or ALERRT, at Texas State University runs scenario-based courses for first responders and civilians. Founded by former SWAT officers and funded largely by state and federal money, it has reached more than 250,000 first responders and trained more than 9,000 police agencies across the country, according to executive director Pete Blair. The training begins with an orientation and progresses to live-action, scenario-based drills.
Blair pointed to the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department’s response to the 2023 Covenant School shooting as a recent example of training paying off. Police video showed two officers storming into the school and killing the shooter, who had just fatally shot three 9-year-olds and three adults and was firing from a window. They reached the attacker within three minutes of arriving. “The police department was doing our training for some time and taking it very seriously, and they were able to respond effectively,” Blair said.
Quick response times have repeatedly been shown to be critical. In the 2021 shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan, police responded within minutes of emergency calls, disarmed a 15-year-old boy and took him into custody. “As they were coming down the hall, they saw him. He put his hands up, they took a gun and they took him into custody,” the local sheriff said at the time. In 2019, deputies at a Denver-area STEM school arrived while the shooting was still underway — within two minutes of the first calls, officials said — and arrested the two shooters.
Not everyone is convinced that the hardware-first approach is the most effective way to protect students. Michael Dorn, executive director of Safe Havens International, a nonprofit that conducts school safety assessments, advocates for a broader strategy that focuses on student supervision, threat assessment and management, and suicide prevention.
“Those three things are all relatively inexpensive compared to a lot of the things people are unfortunately spending money on, and all of them provide, in my experience, a higher level of protection than a lot of those other approaches,” he said. “And they bear fruit even if we never have somebody in the school who would even think about carrying out that type of attack.”
Dorn acknowledged that schools want straightforward answers to a deeply complex problem. “People want simple solutions to complex problems, and they just don’t exist,” he said. “It doesn’t mean they’re not solvable, but it means we have to be thoughtful about how we spend our time, energy, and budget — the three things no school system, or independent school, or faith-based school has an excess of.”
He remains open to technology, including cameras that detect loitering and AI tools that help with student supervision. But he said the softer measures also help students feel safer and know their mental health needs are being met.
DePaoli, of the Learning Policy Institute, said students have grown up in an era where preparing for a shooting is as routine as a fire drill. Physical security measures can help students feel safer, she said, but they can also have the opposite effect.
“A lot of these physical hardening measures, they really only hit on one part of it, and that’s physical safety. They don’t really look at how they’re impacting students’ sense of psychological safety, and I think that’s where we get really cautious,” she said.
The security industry, DePaoli said, is largely built on the assumption that a shooting will happen and that schools must be ready to react. That approach can overshadow prevention efforts such as mental health support and building trust between students and teachers, and among peers. Those proactive methods, she added, are not just good for school safety but also for student learning.
There is also little independent data on whether newer technologies actually make schools safer, she said, which makes it hard for districts to justify the expense.
“It makes me really nervous when you hear that billions and billions of dollars are being spent on things that we just don’t know that actually work,” she said.
After Parkland, much of the state spending went to physical security and school resource officers, but a significant portion also went to mental health programs, violence prevention, emergency planning and anonymous phone and text tip lines, according to The 74. DePaoli said both federal and state investments have increasingly given districts discretion over how to use the money.
Marston said his company has applied for grants to study the drones’ effectiveness. “The things that we have done with the FBI and others so far have been very positive, but we would like to see a broader study with more formalized methods that ultimately is published in a peer-reviewed journal,” he said.
He acknowledged the cost question but argued that placing school resource officers at every campus is far more expensive than the technology on the market. State officials, he said, ultimately have to decide how much they are willing to invest.
Marston envisions a future in which active shooter suppression systems are as common as fire sprinklers. “You wouldn’t send your kids to a school that didn’t have a sprinkler system. Five years from now, you wouldn’t send them to a school that doesn’t have an active shooter suppression system,” he said.
His company says the drones can cut law enforcement response time by crucial minutes. They fly through hallways scanning for threats, then use flashing lights to disorient a suspect and fire pepper balls or ram into the attacker. Live video is streamed to police, giving them a clearer picture before they enter the building. Marston said the presence of the drones alone could deter potential shooters.
“If ultimately the work that I do in this company can help eradicate mass shootings and make every kid safe and make every parent feel better, you know, it will be the most meaningful thing that I do in my life, my career,” Marston said.