Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools will be piloting a new kind of metal detector this year.
The district purchased eight new devices, called OPENGATE weapons detection systems, with funding from a state safety grant.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Chief Safety and Security Officer Jonathan Wilson said this technology should speed up the process for students entering school.
That’s because the district’s current metal detectors, he says, aren’t designed to only identify weapons.
“It detects metal, but it's going to detect everything. So it requires a student to hand us their bag. Our staff searches through the bag to make sure there's nothing in the bag that they shouldn't have," Wilson said. "They pass through the metal detector. It does not go off, and then they retrieve their bag and go to class. So you can see how that is very cumbersome. It takes a lot of folks to do that.”
Wilson said the OPENGATE detectors can be adjusted to identify a concentration of metal, like a gun, rather than any metal at all, like a water bottle. They’ll also require fewer staff members to man them.
“So we should be able to get students in three, four times as fast as we could with those other ones," he said.
Officials will be moving these around to different schools throughout the year to test them out. Superintendent Tricia McManus said there are also plans to increase the random use of the district’s other metal detectors.
"Last year, I think we were getting to it about quarterly, but it's going to be more frequent," she said. "Because, again, random metal detecting is about deterring students from bringing anything to school that they should not have, that would constitute a weapon."
The most recent statewide report shows there were 13 instances of students possessing firearms in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools in the 2022-2023 school year.
Amy Diaz covers education for WFDD in partnership with Report For America. You can follow her on Twitter at @amydiaze.