Heritage High shooting left parents asking ‘where are the metal detectors?’ But would they help?

In the hours that followed the Monday morning shooting at Heritage High School people wanted to know — where were the metal detectors? Why didn’t they stop this?

Heritage has metal detectors, but Superintendent George Parker III said the school doesn’t require students to pass through them every day. Instead, the school — like most in Hampton Roads — relies on planned and random searches and following up on specific tips to keep students and staff safe.

Standing outside the school Monday, surrounded by crime tape and police vehicles, Parker wondered whether the district needed to rethink its policies on metal detectors.

“It’s bittersweet that we have to come to (this), that our schools have to look like a prison,” Parker said.

But turning schools into a prison-like environment is just one of the many reasons school safety experts actually caution against relying mostly on metal detectors. It creates enormous logistical challenges and isn’t shown to be more effective than other preventative strategies.

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Heritage high school students, from left, Latasia Cherry, Zeniya Payne, and Nevaeh Watkins, attend a prayer vigil held at Heritage high school on Tuesday, September 21, 2021 in Newport News, Va. (Mike Caudill/The Virginian-Pilot)

“There’s a climate and culture concern of turning your school into a prison and creating this adversarial relationship that the students are potential perpetrators or criminals and the staff are law enforcement or prison guards,” said Amy Klinger, founder of the Educator’s School Safety Network. “That’s really counterproductive, especially when there’s not a particularly high success rate of actually finding weapons when they come into schools.”

The experts say the desire to put metal detectors in school after a tragic or traumatic event is understandable. There’s pressure from parents and students, and emotions are heightened — as was the case outside Heritage on Monday.

“They need to beef up these metal detectors,” Stephanie Wyche, the mom of a Heritage student, said after rushing to the school. “Making sure these kids are not coming to school with any weapons — like a knife to a gun to anything — because there’s no way that little boy should have got in there with guns.”

Reality of metal detectors

Most high schools in the area handle security the same way Heritage High does. Many have walk-through metal detectors but most don’t require students to pass through them every day, school divisions said Tuesday. Most have hand-held metal detectors, too. Generally, districts reported using both types of detectors for random spot checks or at special events like athletic games where there might be large crowds coming in from the community. Districts use other physical security measures as well: buzzer systems at doors, cameras and two-way radios and panic buttons.

Metal detectors offer a visual appearance of safety, but can give people a false sense of security, said Mo Canady, the head of the National Association of School Resource Officers.

Operating them properly requires perfect use, constant maintenance and trained individuals. The experts caution that for a metal detector to have a chance at being effective, it would also mean offering only one way into the school to ensure everyone passes through it.

[ 15-year-old Heritage High student arraigned, community holds vigil following school shooting that wounded 2 ]

That’s something Klinger says is unlikely to work in practice.

“(Metal detectors are) security theater,” she said. “It’s supposed to make everyone think things are safer and maybe feel like things are safer, but in reality, it makes things more dangerous because you’ve created an illusion and you haven’t addressed the problems at all.”

Canady agreed. A former school resource officer, he worked in an Alabama district where a student stabbed a classmate to death in 2002. The principal faced a lot of pressure from parents to use metal detectors after the attack, Canady said. So they decided to try it: Every student and staff member would pass through a single door to enter the building.

“I can tell you, they didn’t get everybody in (the school) in time for lunch,” Canady said. “It really is a tremendous staffing issue.”

At Heritage, police have identified the suspect as a 15-year-old student. Klinger says it would be easy in a situation like that for another student to unwittingly let an armed student — someone they recognize — into the building through a side door.

What should schools do?

So, what do the experts recommend to make schools safer?

Klinger’s education safety organization recommends investing in training for teachers, students, parents and community members to help identify people who may be at risk for committing acts of violence.

“Improving our threat assessment, investing in people to be able to respond and identify individuals of concern is going to give you a significant more bang for your buck than we’re going to plop a metal detector in the lobby and call it a day,” Klinger said

“It’s not just waiting for these events to happen and responding to them, but also preventing them and providing kids with the support they need to not commit these violent acts,” she added.

[ “You have to know what’s broken.” Newport News School Board talks next steps after Heritage High shooting ]

Threat assessment teams are seen by experts as one of the best ways to evaluate warning signs and head off violent incidents. Virginia was the first state to require such teams in every K-12 school and is seen as a leader in school safety efforts.

A majority of the threats assessed in Virginia schools each year involve self-harm, according to researchers at the University of Virginia. Self-harm threats accounted for about 57% of all threats in 2017-18, the last year for which there’s data. About 38% involved threats to others, and the rest involved a combination.

Very few threats were deemed high risk, meaning it’s an imminent threat, researchers found. Between 2016 and 2018, schools assessed a total of 21,539 threats, only 82 of which were classified at the highest threat level.

Training should prepare teachers to respond to any crisis they might encounter — not just active shooters — to make schools safer, by intervening to prevent suicides, risk-taking behavior and violence.

“Preventing violence by detecting and addressing these [behavioral] red flags is more effective than any physical security measure,” according to a 2018 Department of Homeland Security report.

Schools should also review and practice their plans, Canady said.

Virginia law requires schools to develop plans and update them annually with law enforcement. Reports of how Heritage students and staff responded Monday — immediately seeking shelter, barricading doors, keeping quiet, waiting for the all-clear from law enforcement — is a sign the plans and drills worked, Canady said.

“They deserve some compliments here,” he said.

Canady, the former resource officer, said SROs — sworn law enforcement officers who work in schools — are an important part of those plans. There’s been resistance to having SROs in schools in some places because of concerns about bias in policing, but Canady advocates for more training and higher recruiting standards: “It’s the most unique job in law enforcement.”

[ Heritage High School allowing students to pick up their possessions ]

A good SRO, he said, will form relationships with students, building rapport so that when students have a tip about something, they turn to the officer. To build better relationships, Canady encourages schools to assign SROs to a single school, something he said Newport News should consider. Heritage has an SRO who splits their time with Achievable Dream Academy next door. Newport News police said Tuesday the school’s SRO was on site but hasn’t detailed how the officer handled Monday’s shooting.

Schools reflect the community

Canady’s organization has trained 33,000 SROs since 2019. It used to be that resource officers were trained to wait until additional law enforcement arrived. Now, they’re trained to run towards the threat and intervene immediately, he said.

School district’s plans are more important than ever this fall, as students are returning to the classroom, some of them for the first time in 18 months. The pandemic has exacerbated mental health struggles, and while mental health issues are not a sign someone will commit violence, threat assessment teams are likely to be busier than ever, Canady said.

“The level of mental health issues with students is so much higher than we’ve seen in decades past,” he said.

Schools are “a microcosm” of their communities, Canady said. If there’s violence outside the school — and many Hampton Roads cities saw a rash of shootings this summer involving children — that will be reflected in schools.

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For this reason, groups like Moms Demand Action advocate for legislators and government officials to fund community-based nonprofits.

“Some of the issues that are causing these kids to pick up a gun and do something like this — some of those issues need to be addressed in advance,” said Ruth Winters, a volunteer with the Virginia chapter of Moms Demand Action.

She says violence intervention and prevention groups are already doing work and understand the problems in the communities. The people running many of these groups are already considered credible messengers.

“These groups are not part of the establishment that everybody understands, but they’re doing great work and they’re doing it all over the country,” Winters said.

Staff writers Lisa Vernon Sparks and Peter Dujardin contributed to this report

Jessica Nolte, 757-912-1675, jnolte@dailypress.com

Sara Gregory, 757-469-7484, sara.gregory@pilotonline.com