North Carolina education and public safety leaders are increasingly taking steps to improve school safety — an issue that’s top of mind for families and students, too, who’d rather focus on learning in school than on well-being.
WRAL News found generally declining rates of criminal offenses reported in schools for the past two decades, with particularly significant drops after a post-pandemic surge during the 2021-22 school year. The exceptions are growing offenses for drug possession and for assault on school personnel.
Schools are also taking a number of steps to improve student well-being and improve school safety, including measures recommended by academics and other safety experts.
“We deserve to get to be kids,” said Amirah Williams, a senior at Middle Creek High School. “We deserve to be teenagers and think about teenager things and not be worrying constantly about how safe we are.”
There’s always the potential for danger, but Williams knows that doesn’t mean danger is always there. Her fellow students similarly described trying to keep that perspective.
WRAL News interviewed five Wake high school students who have experienced the positives and negatives of school safety.
They all raised their hands when asked if they felt safe at school, if they sometimes felt unsafe at school, if they’d ever been at school during a lockdown, if they’d ever been at school when a weapon was found, if they wanted more security in their schools and if they sometimes felt security measures went too far.
Their answers showed a nuanced feeling of safety in schools, as well as opportunities for improvement.
The students described generally feeling safe in school and trusting their teachers but getting scared after hearing about mass shootings elsewhere, or when their schools went into lockdown. They said other students didn’t take the lockdown drills seriously enough, vowing to run if there ever were a shooter.
“It does bring a bit of anxiety,” said Paridhi Dhakal, a junior at Enloe Magnet High School. “But also a lot of times I have to weigh out, it’s not every single day that this stuff happens.”
Students and staff use the Say Something reporting app to report safety concerns to school teams of administrators and support professionals.
Data from the app shows bullying, drug use, self-harm and suicidal ideation, and harassment consistently rank as the top statewide user-reported concerns. They accounted for half of tips this past school year, or nearly 37,000 tips.
In Wake County, home to the state’s biggest public school district, it’s similar. Self-harm, bullying and suicidal ideation are the top three topics reported using any kind of method, including the app. Last year, the topics resulted in 534 reports among them, accounting for more than one-third of all reports. People reported a planned school attack 102 times. The school district found some weapons on campuses last year, and it credited the app with identifying at least one of them. It was unclear how many of the reports were duplicates.
Making schools safer
Safety specialists have touted numerous ways to improve safety at schools. Those include anonymous tip lines or apps, staff training to recognize warning signs, doors that can be locked from the inside, bullying prevention and promoting safe gun storage at home. In recent years, more experts have backed newer, artificial intelligence-powered weapons detection systems as another layer of security to add to those efforts.
That support comes after years of skepticism toward the technology, which has come up among the ranks of countless new devices touted to improve school safety.
The technology is relatively smooth operating and can work well at higher sensitivity levels if school resource officers are available to check backpacks for real concerns or false alarms, said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers.
But the devices — just like other safety measures — are only layers, he said, echoing other safety experts over the years.
“We can never just become dependent on technology to do all the work,” Canady said.
North Carolina school districts and leaders have made progress on many of these approaches to safety.
In recent years, the state has required every public school to have an anonymous reporting system, increased youth mental health first aid training for teachers and students, increased access to mental healthcare at schools, and given out about 175,000 safe gun storage kits to people across the state. School districts have spent millions of dollars on weapons detection systems. The state now requires every school to have access to a behavioral threat assessment team, though that mandate didn’t include any funding for them.
Those teams consist of a school resource officer, a school administrator and other staff members. The resource officer can serve multiple schools on multiple teams.
Behavioral threat assessment is somewhat of an unofficial gold standard in school safety, with organizations and experts recommending them in droves. They catch numerous different types of safety concerns and cost relatively little if schools add them to employees’ duties rather than hire new people to operate them.
The rollout of the teams — which were new to many schools and merely slightly altered to comply with the new law at others schools — has had some hiccups, said Karen Fairley, the director North Carolina’s Center for Safer Schools. “But we have heard nothing but positive response.”
The teams are sure to only get better at what they do with experience, Fairley said.
The Center for Safer Schools also has a school safety grant program, distributing tens of millions of dollars each year, that can be used on a host of efforts. Awards can range from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the request and district’s size. The state makes public the award amounts but doesn’t make public what the grants will be used for.
Districts sometimes share what they plan to use their funding for. Some districts have used it to fund portions of contracts for weapons detection systems or metal detectors. Wake County used more than $500,000 of its grant a few years ago to implement a software system that checks visitors in and immediately searches records for any flags that might prevent their visit, such as a sex offender registry or restraining order.
Criminal offenses down, weapons detectors up?
Any of these measures could be credited with helping to reduce reported rates of criminal offenses in schools. The state hasn’t published any research on why criminal offenses are generally down.
In general, crime in schools, as reported by schools and collected by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, has been decreasing for most of the past 20 years, even as the student population has grown. The number of weapons offenses recorded in public schools during the 2024-25 school year, the most recent year of data available, is less than half the number reported during the 2006-07 school year, the oldest records available. During the 2024-25 school year, public schools reported 1,875 offenses for possession of a weapon. During the 2006-07 school year, public schools reported 3,925 offenses for possession of a weapon.
A post-pandemic surge during the 2021-22 school year raised alarm across North Carolina schools and prompted additional security measures. Namely, that’s when dozens of school districts in the state began installing weapons detection systems. Those coincided with expanded behavioral threat assessment and widening access to mental healthcare and training.
WRAL News data analyses have found that drops in weapon possession offenses since the 2021-22 school year spike have been more pronounced in area school districts that have weapons detection systems than those that don’t, though weapons possession offenses in districts with detectors were generally lower to begin with.
Wake and Charlotte-Mecklenburg have gone in different trajectories since 2022.
Before the pandemic, during the 2018-19 school year, Wake reported 192 offenses for weapons possession, compared to 277 in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district. During the 2021-22 school year, Wake reported 442 such offenses, compared to Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s 421. During the middle of that school year, Charlotte-Mecklenburg had begun to deploy weapons detectors at seven schools that leaders said were struggling more than others. In the years since, Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s weapons possession offenses have dropped at a far faster rate than Wake’s. During the 2024-25 school year, Wake reported 287 such offenses, compared to 159 in Charlotte-Mecklenburg.
Statistics like that have led some safety leaders to believe the detectors act as more of a deterrent to bringing weapons into schools.
That’s what Michael Warren is hoping for at Sampson County Schools, which is implementing weapons detectors for the first time this year. Warren is the district’s school safety director, and believes the detectors will both catch illicit items and deter children from ever bringing them in.
“This gives us another point of contact to be able to have the kids come through and inappropriate items be able to be seen, confiscated, taken away from the students if there are things that they would have that are not appropriate to have at school,” Warren said. The district reported four offenses for possession of a firearm during the 2024-25 school year and two for possession of a weapon, a category that doesn’t include firearms.
Wake County has resisted following Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s lead.
Charlotte was lauded and criticized when it rolled out weapons detectors, in part because the district had to lower the devices’ sensitivity levels and instruct students to take devices out of their bags before entering to avoid false alarms. In other districts, students commonly carry laptops and other objects over their heads as they walk through the detectors.
The detectors have also been criticized for not catching knives and causing too many false alarms.
Wake Superintendent Robert Taylor told WRAL News earlier this year he’s still a skeptic of the tools amid the district’s budget constraints. He noted how much the district would have to change its entryway staffing and processes and the cost, which he believes would be $20 million to $30 million for the district.
“There are a number of gaps that still exist in weapons detection systems,” Taylor said earlier this year. “So we don’t want to go out and invest a huge amount of money — we’re talking $20 million or $30 million dollars — and still not be able to provide the level of security that people believe they have. And so we want to continue to engage in those things that are going to keep kids safe and keep those numbers low.”
Charlotte-Mecklenburg spent $15 million in startup costs for its weapon-detection system, according to WCNC reports. It now spends about $3 million annually on the devices, according to board documents. They serve middle schools, high schools and the district’s few K-8 campuses but not elementary schools.
Room for improvement
In a survey released this month, about one-quarter of Wake high school students said they believed weapons detection systems would improve safety. Greater shares of them, though not majorities, said they wanted better monitoring of shared spaces and ensuring external and classroom doors are always locked. They also complained about the conditions of bathrooms and said staff need to better monitor those.
The students interviewed by WRAL didn’t have a consensus on weapons detectors.
“It would be costly, but it’s a cost of a metal detector or a cost of a life potentially,” said Paige Lawson, a senior at Garner Magnet High School.
Another was more skeptical.
“I feel like weapon detection stuff, that would be an inconvenience to students’ lives and it would disrupt normal life for them,” said Aaditi Pandey, a junior at Green Hope High School. “Because obviously, if you’re going to school, a place to learn, and you just see this metal detector, that’s going to put fear in you.”
Williams, the Middle Creek High senior, was also concerned about the cost and feeling like bag searches were an invasion of privacy. Fellow student Sara Anderton, a senior at Fuquay-Varina High School, said she was worried about children with medical devices that could go off with metal or weapons detectors.
Williams has first-hand experience with trying to report a weapon in school. She said she was scrolling on Instagram during class a couple of years ago and found a fellow student had gone live and showed what appeared to be a gun in his backpack. She reported it, but she never knew what happened next and the school never went into lockdown.
Better communication would go a long way toward making the students feel safe, they said. They described not knowing why they were in lockdowns and relying on information coming to them from outside sources, that may or may not be true. Schools should also communicate more explicitly about dangers and how students can stay safe, outside of just running drills, they said.
But one major issue they weren’t quite sure how to solve? The bathrooms.
Carolina schools reported 7,113 offenses for drug possession during the 2024-25 school year, the highest number reported in the past two decades and up by nearly 2,000 offenses since the 2021-22 school year.
Students believe some of that is taking place inside bathrooms, alongside rampant vaping that people have just gotten used to.
“I don’t know the solution,” Anderton said. “It’s mostly like, Hey people, can you please not be doing drugs in the bathroom? Keep yourself safe. We want you alive.”
WRAL anchors Dan Haggerty and Ashley Rowe and WRAL reporter Alex Littlehales contributed reporting for this article.
