Such a threat was carried into the school nearly four weeks ago and went undetected despite to school leaders that the first grader was armed. Though school safety experts said that human errors led to a violence prevention breakdown, much of the district’s response hinges on unproven technology that’s being installed on every campus, starting with Richneck. 

“Walk-through metal detectors will be in place and used for all students, faculty, staff and visitors to Richneck upon school reopening,” school board Chairman Lisa Surles-Law said . “As of yesterday, funding for all 90 state-of-the art metal detectors has been obtained.”

The district spent more than $1.5 million on , the district spokesperson told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. The devices come from Ohio-based metal detector manufacturer CEIA, which says its latest hardware is than the metal detectors of yesteryear. With “extreme threat item discrimination,” the sensors are designed to distinguish cell phones, water bottles and other innocuous items from “mass casualty shooting weapons” without getting tripped up by false alarms. 

The CEIA scanners, and similar devices that have become a trendy segment of the $3.1 billion-a-year school security marketplace, purport to solve roadblocks that have long kept traditional metal detectors from widespread adoption in schools: long checkpoint lines, the need to empty pockets of change and keys, separate X-ray scanners for backpacks and purses, and an appearance that evokes a prison. 

Yet as districts nationwide shell out millions of dollars on weapons detectors from CEIA, Evolv Technology and competing vendors, school safety experts warn the devices have significant limitations that can leave serious threats undetected. 

Campus security personnel must decide whether to use sensitivity settings that could miss certain weapons in the name of expedience or to be more thorough but get besieged by false alarms from commonplace school supplies like laptops and three-ring binders.

“In some schools, the number of false alarms on these items is staggering,” said Nikita Ermolaev, a research engineer at IPVM, a security industry research group. Due to “a phenomena called alarm fatigue or, in layman’s terms, the boy-who-cried-wolf effect,” he said screening technology that inundates security staff with false alarms can be dangerous. 

“By the enormous amount of false alarms on everyday objects that students carry through them in schools, you create a false sense of security because a weapon, such as a knife or a gun, can easily be missed.” 

On the day of the Newport News shooting, school employees warned leaders at least three times that the 6-year-old shooter might be armed, according to the wounded teacher’s attorney. Alerts included a shrugged-off request to search his pockets and a teary report from another child that the boy showed him the gun at recess. These human failures were the real security breakdown rather than a lack of hardware, said Jaclyn Schildkraut, interim executive director of the at the Rockefeller Institute of Government.

“The school missed an opportunity to do a threat assessment on this kid, so instead of beefing up their threat assessment policies they’ve now put metal detectors in as if it’s going to somehow undo what happened,” said Schildkraut, who warned the devices could have the opposite of their intended effect, elevating student fears of campus violence. “You’re now telling these students, who have existed in this school without metal detectors, ‘Guess what, your school is not safe.’”

While there’s limited evidence to suggest that scanners are effective at preventing school shootings and other campus violence, the latest “weapons detectors” offer little more than “a fancy, gimmicky name for a metal detector,” Schildkraut said.

“It may be a more sensitive metal detector, but it’s still a metal detector,” she said.

Weapons, undetected

CEIA’s marketing materials say its product is built to detect “high caliber assault weapons and other large mass casualty metal threats,” raising questions about its ability to find handguns — like the one used by the 6-year-old to critically injure his teacher — without overwhelming security staff with false alarms. CEIA didn’t respond to interview requests. The company has pocket knives to be a “mass casualty threat” and its weapons detection system is not designed to catch anything smaller than “a tactical knife — a knife that’s actually designed for killing.” 

“If you want to be able to catch the smaller items” like Swiss Army Knives and vape pens, “I’m going to alarm on a lot more things and I’m back to where I can’t carry a backpack full of stuff” through the detectors, Tom McDermott, CEIA’s school safety and security sales manager, said in a promotional video with Campus Safety magazine. “So there’s always that tradeoff, and that’s a conversation I have with schools all the time.” 

When Richneck Elementary students returned on Monday, they were greeted by a police presence and given clear backpacks for their belongings. Richneck now has two security officers, instead of sharing one with another school, a district spokespersonThere was also a leadership shakeup. The school principal was , its vice principal and the district superintendent was

CEIA competitor Evolv has also faced scrutiny for but in practice may miss large knives and bombs. An Evolv spokesperson said it works with customers to pick a sensitivity setting that best fits their individual needs and is transparent with them about limitations. Providing information about its sensitivity settings with the general public, the spokesperson said in a statement, “is irresponsible and puts people at greater risk.”

“We must assume any published information regarding details of a physical screening system will be studied and leveraged by a bad actor seeking to do harm,” the statement continued. The company declined to comment on the false alarm rates reported by its customer school districts. “Our systems are designed to detect many types of weapons and components of weapons, but there is no perfect solution that will stop 100% of threats, including ours, which is why security must include a layered approach that involves people, process and technology.” 

Several security experts said the devices shouldn’t be called weapons detectors if they’re incapable of picking up on certain bladed objects, and Luca Cacioli, CEIA’s CEO, is a “marketing word” and that such devices, which identify metallic objects, are “the same metal detectors that were developed in the ’60s.”

In at least one security incident, the distinction between mass casualty and other weapons proved dangerous. 

Last year, the school district in Utica, New York, from Evolv Technology, a publicly traded company backed by big-name investors including Bill Gates and Peyton Manning. The company claims its artificial intelligence-equipped devices can screen up to 1,000 students in 15 minutes — 10 times faster than traditional metal detectors. 

The Evolv scanners and were ultimately removed after a student was during a fight in a high school hallway, leaving him with wounds on his back and hands. An investigation revealed the knife-wielding student had passed through an Evolv scanner with the blade in his backpack undetected. 

In another incident, the Evolv system failed to alarm when an off-duty police officer accidentally brought a service revolver to a campus open house, the . Yet, on another occasion, the system was set off by a student’s lunch box. After the stabbing and before removing the Evolv tech entirely, district officials cranked the scanners to the highest setting, to roughly 50%. Other districts have reported false alarm rates . 

“The Evolv weapons system was designed for use at large arenas or stadiums to prevent incidents of mass casualties and is not adequate or practical for school use,” Brian Nolan, the acting superintendent in Utica, said at .

That hasn’t stopped other districts from purchasing its products. Evolv announced a $2.6 million contract with Atlanta Public Schools a few weeks ago. 

High failure rates in airports

The use of metal detectors in schools dates back several decades, particularly in large urban districts like New York City. Yet unlike other physical security measures like surveillance cameras, they’ve never received widespread adoption due to inconveniences that next-gen weapons detectors promise to address. 

During the 2019-20 school year, just 6% of schools — and fewer than 2% of elementary schools — used metal detectors to conduct random searches on students, according to . An even smaller share of schools — just 2.7% — required daily metal detector screenings. 

While metal detectors offer a visual appearance of security, their ability to keep people safe has faced significant questions. In fact, there’s little evidence to support their use in schools, by the WestEd Justice and Prevention Research Center. In December, a high school student in Akron, Ohio, was that escaped the metal detector altogether when a classmate let him in through a side door. 

“When we hear about the introduction of metal detectors in schools where they haven’t previously been, it tends to be reactionary, to something like what happened in Virginia,” said Schildkraut, who co-authored the WestEd report.

In New York City, students of color are to attend schools with metal detectors, with racial disparities prompting criticism from civil rights advocates. Yet city data indicate recovered from students were identified with metal detectors. 

With heightened school violence fears in his community since the Jan. 6 shooting, Newport News school board member Gary Hunter told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, metal detectors are an appropriate approach “if it makes the teachers feel safe.” But he also noted considerable tradeoffs, expressing concern that installing scanners could come at the expense of positive campus climates while sidestepping necessary conversations about American gun laws. 

“Ten years from now, in many of our cities, our schools will look like prisons,” Hunter said. “Where does it stop?”

There is some anecdotal evidence of metal detectors, and modern weapons detectors, keeping guns out of schools. Earlier this month in Jamestown, North Carolina, law enforcement officials for finding a loaded handgun inside a high school student’s backpack. Yet, other districts have reported guns getting through undetected and . 

Even in airports, with robust and daunting screening checkpoints, metal detectors have striking limitations, federal data indicate. In 2015, undercover investigators with the Transportation Security Administration were through checkpoints in a startling 95% of efforts. Two years later, the agency found marginal improvements with . 

“TSA, their only job is to keep weapons off of a plane and they fail at that 80% to 90% of the time,” Schildkraut said. “So now you’re expecting metal detectors in schools where people who are operating them have less training and more responsibility to somehow do a better job.” 

Just one tool

As schools nationwide in firearm incidents, districts are increasingly turning to weapons detection systems, like the one offered by CEIA. In Wichita, Kansas, for example, district leaders began to roll out the company’s Opengate scanners this year after five guns were found in schools in a three-week period.

Terri Moses, the district’s director of safety and environmental services, said that while the new scanners won’t catch every threat, they’ve become one important tool among many to keep students safe. In fact, she knows the devices have notable shortcomings: An inability to detect certain knives, which she characterized as a “tradeoff” for the convenience that traditional metal detectors don’t offer. Educators must remain diligent about potential campus threats, Moses told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. 

“We always encourage our teachers, our staff or other students to report anything that is inappropriate and not to take for granted that just because we have this that something can’t get through it, or that somebody isn’t finding another way to get around it,” she said. “It is not a solution, it is another tool in the toolbelt that our district has chosen to use to improve safety.”

For school security consultant Kenneth Trump, president of the Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services, the devices’ failure to capture knives is a major red flag since students than guns. 

“Some might argue ‘yes, a bladed weapon is a threat but you’re not going to take out 20 people in a matter of minutes or seconds like a gun,’” he said. “That’s true, but if you’re telling me that you’re selling a weapons detection system, I would expect it to detect more than guns.”

Even as CEIA markets its product as having “a near-zero low nuisance alarm rate on personal, non-threat items,” the system and its competitors have proven no match for a common foil in schools: Chromebooks. In Wichita, students are instructed to pass their Chromebooks around the scanner as they walk through, Moses said. In other districts, students have been instructed to hold their laptops above their heads. 

At a certain point, Ermolaev of IPVM said that false alarms from Chromebooks and other innocuous items put the weapons detectors from CEIA and Evolv in the same realm as traditional metal detectors, which are much less expensive. 

“If you put both systems to the highest sensitivity setting, it will be similar to a metal detector because it will false alarm on pretty much everything,” he said. “Which will inherently bring this screening experience closer to TSA-like screening, which was one of the [things school districts were trying to avoid by purchasing] CEIA or Evolv in the first place.” 

In the weeks since the Jan. 6 shooting in Newport News, Virginia, which police almost immediately deemed intentional, new details continue to emerge, but with each revelation the incident becomes harder to understand.

That was especially true this week when the attorney for injured first-grade teacher ​​Abigail Zwerner alleged the school failed to intervene despite at least that the student was carrying a gun. The school board on Wednesday night and the 6-year-old’s mother, who legally purchased the weapon, still faces the .

Zwerner, 25, suffered a gunshot wound as a bullet passed through her hand and into her chest, police say. Law enforcement officials have said there was an altercation between the boy and his teacher but gave no details; another boy in the class told The Washington Post that Zwerner was shot after she . While injured, she more than 15 other children out of the room to safety, according to police. The wound initially left Zwerner critically injured, but she was released from the hospital Jan. 20. A bullet remains lodged in her body, her lawyer said.

With national attention trained on the shooting and its aftermath, we recap the twists and turns of the disturbing event that encompasses ongoing debates over guns, student mental health, teacher support and school safety.

New details, timeline of events

In the hours before the first-grader shot his teacher, school employees warned leaders at least three times that the student might be armed, including a shrugged-off request to search his pockets and a teary report from another child that the boy had shown him the gun at recess, Zwerner’s lawyer said in a Wednesday news conference. 

The attorney Diane Toscano laid out goes as follows:

Sometime between 11:15 and 11:30 a.m., Zwerner reported to a school administrator that the 6-year-old child had threatened to beat up a classmate. The administrator took no action to check in with or remove the child, Toscano said.

An hour later at 12:30 p.m., another teacher told an administrator she had searched the child’s backpack for a weapon and found nothing, but believed the 6-year-old had put the gun in his pocket before heading outside for recess. The administrator allegedly dismissed the threat, saying the boy “has little pockets.”

Soon after 1 p.m., a third teacher told the administration that a child had tearfully confessed that his classmate showed him the gun at recess and threatened to shoot him if he told anyone, Toscano said.

A fourth employee then asked school leaders for permission to search the boy, but was denied and received instructions to wait because the school day was almost over, according to Toscano. 

The child shot Zwerner roughly an hour later, said Toscano.

Under , school staff can search a student if they have “reasonable suspicion,” a lower bar than the probable cause required of police when searching civilians. Reports by two students to officials that a student possesses a gun at school can represent reasonable suspicion for a search, according to a 1990 court ruling.

Shortly before the Virginia teacher was shot, she sent a frustrated text message to a loved one saying one of her students was armed and her school administration was failing to act, on Wednesday. The outlet did not reveal the identity of the person who received the text or its exact wording.

A spokesperson for Newport News Public Schools declined to comment and noted that the district’s investigation into the incident is still ongoing.

The shooter’s family, however, called the shooting “horrific” and on Wednesday released a statement through their lawyer, James Ellenson.

“On behalf of the family of the child, we continue to pray for Ms. Zwerner and wish her a complete and full recovery,” Ellenson said. “Our hearts go out to all involved.”

Legal ramifications

Zwerner plans to sue the school district, Toscano said on Wednesday, alleging that officials could have prevented the shooting but failed to act.

The events on Jan. 6 came after weeks or more of disturbing behavior from the student that school officials appear to have downplayed. A Richneck educator spoke anonymously with and said, on one occasion, the boy had written a note to a teacher saying he hated her and wanted to light her on fire and watch her burn to death, but the school administration told the alarmed teacher to drop the matter. The teacher did not specify the date of the incident.

On another occasion, according to the teacher, the boy threw furniture and other classroom items, forcing classmates to hide under their desks. He also, on a separate occasion, barricaded the doors to a classroom, trapping students and an educator inside until a teacher from across the hall forced the doors open from the outside. The boy’s identity appears to be known by several reporters who have interviewed educators and others who know him, but neither he nor his parents have been identified. 

The 6-year-old has an “acute disability” and has been under an intensive care plan at his school, his family said in a Jan. 19 statement through their lawyer.

The family described an unusual arrangement with the school, saying his mother or father had been accompanying the boy in class each day to help manage his disability, and that the week of the shooting was the first time their son had been in school without a parent.

“We will regret our absence on this day for the rest of our lives,” the family said.

The child is currently at a medical facility after police took him into custody and obtained a temporary detention order.

Virginia is one of 24 states in the U.S. with . Still, it is “incredibly unlikely” the 6-year-old would be charged with or convicted of a crime because children that young are considered incapable of forming criminal intent or being able to understand trial proceedings, University of Virginia legal professor Andrew Block .

The child’s parents, however, may be in legal jeopardy, juvenile justice experts in Virginia say, even though no one has so far been charged in the shooting.

The mother’s 9-mm. Taurus pistol used in the shooting was stored on the top shelf of her bedroom closet and the weapon had a trigger lock, Ellenson, the family’s lawyer, . Virginia law prohibits leaving a loaded firearm anywhere it is accessible to children under 14, a crime punishable by misdemeanor.

“A 6-year-old cannot go to the store and buy a gun,” David Riedman, founder of the , told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. “So if a 6-year-old shoots somebody at a school, it’s because whoever owned the gun failed to be a responsible gun owner.”

School policy changes

Facing mounting pressure from community members, the Newport News school board Wednesday night voted 5-1 in favor of terminating the contract with its superintendent, George Parker III, effective Feb. 1.

“We’re going to have to become a much more student-disciplined and safety-oriented board and division, and that is potentially going to require a lot of new direction,” board member Douglas Brown said.

At Richneck Elementary, the principal has left and the assistant principal resigned, according to . Karen Lynch, a principal in the district for 17 years, is leading the school’s reopening, according to a .

Students will return to campus on Monday, Jan. 30. On Wednesday, the school invited students and families back for a non-instructional, two-hour transition period to get re-accustomed to the building.

The school’s says it is providing sessions with school social workers or licensed therapists to affected students or families seeking emotional support. However, the listed number went to voicemail when called by ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ Thursday, and staff offered no comment on when the soonest available appointments for families seeking the services would be.

Earlier in January, school board Chairman Lisa Surles-Law said the district would purchase 90 walk-through metal detectors, to go in all 45 schools within the roughly 26,600-student district. Richneck Elementary would be the first school in which the detectors would be installed.

The district did not respond to questions from ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ asking whether the metal detectors would be in place for Monday’s reopening. The most recent shooting was the of gun violence on Newport News Public Schools grounds in 17 months.

What’s next

Newport News is a medium-sized oceanside city on the Chesapeake Bay home to the nation’s largest military shipbuilding company and several military bases. Roughly half of students who attend the school district are Black, about a quarter are white and the remaining share are Latino, Asian or mixed race. About half of all students qualify for free- or reduced-price lunch.

In the city that, until weeks ago, was best known for building submarines and supercarriers, many questions remain unanswered.

Steve Drew, the city’s police chief, his team by Friday expects to finish their interviews of children who were in the classroom when the shooting happened, but did not specify when the investigation would be complete.

Reporter Mark Keierleber contributed to this report.

Barely a week into the new year, a at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia, becoming one of the youngest school shooters in the nation’s history. While , his teacher remains hospitalized with serious injuries. David Riedman, creator of the , discusses the relative rarity of school shooters under age 10 and the likely aftermath of the event.

How rare is it to have a school shooter this young?

This is the 17th shooting involving a student under the age of 10 at a school since 1970 – the first year for which my database keeps track. Most of these shootings were not intentional. But in 1975, a 9-year-old student at the Pitcher School in Detroit was in a fight with a 13-year-old, left campus, got a rifle from his house and came back to the school and shot the student in the head, killing him.

In 2000, a , in their classroom at Buell Elementary School in Michigan while their teacher lined up other students in the hallway. The shooting .

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How do kids this young typically get guns?

In most school shootings, the gun is taken from the student’s home or from the house of a friend or relative. In the 2000 shooting at Buell Elementary, the student’s uncle pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and was for leaving a firearm in an easily accessible place.

The 6-year-old shooter did not face charges due to his age.

What stands out about this recent case?

The most striking part of this shooting is that it appears to be . While many details remain unknown, it is likely that the student had the gun with him the entire day, possibly multiple days, before shooting his teacher. In many states, the legal system assumes that young children are not capable of the thought and planning that goes into committing a violent crime. In Virginia, the to charge someone with a felony is 14 years old.

Do schools need to start searching first graders?

Despite the attention that they generated, school shootings at any age are relatively rare. There have been 17 shootings involving kids under 10 publicly reported across a 52-year period. attend schools every year, and fewer than 300 of them shoot someone on campus.

When most guns that end up in schools come from the home, I’d argue it is the responsibility of parents, relatives and older siblings to make sure that every firearm is locked, secured and accounted for.

The use of metal detectors has been shown to and are only effective with constant maintenance, training, staffing and screening procedures. Some of the incidents involving children have resulted from adults putting a firearm in the kid’s bag and the child firing it when they find the gun at school.

What’s next for this boy?

This remains unclear, and due to juvenile privacy laws, we may never know. The 6-year-old who killed his classmate at Buell Elementary in 2000 was not charged with a crime. In 2021 in Rigby, Idaho, a 12-year-old girl shot three people during a planned attack at Rigby Middle School. Based on her written plan, this young girl intended to . She is until she turns 19 – and possibly until age 21 if she is not deemed fully rehabilitated – following a guilty plea to three counts of first-degree murder.

What’s next for the school?

While much attention is focused on the shooter and teacher, a classroom full of first graders witnessed their classmate shoot the teacher. She was , which means that it was likely a gruesome scene. These students will all need extensive counseling to understand and deal with this trauma. For the other students, teachers and parents, this is also a traumatic experience, and many students may no longer want to go to school.

What does this case suggest for school safety in the US broadly?

There were 302 shootings in school property in 2022, more than in any other year since 1970. Since 2017, the number of shootings each year has significantly increased. This pattern matches the across the country. It is important to remember that most shootings at schools are committed by current or former students, not outsiders breaking into the building. Because of this, school security plans need to include all levels of schools and shootings by all ages of students.

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