With schools plagued by threats, the I-Team actually investigated how often guns are brought onto campus. As it turns out, that’s not Arizona State’s statistical footprint.
PHOENIX — It was the afternoon of February 2, 2023. As the school year draws to a close at Red Mountain High School, things take a horrifying turn.
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According to disciplinary records, the student reported to the assistant principal that he saw the tan gun during the seventh period of class. He told the administrator who the student was, but when the administrator went to the suspect’s eighth period class, he was not there.
Two police officers, the school’s security team, and the entire administration began cleaning the campus. He finally found the student and urged him to pick up his pace. The administrator grabbed the student’s backpack and stopped it, exposing his back and the grip of a tan, black handgun.
The school was forced into lockdown as students fled and began running.
The student was eventually found off campus without the gun. The gun was later found under a tree.
This was the first of more than 100 close calls in Maricopa County since 2019.
At least one gun has been seized in 16 of 20 high school districts since 2019.
“We know kids are getting weapons,” said Allen Moore, director of school safety and security for Mesa Public Schools.
The 12News I-Team obtained gun seizure records from 20 of Maricopa County’s largest high school school districts through public records requests. At least 114 guns have been found on school campuses since January 2019, records show.
Twelve of those students were from Mesa Public Schools, the state’s largest school district. Half of them happened in the last year alone.
“I think guns have forever been a problem in our society. I don’t think I’d be naive if I said there were never guns in our schools. It’s something I’ve always worried about over the years. “You know, how can we call our school a gun-free district?” Moore said. .
That’s why Mesa installed a weapons detection system this year.
“How quickly did the weapon detection system actually detect the gun?” 12News reporter Bianca Buono asked.
“Well, that’s an interesting story because we launched it at Skyline last April. About a month or so later, we worked out all the protocol bugs, and then the next week we launched it at Mesa High School.” said Mr. Moore. “Then about 20 minutes later, a kid came in with a gun.”
In the West Valley, the Tolleson Union High School District announced 15 guns have been found on campus since 2019.
Superintendent Jeremy Coles said: “While our efforts have removed 15 specimens from schools, we remain concerned about how many remain undetected and unremoved.” spoke. Possessing a gun on campus. ”
Most of the students were from the Phoenix Union High School District, the state’s largest high school district. At least 44 guns have been seized, and the data only covers the first three quarters of the 2023-2024 fiscal year.
But countywide records obtained by 12News highlight how widespread the problem is. Sixteen of the 20 school districts seized at least one gun between 2019 and 2024.
States don’t track guns in schools
“Well, that’s shocking,” said Tom Horn, Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction.
Currently, Arizona is one of the few states that does not track the number of guns found in schools, so the I-Team submitted its findings to the Arizona Department of Education.
Under the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994, schools are required to report weapons incidents to states, which in turn report that data to the U.S. Department of Education.
Instead, the Arizona Department of Education will send a voluntary survey to school districts.
The I-Team reviewed one of our surveys for the 2022-23 school year and found that the data was completely different than what the district directly reported in response to our public records requests. did.
Many districts did not respond at all.
“I wonder how we can make informed decisions about school safety when we don’t know the extent of the problem,” Buono said.
“Well, you gave us an opportunity to ask the public to enforce the law that prohibits school districts from bringing guns to school, to report to us, to report students to the police. I think it would go a long way toward resolving the issue if students knew that other students had been indicted,” Horn said.
Horn said he supports legislation that would require local governments to report gun seizure data to the state.
Tolleson Union High School is one of the districts that did not respond to the survey.
“I know they send out a few hundred surveys a year, but I don’t know about those specific surveys and I’m not going to do that through surveys,” Calles said. we should do it right. Build the actual system. Build a cloud-based service that allows you to access this system and not only send data, but also get dashboards with meaningful insights to help you do your job. ”
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