Dive Brief:

• Responding to a sharp increase in the number of guns confiscated from students so far this year, the Clark County School District (CCSD) in Nevada announced that in the next few weeks it will start conducting random searches of middle and high school students, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports.
• The policy comes after a series of gun scares and violent acts on campuses throughout the school system, which includes Las Vegas and surrounding areas. In one instance, an 18-year-old high school student was shot and killed. So far this year, district officials have found 11 students in possession of a gun, up from five the same time last year.
• Under the new policy, students in classrooms randomly selected by a computer will be asked to line up at a designated search area. School administrators will then search their belongings and scan each student with a hand-held metal detector.

Dive Insight:

As the paper reports, the CCSD policy “has sparked debate among parents, students and educators over the proper balance between privacy and safety.” Such is the case with similar practices in other school districts throughout the country, including a longstanding student search policy in the Los Angeles Unified School District. One study found that in the 2013-2015 school years, LAUSD administrators confiscated many more school supplies than weapons (zero guns, 37 knives).

The low number of confiscated weapons led proponents to tout the program’s effectiveness. Critics, however, say the numbers are proof that the search policy creates more problems than it solves – that instead of finding weapons, it fosters distrust between students, teachers and staff, and the searches often discriminate against certain groups of students.

Only 4% of U.S. schools used random, metal-detector checks in the 2015-2016 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. More common practices are the enforcement of a strict dress code (53% of schools) and random dog sniffs to check for drugs (25%). The most common practices and those preferred by the National Education Association are the use of security cameras (81%) and controlling access to school buildings by locking or monitoring doors during school hours (94%).