LANSDALE, Pa. (KYW Newsradio) — Students at North Penn High will now go through a weapons detection system every day after a student brought a gun to school earlier this week. Parents have been calling on the school district to make the system permanent.
On Tuesday, school officials said a 16-year-old student brought a 9mm handgun to school. He was quickly taken into police custody and charged. No one was injured.
At a school board meeting Thursday night, North Penn School District Superintendent Todd Bauer said the Evolv detection system that was installed Wednesday morning will remain in place. Bauer said school officials had been reviewing security prior to this incident, and the district was already in possession of the Evolv equipment.
Concerned parents argued it should have been implemented sooner.
“If it is not implemented every day for every child, it’s ineffective,” said Shannon Main. “Your security protocols are a failure if a kid can walk into a building with a handgun in his waistband.”
Nicole Brown said the district needs to be more proactive in identifying students who may need help and counselling.
“North Penn needs to do better about mental health and supporting children who need intervention, whether the child can verbally identify this or not,” she said. “These thoughts have kept me awake — of what could have happened — and I have been awake for days.”
Jonathan Kassa, a school board member with a public safety background, said, “Community members have asked, ‘You’ve had this Evolv system, why isn’t it there all the time?’ A few years ago, it may have been a response, ‘Well, we didn’t want it to feel like a prison.’”
Bauer noted a lockdown wasn’t issued on Tuesday because their first opportunity to act on the tip came when students were between periods, and a lockdown would have been impractical.
Officials also said they would review the school’s communication protocols. They initially only informed families of high school students about Tuesday’s incident, but failed to recognize that younger students in the district had come to the high school’s planetarium for a field trip.