Cape schools to enhance safety with new weapon detectors

The Cape Girardeau Public School District will begin implementing weapon detectors at Cape Central High School and Terry W. Kitchen Jr. High School this school year.

Detectors will be placed at designated entrances at both schools, and also will be used for other school-sponsored activities, both indoor and outdoor. The district will have the detectors installed before the first day of school Tuesday, Aug. 20.

According to Josh Crowell, CGPS assistant superintendent of Support Services, the district purchased eight additional CEIA Opengate Weapon Detection Systems after performing a test run with them at Cape Central Academy during the 2023-24 school year.

"We deployed a unit at Central Academy for the entire school year last year," Crowell said. "Around the wintertime, we had all of our research and we looked at how that was operating.

“We had multiple conversations on pros and cons, we looked at, ‘Does this create a delay at the door? Does this create a bottleneck? How do we combat that so that the traffic is still free-flowing? If there's a tone that goes off and we have to do a second screening on one particular individual, how do we do that?’ We took all of those different data points, we had our internal discussions and, from there, he guided us to rolling it out to other buildings and so we placed that order.”

Crowell said the reception from students and staff was positive as having the system in place provided them with peace of mind and allowed them to focus more on their individual tasks.

The CEIA system was designed with portability and versatility in mind. The portable system weighs just 25 pounds and can be used both indoors and outdoors. According to the product’s website, the device can detect multi-caliber weapons and improvised explosive devices.

According to Crowell, administrators began researching weapon detection systems to utilize at district schools 2 1/2 years ago and had purchased the units well before the shooting incident during Cape Central's graduation at the Show Me Center took place. However, the detectors hadn’t arrived by graduation.

"As you can imagine, there's still some equipment out there that's at high demand, and it takes a while to get this stuff back in," Crowell said. "Unfortunately, we weren't able to get everything set up to go at that off-site location for our graduation."

In addition to purchasing more detection systems to implement at the two schools, the district is also working toward hiring a door operator whose responsibilities would include greeting visitors and verifying their reason for visiting, reporting suspicious activity, ensuring visitors sign in and out before directing them to their destination, responding promptly to building alarms, ensuring all students and visitors pass through the weapon detection system and alert building administration to address discovered.

While the district hopes to fill the position soon, Crowell said it will continue to be a “team effort” between administrators, school resource officers and building staff to help offload students in the morning.

“We all collaborate on what assignments they have in the morning,” Crowell said. “We have staff that are out in front of our buildings helping at the elementary level, helping parents get their kiddos out of the car and we have staff that are posted up in various different hallways of the buildings. … We all have various assignments with staff members that we help out to make sure kids are organized and they're going where they need to be. That's elementary through secondary.”

Crowell said the district is still “finalizing all of the details of what this will look like,” and said students and parents can look forward to receiving communication about the new weapon detection systems and what to expect in the near future.

“Families should be expecting direct communication coming from our buildings very soon, even during our orientations, on what this will look like,” Crowell said.