This week, the Jefferson County Board of Education approved a plan for installing a weapon detection system in middle and high schools.

Jefferson County Public Schools plans to spend over $17 million on the system that uses artificial intelligence to detect weapons.

One of the companies that makes the systems was at a Jefferson County High school one day after the vote.

To demonstrate how it works.

Same thing here.

I walk through.

Why is going red is an audible.

My image shows up.

I'm actually going to be directed to resolution.

This is a little bit of video moving it to help sometimes to identify where on the person the item might be.

The other thing that that you can see is that because it allows the matching, there's less opportunity for bias to be introduced into the screening process.

The other thing it allows is for understanding what what doors or what entrances are being used, because you can look at statistical information of arrival when people are getting in for schools.

You can kind of tell the where the kids are coming in.

So the system is designed to allow multiple people to go through at the same time.

You can go through shoulder to shoulder if you're two adults.

We typically do not see lines, right.

That's one of the design principles for the system.

We want to sort of mitigate that soft target that actually gets created when you actually have lines out in front of the system.

So it's very minimal and is very the weapons detector is not as intrusive as a metal detector allowing for free flow.

And especially if a but once the kid takes out that Chromebook and does the wrap around mess that you see at this table right here, it's pretty free flowing.

You know, with bags.

So people can have bags in the back, they can have it on the side and just walk through.

If the light stay green, they go right on in because it is an air based system.

We're continuing to train and teach the system over time.

Right.

So gathering more data and the more data that we have, the more we can actually go and train and teach the system.

And so because of that, it allows us to continue to improve the system over time.

If Apple comes out with a new iPhone, we want to learn to ignore it.

Right.

And if it comes out with a new weapon, we want to learn to catch it.

And so we have to keep updating the system and getting it smarter as time goes on.

Absolutely.

Anecdotally, we're hearing from schools across the nation that they're seeing fewer guns being found because of the deterrent value.

I will say we caught 176,000 weapons last year and, you know, not only in schools but across all the different venues that we try to protect.

Obviously, the key to implementation is going to be staffing.

And I think you heard that if you observe the board meeting and so for us, we know it's going to take about three individuals per unit in order to staff it appropriately.

After visiting multiple districts, we feel that it is a best practice.

So we are still going to do the safety measures that we've been doing for for the years.

This is just another layer that we're going to offer to our to our community.

Jefferson County Public Schools will now begin looking for a vendor to install the systems in schools.