With more than 1,000 school shootings killing or wounding 800 victims in the last three years in the United States, parents, teachers, educators, law enforcement agencies, and legislators are desperately seeking ways to avert active shooter situations. One of the latest solutions is the use of drones.
Mithril Defense, a company in Austin, Texas, has started marketing a drone-based security platform to schools called Campus Guardian Angel. According to the Wall Street Journal, both Georgia and Florida have approved US$500,000 each for drone services in their schools, and a group of parents in Texas has raised $200,000 to deploy Guardian Angel in a high school near Houston.
The Journal also reported that the drone services are priced at 50 cents per square foot annually, or about $8 per child a month.
“Our vision is ultimately to be in every school in the nation and to eradicate mass shootings,” Mithril’s founder, Justin Marston, told the Journal.
Guardian Angel drones sit on charging pads in a school and are activated only when an active shooter situation arises. The drones are monitored and controlled from Mithril’s offices in Austin, and according to the company, can confront an active shooter in 15 seconds with a flying machine that screeches, flashes strobe lights, and shoots pepper spray.
The company noted on its website that the drones can fly at 30 to 50 miles per hour inside a building and sprint at 100 mph outdoors. They can cover a high school campus in eight seconds, two minutes faster than an officer on foot, it added.
Drones Provide Real-Time Visibility
“Active shooter events average approximately three victims per minute — that tells you everything that’s at stake,” observed Michael Martin, founder and CEO of RapidSOS, in New York City, which builds and operates a mission-critical emergency data platform used by 911 centers, public safety agencies, and enterprise partners.
“Drones give public safety agencies real-time eyes on scene, guiding officer actions and delivering the critical situational awareness that the heroes running into those situations desperately need,” he told TechNewsWorld. “When that aerial intelligence connects directly with 911, it stops first responders from rushing in blind and starts getting the right information to the right people at the right time.”
Drones offer faster situational awareness than fixed cameras or foot patrols, added Rich Fahle, vice president of marketing at Airspace, a global logistics technology company. “They can be deployed in seconds to cover large campuses, parking lots, athletic fields, and perimeters that would take security personnel several minutes to reach on foot,” he told TechNewsWorld.
Fahle noted that drones can provide a real-time aerial vantage point that’s simply not available from ground-level infrastructure, giving administrators and first responders a common operating picture during an incident.
“Drones can also be integrated into existing security operations as a force multiplier — not replacing school resource officers or security staff, but extending their reach and response capability,” he said.
“For districts with multiple buildings or sprawling suburban and rural campuses, drones are a cost-effective way to scale coverage without proportionally scaling headcount,” he continued.
In addition, he pointed out that thermal and night-vision sensor payloads allow monitoring during after-hours, events, and low-visibility conditions when schools remain vulnerable but staffing is minimal.
Fragmentation and Compliance Challenges
However, deploying drones presents challenges. “The biggest threat to drone programs in schools isn’t airspace or cost — it’s fragmentation,” Martin contended.
“Too often, drones operate in isolation, trapping life-saving data in a disconnected silo,” he explained. “If that aerial intelligence doesn’t reach the 911 center the moment the incident unfolds, it’s just adding another tool to a patchwork of closed systems.”
“We’ve spent billions as a nation on siloed technology that doesn’t talk to each other, and we see the cost in lives,” he continued. “For drones to actually protect students — and the heroes running in to save them — they need to be built into an interoperable network from day one, not bolted on as an afterthought.”
“Airspace compliance is the biggest overlooked challenge,” Fahle added. He explained that schools are frequently located near airports, in controlled airspace, or under flight restrictions. “Flying without proper authorization through LAANC or FAA coordination creates serious legal liability for the district,” he warned.
“We’d encourage any district exploring drone security to start with the airspace question first,” he advised. “What are the local flight restrictions? What authorizations are required? What platform will manage operations and ensure compliance? Getting the airspace foundation right is what makes a drone security program sustainable rather than a one-off pilot that stalls.”
Privacy concerns are real and must be addressed proactively, he added. “Parents, students, and community members need transparency about what’s being captured, how data is stored, and who has access,” he cautioned. “Without a clear policy framework, even well-intentioned programs will face backlash.”
Mission Creep Concerns
School districts deploying drones should also be concerned about mission creep, warned Beryl Lipton, a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco. “Will these drones really only be used as needed in the worst-case scenarios, or will they eventually be used to monitor the perimeter or internally?” she asked.
“All use of drones requires policies to dictate their use, and these policies need to cover appropriate deployment scenarios, data sharing, and allowable payloads and rationale,” she told TechNewsWorld. “For example, we would never want to see drones authorized to use pepper spray against a shooter, then be used to deploy pepper spray against a student.”
“Surveillance use of a drone would need to have clearly thought-out parameters and restrictions on footage retention and sharing,” she said.
“It’s very important that strong security is in place so that no inappropriate access or use of the drone can occur,” she added. “All drone use requires oversight, transparency, and consequences for misuse.”
When considering a drone deployment, Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C., advised schools to look at the “big picture.”
“If you have limited money to spend on trying to improve school security, are drones the best way to do it, as opposed to having classroom doors that lock from the inside or more mental health counselors?” he told TechNewsWorld.
As for drones preventing school shootings, he argued, “Drones don’t do anything more than security cameras. There’s no actual benefit there.”
“When schools spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on armed drones for their school,” he continued, “it can increase fear in the students.”
“I think it is a technology that on its best day has limited benefits and on its worst day can actually make a situation more dangerous,” he said.
