The prevalence of school shootings and other violent incidents on school campuses continues to be a concern for the staff and students who spend any amount of time in a school building. For the most part, these issues have avoided directly impacting Davie County Schools, but concerns about weapons on campus and incidents of violence have occasionally reared their heads.
On February 26 of last year, a Davie County Sheriff’s Office investigation revealed that two students involved in an altercation after school hours had a firearm in their possession earlier that same day on school grounds. When responding to the altercation, Sheriff’s deputies located one firearm on the ground near the site of their altercation, which led to the investigation. Two weeks prior, two posts from a Davie alumnus on his Snapchat story were investigated as potential threats against the school.
With incidents like these and events like the mass shootings at numerous schools around the country, it’s no surprise that adding more safety protocols to the Davie High campus has been a concern for Davie’s principal Michael Pruitt.
“We’ve been talking about it for a couple years as more and more incidents continue to happen, some of them striking closer to home than others,” Pruitt says.
The Board of Education and other County Office personnel agreed. On November 12, 2024, the board voted that metal detectors be implemented throughout all school campuses. But it wasn’t just their decision: other leaders in the schools and the community provided their input.
“So the sheriff’s department, central office, school, SMRT teams, (that’s our safety teams), have been discussing it for several years,” Pruitt says. “Mr. Wallace met with a superintendent friend of his who recently got the same ones [metal detectors] that we’re using and talked about the relatively good cost and ease of use for these particular machines. So it was enough for him to finally sit down with them, with the company, and say, ‘Okay, show me what you got. What could we do to make this work?’ And I think that’s when they decided.”
Beyond that, Pruitt had consulted with the parent’s association earlier last year. While parents haven’t usually been open to the idea of the detectors in the past years, the rise in violence within schools has led them to open up to the idea.
“When I first became principal, the idea of putting metal detectors in, you know, many of our parents said, ‘We don’t want that. We don’t want our school to feel like a prison. We don’t want our kids to feel like, you know they’re they’re having to go through and all this stuff every day.’ We don’t want them to worry about it,” Pruitt says. As incidents have started getting closer to North Carolina and Davie, such as the Apalachee High School shooting in Georgia, parents began to see that metal detectors could be a good idea to protect the students.
As with any large add-on to the school campus, the OpenGate metal detectors came with a matching large price. While Davie County Schools has at times struggled to maintain an effective budget for educational expenses, there was a strategy the school could use to be able to afford these detectors.
“The school system has already decided that this is worth it for them to spend the money,” Pruitt says. “So just like every other large organization, they have a rainy day fund where they have set aside money every year in good years, so that if there comes an emergency expense or something that they need to take care of that they can’t take care of any other way, they dip into the emergency rating fund.” The school did apply for a grant, though it isn’t necessarily needed; if they receive it, they plan to reimburse the grant.
While safety concerns are understandable, the implementation of these metal detectors has brought about some anxiety among students. One chief worry from students is the question of what metal they will detect. School Chromebooks are made with lead, and a large majority of students around the school carry large water bottles. Will these trigger the detectors? How will the school make sure everyone is not hit with a continuous barrage of alarms every morning? Pruitt says that these concerns have been considered and that there is some degree of flexibility.
“So with the metal detectors, they have different settings, just like the ones at the airport and at sporting events,” Pruitt says. “So if you’ve been to a sporting event recently—a big sporting event, like a Panthers game or a Hornets game—you’ve probably walked through pretty much the same system that we’re going to have.”
While safety procedures five to ten years ago at sporting events required your bag to be searched, that is not the case in this situation. The metal detectors the school is implementing will have different settings that can be adjusted, meaning only certain amounts of metal will be detected.
“The ones that we have, while they have the capability of being turned all the way up and detecting all metal, we can also turn them to a setting that will just search for larger weapons,” Pruitt says. “So that’s where we intend to keep them.”
During lunch on January 21, students were invited to walk through the metal detectors prior to their official installation to see their sensitivity and get a feel for the transition. Most students did not take advantage of this opportunity, but all will soon be seeing the devices in action as second semester arrives.
