Just when your eyes have traced the flight path of a Black Arrow drone long enough to make out its glowing blue lights and propellers in furious motion, the aircraft darts skyward, rocketing off the ground until it practically disappears.
Within seconds, your eyes catch up with the drone as it cuts across the expanse of John Adams Academy’s blacktop basketball court and circles back, hurtling with precision and a hum like a swarm of hornets ready to attack.
Equipped with flashing lights, blaring sounds, pepper spray gel and the capability of ramming into an attacker at 60 mph, these drones are arming schools with an experimental tool to ambush an active shooter and defend classrooms.
John Adams Academy, a new charter school opening Aug. 24 in Sterling Ranch, is the first school in Colorado and among several in the country to test out the defense drones, which aim to stop an active shooter within the first minute of someone opening fire.
“If there’s an active shooter, I want everything possible to help save the children,” said Brenda Dickhoner, one of the charter school’s founding board members whose children will attend the school next year. “They’re meant to bridge that gap before the cops get there. Those few minutes and seconds, we know that can save dozens of kids’ lives.”
The safety of Colorado students and teachers has consumed more attention and more money in a state repeatedly jarred by school violence — including school shootings as long ago as Columbine in 1999 and as recently as Evergreen High School last year.
To better protect students and staff, many schools have outfitted buildings with security features like cameras, locked exterior doors and tightly monitored vestibules in which staff control who enters. They also have hired school resource officers, often partnering with local law enforcement, and practice lockdown drills every year to prepare kids to hide and evacuate.
The drones, similar to devices deployed in conflict zones including in the war between Ukraine and Russia, give schools a faster way to respond to a shooter, smacking the shooter and stopping the gunfire, according to Justin Marston, CEO and founder of Campus Guardian Angel. The Austin, Texas-based technology startup developed the drones, with a goal to activate a drone in an emergency within five seconds, steer it toward the threat within 15 seconds and stop the perpetrator within one minute.
The drones offer schools another layer of protection, something that “goes beyond thoughts and prayers,” Marston told The Colorado Sun.
“If we could really help eradicate mass gun violence in schools in this nation by denying people the time to kill lots of kids,” he said, “I think everybody would agree that would be a worthy and incredibly important outcome for our society.”
“Anything that we can do to protect our kids”
During a demonstration of the Black Arrow drone’s speed and features at John Adams Academy last week, pilots who double as professional drone racers simulated an attack strategy for an active shooter rampage.
Before taking a drone outside to launch, the pilots sent two drones zooming through the gym. At one point, the 2.5-pound drones whirled around a police officer, bright white lights flickering and a loud alarm pulsating. A few minutes later, the pilots veered their devices toward a dummy, crashing one into the dummy and knocking it to the ground.
“My heart’s even racing,” Debbie Brook, a kindergarten teacher at the charter school, told The Sun after watching the drones in action. “This is the coolest thing that I’ve seen in a long time.”
School safety is Brook’s top priority for her students. She has been rattled by school shootings in other states and in her own community.
Brook was a teacher at Ben Franklin Academy, another charter school in Highlands Ranch, during the 2019 shooting at STEM School Highlands Ranch that left one student dead and eight others injured. Her school, only 2 miles from STEM, went into lockdown that day.
“Anything that we can do to protect our kids,” Brook said. “You can’t educate them if they’re not safe. Just to know that we are multi-tiered, we have so many different resources to protect our kids and to keep them safe. It’s just amazing that we get to be the very first school in Colorado to take advantage of this.”
In a real emergency, Campus Guardian Angel pilots would control drones inside the school from an operations center in Texas and remotely navigate the devices toward the perpetrator.
Preparing for that encounter starts with the company’s team of drone pilots, a former 911 dispatcher, a paramedic, and law enforcement and military veterans, including one co-founder who was a member of the Navy SEALs for 32 years.
Once a school contracts with Campus Guardian Angel, the company makes a three-dimensional digital replica of the school, according to Khristof Oborski, Campus Guardian Angel’s tactical operations director who previously led Austin Police Department’s SWAT team and worked as a school resource officer. Using gaming technology, they overlay the cameras already in the school on the digital replica, which gives the company’s command center in Texas a live look at the school when a threat surfaces.
Teachers and school staff have access to a mobile app through which they can alert the operations center about an active shooter, Oborski said. The operations center can then inform a school resource officer about the shooter through a separate mobile app for police officers, feeding them information they get from the teacher.
The command center stays in close contact with school staff and law enforcement throughout an emergency and can communicate in real time while making second-by-second decisions about whether to fly the drones, switch on their lights and alarm sounds, deploy the pepper spray gel or ram into an attacker.
While drone pilots pursue the suspect, teachers can talk to a 911 dispatcher at the command center through the app to relay critical details and consult a paramedic about how to tend to injured students and adults.
Could drones also prevent shootings?
What if a reported incident turns out to be a false alarm?
Campus Guardian Angel relies heavily on school resource officers and local law enforcement to verify whether the threat is credible, Oborski said. His team at the command center also carefully listens to the demeanor of the educator who reports an active shooter.
“If they’re frantic and screaming, that’s a high indication that this is not a false alarm,” he said.
If, however, the chatter coming through is casual and the command center staff senses an alert might have been made on accident, they ask the school resource officer to find the person who triggered the app and assess whether there are real concerns.
In the event of a false alarm, the command center notifies all school staff through the app.
Marston, the company’s CEO, believes the drones could be effective at deterring school shootings altogether.
“If you know you’re going to be hunted in 10 to 15 seconds and then you’re going to be looking stupid running away from drones, focused on the drones, not on the victims,” Marston said, “you have no sense of power.”
Then the drones barrel into you as fast as a car on the highway.
“You probably don’t die,” Marston said. “You’re in extreme pain. You’re carried out. You’re put in the justice system. Who wants to do that?”
Campus Guardian Angel is in the process of introducing its drones to schools in other states, most of them in Florida and Georgia, and has also had initial conversations with private schools in Colorado.
At John Adams Academy, the drones will be one part of a broader school safety plan, acting as a first responder and “one more line of defense,” Kim Gilmartin, one of two school co-founders, told The Sun.
“Why not have every tool in the toolbag that we have,” Gilmartin said, “and hope to God that we never have to use it?”