Fairfax County Public Schools is deploying free-standing weapons detection scanners that are more sensitive than traditional metal detectors at high schools and secondary schools.
Beginning with the week starting Monday, the OpenGate systems will be used at a randomly selected FCPS high school during morning arrival, and will be in place at that school for one or several days, the county school system explained on an FAQ page on its website.
Secondary schools will also be subject to the randomized scanner pilot, FCPS said in a release last week.
Students will pass through the scanners one at a time, with laptops handed over and then returned to the student once through the scanner. If an alarm is sounded, the student will then go through a secondary screening conducted by school security and staff.
The county has 15 devices, which will be deployed en masse at the selected high school. This will allow multiple students to go through simultaneously in order to prevent delays.
The program will run through the end of the current academic year, with its status for the 2025-2026 school year dependent on funding.
While the new systems are intended to find weapons like guns and knives, they will pick up on innocuous metal items like metal glasses or pencil cases, metal lunchboxes, binders with metal rings and umbrellas. The secondary screening is meant to determine the cause of the alarm and then find out whether a person has a prohibited item.
Weapons, bomb-making materials or other illegal substances found in a person’s possession will be confiscated and the student may face FCPS discipline as well as potential charges from the police.
Parents whose children cannot go through the scanners for medical reasons were asked to contact their school’s doctor or principal.
FCPS also stressed that, as opposed to an X-ray, OpenGate systems use “safe, low-frequency electromagnetic fields” which ensure that “the screening process is completely safe for all individuals, including children, pregnant women, and those with pacemakers or other medical devices.”
The program was first budgeted for in August and December, and the debut of the scanners comes just weeks after two students at Thomas Edison High School in Alexandria, Virginia, were arrested and charged with having a gun on school property, according to FFXNow.
