Why TSA-style security doesn't work at schools
There are inherent flaws with the concept of manually searching every student at the front door of a huge campus because it's too easy to bring a gun through a different door or window.
Dallas ISD high schools have metal detectors, school police officers, security screenings, ballistic shields, lockdown alert systems, campus security audits, and clear backpack requirements. This didn’t stop a student from being shot inside a classroom at Wilmer-Hutchins High School on April 12, 2024.
Yesterday, three students were shot and another was injured when a 17-year-old student opened fire inside Wilmer-Hutchins High School during afternoon classes. The shooter fled before police arrived on campus. During a press conference, the police chief said "it was not a failure of our staff, of our protocols, or of the machinery that we have".
How can two shootings happen at the school in April 2024 and April 2025 when Texas and Dallas ISD has invested so much time and money into physical security?
An often-overlooked detail with school security is who the "security officers" are. If you listen closely to this story from the 2024 shooting, some of the staff doing the security screenings are teachers.
In 2024, a student was able to sneak a gun through the metal detectors during "late arrival" because staff weren't assigned to the checkpoint anymore—because teachers were probably in classrooms teaching students instead of working the metal detectors.
Last year, Dallas ISD’s proposed solution is having more staff conducting screenings during the day (instead of teaching?) and more training in bag searches. An effective bag search is a function of time and staffing because it takes a long time to check every pocket. If staff follow all of the steps in the Department of Homeland Security’s Public Venues Bag Search Procedures Guide, staff need 2-3 minutes per student to conduct a comprehensive search.
How did these failures occur?
Last year, Dallas ISD district's police chief says protocols were not followed at Wilmer-Hutchins High, resulting in the gun getting inside the campus. The student had the gun inside a backpack that triggered the metal detector, but no one stopped him or checked his bag.
This was an example of “The Matrix Problem” when staff at a metal detector or security checkpoint don’t actually think they will find a weapon. When they do encounter an armed person, they are neither prepared, trained, nor equipped to deal with the situation.
The Dallas ISD police chief explained that "our monitors and staff members are dealing with a long line of students, school is about to start and so there’s some pressures there, and we want them to understand that safety, that protocol, that taking the time to do what’s right, ensures everybody will be safe."
I created this matrix (above) after two school administrators were shot during a student search at Denver East High School last year. Neither staff member was training for what to do or how to protect themselves if they found a weapon.
There are three ways school security screening can go wrong compared to one way it can go right. Wilmer-Hutchins High is an example of both staff without training and staff who were not taking threats seriously.
Huge campus is not a securable space
The fundamental problem (first principles) is a 3.2 million square foot campus is not a securable space unless there were hundreds of security officers and a military-base style security fence with watchtowers.
Wilmer-Hutchins High has multiple attached buildings with hundreds of doors and windows. Even if a student goes through security at the front door before first period classes, they can easily leave a gun outside and then get it during lunch or gym class. If a student has a gun they hide outside, they can easily come back into the school during school day when the security screenings are over because teachers are back in their classrooms teaching.
TSA screening for schools?
TSA gets referenced as a template for school security and this is the wrong comparison. TSA has dedicated and trained staff who only focus on security screenings. They don't leave the security post to go load up the airplane or serve snacks in the airport.
The size and scope of a school security screening agencies would also be significantly larger than the requirements on TSA. There are 130,000 k-12 school campuses in the US with 60M students attending school. By comparison, TSA screens an average of 2.7M passengers per day at 450 airports.
TSA's budget is about $11 billion/year. The school screening mission is at least 22x bigger just looking at number of students versus airline passengers that need to be searched daily. Kids going into school are also allowed to carry a wider variety of items than carry-on luggage. To make matters even more complicated, airline passengers usually get screened once while kids come in and out of a school multiple times per day which exponentially increases the number of screenings.
On top of 60M students, there are another 10M teachers plus parents, other staff, contractors, volunteers, and community members who enter and exit school campuses multiple times each day.
TSA operates at 450 airports while there are 130,000 k-12 school campuses. Each TSA checkpoint needs staff at:
Initial line entry
ID verification
Conveyer belt loading
Computer screen on the x-ray machines
Entry to person scanner
Exit from person scanner
Secondary bag search if item is flagged
Edge of secure area to make sure nobody bypasses screening
This means every school needs a minimum of 8 TSA checkpoint staff working the entire day when the school building is open. This adds up to 1,040,000 school security screeners as just the bare minimum requirements.
Using the average TSA budget per airport multiplied across the number of school campuses in the US, a ballpark cost is somewhere around $250B per year? That's roughly 45x the budget of the entire NYPD.
Every airline ticket also has a $5.60 September 11 Security Fee which goes to the TSA budget. Public schools are free and can't charge a kid $5 every time they go through security.
Once you go through security at an airport, you can’t exit or re-enter the secure area. For a TSA-model to be effective, school campuses need to be physically retrofitted to have a single entryway for the TSA screening area and then all other doors locked, alarmed, and patrolled. This is a fundamental change in how campuses are designed, and the cost is millions of dollars per school.
Solutions beyond physical security
Instead of putting more burden on teachers, our focus needs to be on reducing the amount of time and effort that educators spend on security.
If a student is bold enough to carry a gun through a metal detector, this likely means that having a firearm is normalized behavior because they know security won’t catch them. Teens should not be habitually carrying guns in schools.
We need to focus on solutions that will keep firearms out of backpacks without placing the responsibility on teachers to find them. We need to do this while realizing that airport security in schools isn’t a viable option either.
A more viable solution is fixing “Unforgiving Places” like a school that has multiple shootings on campus. During my recent podcast, Dr. Jens Ludwig disproves the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people. Most shootings are interpersonal conflicts, especially arguments that escalate into shootings. Progress on gun violence doesn’t require America to solve every other social problem first; it only requires that we find ways to intervene in the places and the ten-minute windows where human behaviors predictably go haywire.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.