A small number of schools have agreed to test a novel approach to safety: swarming school shooters with remotely piloted drones.
Eight schools in Florida and Georgia plan to pilot the yet-unproven school safety solution using state grant funding. The first, the 1,700-student Deltona High School in Deltona, Fla., plans to install 39 drones throughout its building in time for the 2026-27 school year.
The drones, about the size of a pizza, are designed to distract attackers by emitting high-pitched chirping noises, shooting nonlethal pepper balls, and even ramming into suspects at high speeds.
“Quite frankly, this is the future,” Volusia County, Fla., Sheriff Mike Chitwood said at a recorded demonstration at the school on May 1.
The drones will be docked in ballistic boxes in school hallways. During a shooting, educators can deploy them with the push of an emergency alert button that notifies professional drone pilots in an Austin, Texas, control room. Using on-drone cameras and detailed maps of school facilities, the pilots will aim to confront the shooter in 15 seconds, sending information to responding law enforcement.
“It’s got to be instantaneous because these things are all over so fast,” said Justin Marston, the co-founder and CEO of Campus Guardian Angel, the Austin startup that manufactures and operates the unmanned craft, noting that it typically takes minutes, not seconds, for law enforcement to respond to an attack.
That’s the sales pitch. But the drones have never been deployed in an actual school shooting.
The company’s co-founder believes the aerial systems could one day be as ubiquitous as sprinkler systems in school buildings. But safety experts caution that the costly technology is unproven and would be prone to logistical challenges in an actual emergency situation.
“It’s a really impractical approach that’s based on assumptions about how these events actually go down that doesn’t match reality,” said Michael Dorn, a school safety consultant who serves as an expert witness at trials related to school shootings. “My first question [to schools] is going to be, ‘Have you done all of the other things that are far more likely to prevent deaths?’”
States pilot drones for school safety
Campus Guardian Angel has already made inroads with state and federal lawmakers and has visions of scaling up to serve thousands of schools.
Legislatures in Florida and Georgia have both approved about $550,000 each in grant funding for a small number of schools in their states to pilot the drone systems. Louisiana lawmakers are nearing approval of a similar measure, and schools in Texas have allowed the company to demonstrate its compact, unmanned craft in their buildings.
In a May 15 report accompanying a proposed spending bill, the House Appropriations Committee said the U.S. Department of Justice should allow schools to use select federal school safety grants to fund the use of “American-made, non-lethal drone systems.” Drones are generally considered unallowable expenses for those grants and subject to case-by-case review, a 2025 solicitation said.
The idea—framed as common sense by supporters and dystopian by critics—comes as years of debates over “hardening schools” through costly physical security measures like metal detectors collide with the rapid evolution of technology, raising complex questions about how to juggle districts’ safety priorities and students’ civil rights.
Some school safety consultants caution school and district leaders against purchasing platforms like AI weapons detection systems, which can come with hefty costs related to contracts, hardware maintenance, and software updates.
While new approaches like those systems and, potentially, drones might sound appealing to lawmakers or parents frightened by headlines about school shootings, they can also distract from fundamental safety practices, like well-practiced lockdown procedures, adequate staff training, and procedures to address more routine safety concerns, like student fights in poorly monitored hallways, Dorn said.
There have been 13 school shootings in 2026 that resulted in injuries or deaths, according to an Education Week analysis. Those include any event on school property during the school day or a school-sponsored activity in which a person other than the shooter was injured by gunfire.
Among the drones’ limitations: They can’t currently fly through closed doors, which must be opened by humans to clear their path, Campus Guardian Angel’s website says. The devices are equipped with lances that can break windows that aren’t coated in ballistic film, the site says.
In past mass school shootings, gunmen have also moved incredibly quickly, Dorn said. And because multiple teachers often press alert buttons in emergencies, it can be difficult to quickly isolate the precise location before a suspect has already moved to another part of the building.
Marston said the drones can be signaled by administrators or by educators through portable emergency response buttons that trigger lockdowns and alert law enforcement in an emergency.
Florida and Georgia are among the 12 states that have passed Alyssa’s Law bills, which require all educators to wear the devices. In an emergency, law enforcement and the company’s response team can communicate directly with teachers who press alert buttons to guide their response, he said.
Drones as first responders in law enforcement
It’s not the first time drones have been tested for safety applications. Outside of schools, state and local law enforcement agencies have added drones and remotely piloted robots to some emergency protocols, using the devices as “first responders” to complete tasks like probing suspicious packages and getting close to potentially dangerous situations like fires or armed standoffs to transmit video without putting humans at risk.
Marston said he had the idea to station drones in schools when he learned about how Ukrainian forces deploy them in the country’s war with Russia. The company’s response crew includes five pilots who honed their remote flying skills on the competitive drone racing circuit, experienced 911 dispatchers, and former SWAT team members, he said.
The cluster of pilot schools, relying on state grants, won’t bear the cost of their drone contracts. Campus Guardian Angel has several pricing models for its agreements. If schools don’t buy the equipment up front, they’ll pay about 50 cents per square foot per year to lease it and contract with the company’s response crew, Marston said. Or schools can buy drones and docking boxes up front and pay about 25 cents per square foot per year for operations.
Drone pilots train regularly, aiming to maintain their efficiency by racing through real and simulated buildings, Marston said.
It may have once seemed strange to install automated sprinklers throughout school buildings, but the systems have helped make fire fatalities in schools extremely rare, he said, drawing comparison to his vision for school safety drones.
But just as schools with drone systems will also need school resource officers, training, and violence prevention to keep students safe from shootings, schools should equip kitchens with fire extinguishers, conduct fire drills, and intervene if students are contemplating arson to prevent fires, Marston said.
“But I wouldn’t send my kids to a school that only relied on those [strategies] and didn’t have a sprinkler system to put out fires,” he said.
