Schools hope attack drones will stop active shooters - USA Today

As students settle back into classrooms around the United States, a small but growing number of schools are set to debut a new way to protect students from mass shootings: drones.

Schools in Colorado, Florida and Georgia have agreed to participate in the Campus Guardian Angel pilot program deploying drones made by Texas-based Mithril Defense. The drones are intended to deter, distract and incapacitate an attacker using sirens, strobe lights, pepper gel and, if all else fails, by ramming the shooter at speeds up to 60 mph.

“We’re like having a SWAT team in the parking lot,” said co-founder and CEO Justin Marston.

The drones, along with advances like AI gun detection software and wearable panic buttons, are part of a broader push for increased school security. But school safety experts have expressed concern about what they see as expensive, unproven technology.

“As impressive as the technology may be it's just - with my 46 years in the field - it's just not a very practical solution, especially given the cost,” said Michael Dorn, executive director of Safe Havens, a non-profit campus safety organization. “There’s just so many more productive ways to put that type of money to use in most school systems and nonpublic schools.”

In the event of a shooting, school staff can alert Marston’s team via an app or by pressing a panic button. Then, a team of pilots can remotely launch the nearest set of drones and use digital maps of the school and onboard cameras to locate the threat within 15 seconds.

Marston said the company will attempt to reach out to local law enforcement and “request permission to use force,” but they won’t wait to receive it in emergency situations. The appeal of the program, he said, is that the experienced team can respond faster than school resource officers or local law enforcement.

“I have kids,” he said. “I would want the most elite response possible available to try and save their lives."

Florida became the first state to authorize the Campus Guardian Angel pilot program for schools in three districts in late 2025. Georgia lawmakers followed suit in July appropriating $550,000 in the state budget for five schools to participate in the program, according to a Campus Guardian Angel press release. A charter school in Colorado planned to install the system in August, the company has said.

So far, the technology is not yet operational on at least five of those campuses, school district officials in Florida and Georgia told USA TODAY. “Our District has not evaluated, endorsed, nor authorized any specific drone capabilities, including the deployment of pepper spray,” said Keyla Concepción, a spokesperson for Broward County Public Schools in Florida.

Andrew Calhoun, director of athletics and safety at Troup County School System in Georgia, said on Sept. 24 he expects 24 Campus Guardian Angel drones will be installed at Troup County High School in the next three to four weeks. Calhoun said he sees the technology as an “added layer of protection” for the over 125,750 square foot school, which already has a weapons detection system and an armed school resource officer.

“We're looking forward to the opportunity and seeing how these work,” he said. “To be honest with you, I hope we never have to use them.”

Marston said he expects the Campus Guardian Angel program will expand to “seven or eight” states, including Arkansas, by the end of the year. The company noted that Louisiana lawmakers recently passed a bill allowing the state’s department of education to evaluate the use of drones for school security, but declined to specify which other states or schools it is in talks with.

Though the security system seems like a science fiction solution, Marston repeatedly compared it to a more mundane invention: sprinklers. He predicted the drone technology could soon be just as ubiquitous.

“It did take some years for them to get widely adopted, but would you send your kids to a school today that didn’t have a fire suppression system?” he said. “And we think five years from now the same will be true for active shooter suppression systems.”

Marston acknowledged that the drones have some limitations. They can’t smash through doors or certain kinds of windows, and it’s possible a gunman could shoot them down, he said.

Marston also said that while pilots could make a mistake in the chaotic environment of a school shooting, the consequences of a drone making such an error are “far less than a lethally armed officer.” He said that’s part of the reason the company is not interested in equipping the drones with lethal weapons.

“We don’t need it,” he said. “It only increases risk.”

In test exercises conducted with law enforcement, the drones have been able to locate a shooter in well under a minute, Marston said. Two researchers have applied for federal funding to study the efficacy of the drone response.

Though there have been 135 incidents involving guns at schools so far in 2026, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database, Marston acknowledged that the drones have not yet been used during an active shooter incident at a school. That’s what concerns Kenneth Trump, president of the National School Safety and Security Services, a Cleveland-based consulting firm.

“Schools are kind of the guinea pigs to see whether this would actually, really work in an actual shooting,” he said. “And I just think there’s a high risk of unintended consequences of what could go wrong that outweigh the well-intended concept.”

Both Trump and Dorn, the other school safety expert, noted how quickly these deadly attacks can unfold and questioned the company's claims about how fast the drones could respond. Dorn said he’s consulted on dozens of major campus attacks, and he “couldn't think of really a single case" where the drones would have intervened fast enough to save lives.

Both experts cautioned schools against using their limited resources on these highly visible, high tech solutions without first investing in measures like threat assessments and stronger student supervision that can help prevent threats.

“When you wait till your shooting starts, you're in a bad place,” Dorn said. “I agree that we need to teach people what to do when those things occurs and that’s important. But you better be spending a lot more of your time, energy and budget on the things that we know happen to be rather effective at not letting us get to that point.”