Safer Schools, Stronger Societies: Rethinking Student Security for 2026

Cliches like “the children are our future” become so because they’re true. In addition to being a moral imperative, protecting our students from physical and other threats will be a linchpin in the coming global struggle between free societies and authoritarian ones. Ensuring children and young adults feel safe and secure while they learn will make us more competitive with our adversaries for the foreseeable future. The stakes could not be higher.

Multiple empirical studies validate the commonsense notion that students learn better when they feel safe. But the accelerating threats to students' lives and safety in the United States will continue to grow and evolve with new technologies and the ingenuity of bad actors. Physical threats, of course, remain the most concerning for students, parents, teachers, and administrators. School shootings have claimed at least 47 lives in 2025, with non-metallic weapons like ceramic knives and ghost guns slipping through metal detectors. Insider threats, including disgruntled students, staff, or visitors, will likely also continue to rise, fueled by mental health crises and online radicalization. Even bio-agents, such as fentanyl-laced narcotics and smuggled pathogens, pose alarming new risks, with CDC reports noting more than a dozen school incidents involving concealed substances last year. The arrest of two alleged Chinese agents attempting to smuggle deadly Fusarium into Michigan earlier this year illustrates that such threats, perhaps once the stuff of science fiction, are becoming all too real.

Beyond physical threats, cyberattacks, and other virtually enabled but very real dangers are emerging. So far in 2025, schools have reported at least 1,800 cyber intrusions. Beyond personal and other data, attacks against physical infrastructure, for example, through IoT vulnerabilities in smart locks and cameras, may also be expected to continue and become more sophisticated. Meanwhile, ransomware attacks, often backed by nation-states such as Russia or China, will likely continue to disrupt learning and exact millions in ransom payments, as seen in the Los Angeles Unified School District's $10 million payout in 2024. And this is before we even get to Artificial Intelligence (AI), which can not only enable cheating but also, more significantly, create deepfakes to impersonate administrators for social engineering attacks or generate blueprints for 3D-printed weapons that evade traditional metal detectors.

Perhaps most troubling, the last few years have seen multiple examples of teenagers attempting to bring metal-detector-evading 3D weapons into schools. While, thankfully, no actual shootings with such weapons in the US have been reported yet, the fact that such weapons have evaded metal detectors is alarming.

How Do Schools “Future Proof” Against These Threats?

Schools must plan and equip to protect against not only current threats but also emerging ones. To future-proof schools most cost-effectively, schools and school districts should prioritize integrated systems that blend cyber resilience with physical threat detection and barriers. In the cyber realm, zero-trust networks are becoming standard, enabling the verification of each user and device and to better detect incoming threats. Schools may also consider AI-driven predictive analytics to flag behavioral anomalies, such as unusual access patterns. Still, they must take reasonable steps to guard against unwarranted privacy invasions and the tendency of even the best AI technologies to “hallucinate” at times.

Cyber Protections Are Not Enough

Preventing deadly weapons from being brought into schools is paramount, but students should not only be safe but also feel safe. Fortunately, emerging security screening technologies can detect metallic and non-metallic threats before they are brought into a school. Among these new technologies, millimeter-wave screening portals offer a significant advance. These contactless systems use AI and 3D imaging to detect a broad spectrum of threats, including metallic and non-metallic weapons, liquids, powders, plastics, 3D-printed guns, bio-agents, explosives, and narcotics. They can detect in seconds and process up to 1,000 people per hour with minimal staff. Equally important, such systems enable walk-through screening without requiring students to stop, minimizing additional anxiety while protecting them and deterring attempts to bring deadly threats into our schools. 

Wherever feasible, threat screening and other new technologies should be “future-proofed,” for example, by using AI to adapt to emerging threats over the coming years without replacing previously purchased hardware. Furthermore, such systems should be portable, allowing schools to move units from one entry point to another. Fortunately, some such screening systems can now be relocated by one or two people in under 30 minutes, making these solutions both flexible and cost-effective. 2026 will likely see such protective technology enhancements for student safety, supported by federal and state funding and, in some states, potentially legally mandated.

Schools shouldn’t be fortresses, but they must be sanctuaries. As both a father and a security professional, I know it is possible to strike the right balance here. And we must.