Mapping Clear Pathways to School Safety

Ernest Williams, CEO of Go To Green Security, discusses how gunshot detection and real-time evacuation technology evolve school safety beyond lockdowns.

• By Ernest Williams
• March 31, 2026

In the past five years, school shootings have drastically increased. For the five years before schools closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there were around 40-50 school shooting events annually. Since students have returned to school, those numbers have jumped to over 75 events every year.

These numbers are based on CNN’s analysis of events reported by the Gun Violence Archive, Education Week and Everytown for Gun Safety and include any school shooting event where at least one person was shot. If instances where guns were brought to school were included, but any potential shooting event was intercepted and prevented, these numbers would be even higher.

Currently, most schools hold active shooter drills as part of regular safety preparations for fire or severe weather for students and staff, and most of these entail school-wide lockdowns. However, there is ongoing debate over the potential damage these drills may cause. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a congressionally mandated report in 2025 looking at the mental, emotional and behavioral health impact on students and school staff when conducting active shooter drills.

Some schools have been criticized for holding active shooter drills that are too realistic, resulting in unnecessary trauma for staff, teachers and students. The report makes recommendations to mitigate the harm these drills could cause but does not address one fundamental flaw of school lockdowns.

The challenge with lockdowns is that if an active shooter is on school grounds, it is not always easy for everyone to take cover before doors are closed and locked.

Students and staff can be trapped in hallways or outside with no knowledge of where the shooter is located and no insight into what route is safe. The same is true if there were a fire, damage following a storm or any other catastrophic emergency. The focus has always been on sheltering, but little has been done to create safe pathways for evacuating a building.

Waiting for law enforcement or a school administration official to physically release each room in a school from lockdown by knocking on the door and providing a pre-planned all-clear message is time-consuming. It also increases the length of time students, teachers and staff are exposed to potential threats.

Schools have long focused on fortification and investing in technology to prevent shootings from occurring. They have installed bullet-proof barriers in front offices, installed security fencing and created other barriers to entry for shooters. While these efforts may help stop people with violent intent from gaining access to campus grounds, the reality is that school shooting instances are still on the rise.

As schools evaluate what else can be done to improve the safety of staff and students, investing in technology to help identify the location of a shooter should be considered. This should include better intelligence to assist in evacuating the premises.

For instance, Gunshot detection technology uses acoustic sensors to detect the sound of a gun being fired and triangulate the shooter’s location. It is already used by law enforcement to locate shootings in real time in cities. Knowing where a shooting is occurring in a school is the first step in creating evacuation routes.

Once school officials know where a shooting has occurred on a school campus, they need a way to efficiently communicate this information to teachers and staff who can aid in evacuating students. Real-time updates should be provided as the shooter moves and continues to shoot. Sending text messages or making announcements via other forms of mass communication can be confusing or overlooked, resulting in accidental exposure to the threat.

Evacuation routes need to be clearly marked in a manner that is easy to understand, even for the youngest student, and the signals indicating safe pathways must be updated as the threat evolves. While areas of the school further from the shooter are being evacuated, other measures can be taken in the vicinity of the perpetrator to protect the lives of staff and students. Anyone near the shooter should be sheltering in place and putting barriers between themselves and the threat until the all-clear is sounded.

Active shooter threats are just one scenario where better technology providing safe evacuation routes can save lives. Instead of only having the option to lock down a building, investing in technology that can communicate pathways to safety gives schools the ability to remove students and staff from danger during an emergency. This might be an active shooter, or it might be a fire.

Regardless of the threat, the goal should always be to help students and staff reach safety as soon as possible.