$4 million sought for school safety threat assessment pilot project

Outside the Legislature, Rep. Ben Bakeberg (R-Jordan) is the principal at Jordan Middle School.

That firsthand knowledge has led him to believe that deploying safety threat assessment technology outside schools is a necessary next step to ensure students are safe from violence in their classrooms.

He sponsors HF3753 that would appropriate $4 million in Fiscal Year 2027 for the Department of Public Safety to contract with a vendor “for services that integrate advanced threat anticipation, real-time monitoring, and rapid response capabilities to enhance protection of students, educators, administrators, and staff.”

This discreet technology would be deployed on the exterior of school buildings, Bakeberg said, adding that the goal of the pilot project is to identify and stop both visible and concealed potential threats before they can harm students inside the school.

Laid over Wednesday by the House Public Safety Finance and Policy Committee, the bill calls for a school safety threat assessment pilot project to be administered in one school district in each of the state’s eight congressional districts, Bakeberg said.

School districts with existing systems that are comparable to the pilot project model would be ineligible.

Timothy Childs is the founder, innovator, and chief technology officer at Guardian School Security Systems, which uses artificial intelligence, millimeter wave technology like that used by the newer airport scanners, and ultra-fast signal processing that could automatically alert first responders when detecting a threat outside the school.

Knives and guns would likely be the most common threats, he said, and the technology can detect these items even if they are inside a backpack or otherwise not visible.

“Despite industry claims to the contrary, there’s no evidence that surveillance technology makes school safer,” said John Boehler, policy counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, who, among his concerns, also argued that over-reliance on surveillance has been shown to result in disproportionate disciplinary actions taken against minorities.

Opposition to the bill focused on the provision requiring technologies that “integrate advanced threat anticipation” — i.e., artificial intelligence algorithms — that several testifiers said raise concerns about bias and misidentification.

Maren Christenson Hofer, executive director of the Multicultural Autism Action Network, said that reliance on predictive analytics and AI-driven tools that lack evidence of effectiveness is especially troubling for students with disabilities.

Many of these students, she said, have behaviors, such as limited eye contact, repetitive movements, or difficulty following instructions that have historically been misunderstood and misclassified as threatening.