How one school system is turning to AI to boost safety

Officials at Loudoun County Public Schools in Virginia are spending summer break preparing to use artificial intelligence to monitor for threats and other incidents requiring intervention in the 2025-26 school year.

This month, LCPS tapped Volt AI’s software platform to monitor footage from existing security cameras for happenings that appear out of the norm, such as fights, someone pulling out a weapon, break-ins, or medical emergencies.

When it spots an anomaly to normal operations, the system alerts officials at Volt AI’s round-the-clock security operations center. If staff verify that there is a problem, they send an alert to the appropriate channels, such as school administrators, the school nurse or even 911.

“[We’re] using it as another tool in the toolbox that we think can help shorten response time, make personnel more efficient, and address things in a quick and safe manner,” said Dan Adams, LCPS’ public information officer. “With the AI looking at all these cameras instead of having to have a human eyeball looking at every single camera, it’s obviously going to be more efficient and advise us quicker of any potential issues.”

Volt AI’s system does not learn to identify and flag specific objects the way many AI processes work, said Dmitry Sokolowski, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer. Rather, it learns to understand the environment, similar to how self-driving cars operate.

“That allows us to, over time, understand what’s normal and what’s not normal,” Sokolowski said. “A very simple example: If you have a basketball court inside of the school, people play basketball, fall down, get up, and all that is normal. Out in the lobby of the school if someone falls down, that is probably not normal because people typically don’t just lay on the middle of the floor in the lobby. The system understands not only the behavior but also understands the context of what it’s seen.”

Currently, the technology is deployed in hundreds of schools across 12 states and at universities nationwide.

Each school can configure what alerts are sent and to whom, even setting parameters around the time of day. For instance, if a student athlete collapses after practice, when the principal and school nurse are gone, the alert might go to a school resource officer or directly to first responders.

The idea isn’t to replace school safety personnel but to “supercharge the existing team and existing resources,” Sokolowski said.

Another common concern with AI is privacy. Sokolowski said the platform changes nothing about the way schools use security cameras – and many do: 93% of schools reported using them during the 2021-22 school year, the most recent data available from the Education Department.

“Schools already have cameras. They are already recording everything,” he said. “The big difference is when you have an incident, a human being has to go through hours and hours of footage, find the incident, generate a report recreating the incident with the visual snapshot, and every incident goes through that process. We’re basically taking that process and making it real-time, so that as soon as the incident is triggered, our system is generating this audit model of what happened during the incident and giving an opportunity for people to do something about it.”

Additionally, the system can continuously learn in two ways. One is at the individual school level, where it gets smarter about normal and anomalous occurrences specific to that facility. The other is at the foundational software level. For instance, Sokolowski said, the system might incorrectly identify a student’s lacrosse stick as a weapon. The SOC team can correct that mistake. “That data automatically goes into our system, and our system learns what a lacrosse stick looks like, and that it is not dangerous,” he said.

LCPS’ Adams said the school district — the third largest in the state with 100 school facilities serving more than 82,000 students and 13,000 employees — has not seen a significant uptick in fights, crimes or other problems; it’s just looking to make the most of AI.

LCPS signed a contract renewable year to year for five years with Volt AI after pilot testing the software. “I don’t have the details of how all it went, but it was successful enough that safety and security did advocate to move forward with a contract with the company,” Adams said.

The plan is to implement it at LCPS’ 17 high schools and 17 middle schools. Part of assessing its performance each year will be comparing the number of fights, assaults and other incidents at schools before and after the software’s implementation, Adams said.

 “While education is definitely our passion and our mission, safety is always our No. 1 priority,” he said.

School districts nationwide are using AI to bolster security. LCPS is among the 1,500 using Gaggle Safety Management to track students’ online activity, flagging concerning searches that indicate physical or mental distress. In January, two North Carolina counties were chosen to pilot test an AI School Safety Program, and last year, Plymouth-Canton Community Schools in Michigan began testing Motorola’s Avigilon, which integrates AI with the camera system.