MIAMI – Miami-Dade schools opt for new gun detection AI technology metal detectors to ensure the safety of students.

“Everyone wants their child to come back safely when they leave home,” says Sherina Akins, the mother of a Miami-Dade Public Schools student.

Parents across South Florida – and the country – know that feeling. And it has prompted school districts to continually improve their safety plans and parents to consider whether their children are best protected.

“I just sent my daughter to this school from another school, partly for safety reasons,” said another parent who knows Leon.

Efforts to make schools safer led to passages Metal detectors for public schools in Broward County this school year, but parents in Miami-Dade shouldn’t expect the same. Instead, the district tested new AI technology over the summer.

“Firearm detection through artificial intelligence,” said MDCPS board member Luisa Santos.

Santos said nine schools, including one CBS News Miami visited in Pinecrest, used special software with existing surveillance cameras to determine if someone was carrying a weapon outside of school.

“The blind tests conducted by our police department showed that the technology is very effective,” Santos said.

The company behind AI gun detection is ZeroEyes. It was founded in 2018 after the mass murder at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.

“America seemed more shocked by this incident than most of the previous ones,” said Sam Alaimo, co-founder of ZeroEyes. “I was doing some soul-searching and around that time our CEO, who I was on Seal Team with, was picking up his daughter from school and she had just finished a school shooting drill.”

Alaimo helped found the company, which was staffed by retired military veterans or police officers from the command center in Pennsylvania.

“As soon as a weapon is visible, a freeze frame appears,” Alaimo said. “The human verifies that it is indeed a weapon, presses the alarm and the customer receives it in multiple ways. In the real world, we do this in about three to five seconds.”

Alaimo said they have 24 clients in Florida. Dade Schools could be next, as Santos believes implementing the technology is a better way to go than installing metal detectors.

“It costs between $3.5 million and $5.5 million to buy the metal detectors,” Santos said. “And the staffing for those metal detectors, because you can’t have metal detectors without staffing. That would cost us about $17 million a year. That’s a very high cost for something that hasn’t been proven to be effective. We’re also worried about logistics.”

She said the annual cost of ZeroEyes would be $500,000.

“If we see a threat or something that needs to be addressed, we will definitely assign it to an officer who will take care of it,” said Miami-Dade Schools Police Chief Ivan E. Silva.

Even though new technologies are being tested and there are currently around 18,000 cameras in use across the district, tips are still important.

Miami-Dade schools say they have received an average of more than 100 tips per day since school started last month. And this school year marks the first time there is a full-time team conducting random searches of all schools using sniffer dogs and search wands to detect firearms on school grounds.

“We basically want to be able to cover more schools and … cover a larger number of schools than before,” Silva added.

Silva said he plans to recommend the district invest in and utilize AI-based firearm detection technology. Board member Santos said she couldn’t give us an exact time frame for when we might see a vote on approval and budgeting, but they are in the early stages of planning a move forward. In the meantime, the police chief said he believes building a relationship between his officers and students is ultimately the best way to keep students safe.

“The ones who give us information about things that are happening in the schools,” Silva said. “They’re the ones who notify us and report illegal contraband like firearms or drugs. And that’s how we solve most of our cases because we have a relationship with those students.”