I’ve been following Campus Guardian Angel for about a year now, and at this point I feel like I should get a punch card. The Texas company sells drones that are supposed to swoop in during a school shooting, blast pepper gel, flash strobe lights, and physically slam into an attacker before real damage is done.
Justin Marston and his cofounder, a former Navy SEAL, say the whole concept came to them at a Whataburger, which honestly explains a lot about how thoroughly this thing was thought through before it started landing government contracts. Since then I’ve tracked this outfit through Texas, Florida, Arkansas, and Georgia, watching them talk school boards and legislators into handing over public money for a product with basically no real-world track record.
Now Colorado has entered the chat, and of course it’s a charter school leading the charge. John Adams Academy in Sterling Ranch hasn’t even opened its doors yet, but it’s already lined up to be the first school in the state to install these drones.
Charter schools already operate as a kind of taxpayer-funded workaround, siphoning public dollars away from traditional public schools while answering to a lot less oversight. So watching one of them turn around and ask the county for another $200,000 on top of that, this time for an unproven drone system, feels less like innovation and more like taking a loan out to buy a lottery ticket.
The county didn’t even get to vote on it. The funding request got yanked off the consent agenda at the last minute, and the founder of the school later told a reporter the school can afford Campus Guardian Angel without the county’s money anyway. She just won’t say how much it costs.
Parents showed up to that county meeting wanting answers and didn’t even get the chance to speak because the item got pulled before public comment.
Finally, one parent raised the obvious question of what happens when a drone sprays pepper gel or slams into the wrong kid. Another parent pointed out that Campus Guardian Angel has been in roughly ten schools across the South and still has zero data proving any of it works, because thankfully none of those schools have had an actual shooting.
And on top of the safety questions, there’s the money itself: a public charter school asking taxpayers to help fund a system whose price tag has been kept deliberately vague, tucked inside a redacted line item labeled “physical security improvements.” Not exactly the transparency you’d hope for when public dollars are on the line.
None of this addresses the concerns I’ve raised again and again about whether this technology could even work in the moment it’s supposed to matter. A dummy in a hallway doesn’t panic, doesn’t run, doesn’t fire back.
A real shooting is chaos, and chaos doesn’t wait patiently for a pilot sitting more than a thousand miles away in Austin, Texas, to get eyes on the right target. We’ve already seen what happens when this kind of threat-detection tech meets reality, because Omnilert’s AI system mistook a bag of Doritos for a gun and sent armed police after a kid who was just walking to class.
Now imagine that same margin for error, except this time it’s attached to a flying drone that can hit someone at 60 miles an hour. John Adams Academy is also planning to have armed teachers on top of an SRO and this drone system, which raises its own tangle of questions about who’s supposed to identify the threat first and how a remote pilot avoids getting in the way of the people already on the ground with guns.
And let’s talk about the thing nobody at that school board meeting seemed interested in bringing up, guns. Colorado likes to present itself as a blue state with strong gun laws, especially in the years since Aurora and Columbine, but the reality is messier than the reputation.
The state has historically had some of the more permissive firearm laws in the country, and even with a new permit-to-purchase law for certain semiautomatic weapons taking effect this August, that law only applies going forward. It does nothing about the millions of guns already sitting in Colorado homes, unsecured, waiting for a kid to find them.
No permit is required to simply possess a firearm. Open carry is legal in most of the state without any permit at all. So no, Colorado is not the airtight, gun-controlled utopia people assume it is, and no drone hovering in a hallway is going to change what’s sitting in someone’s nightstand at home.
Meanwhile, Campus Guardian Angel isn’t slowing down one bit. Marston was just back in Arkansas this week, presenting to hundreds of school resource officers at the Arkansas Safe Schools Conference, the same state where this company once bragged about its Matrix-style pilots and their sixty-drone dream for a single high school.
They’re planning another demo in Jonesboro, and next month they’re set to pitch directly to the Arkansas legislature. Funny how this company keeps circling back to the states most willing to hand out a check without asking too many hard questions, while somehow never circling back to the one policy fix that would actually reduce the number of times these drones might ever need to launch in the first place.
Florida, Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, and now Colorado. Different zip codes, same pitch, same government handout dressed up as innovation.
If corporate welfare had a mascot, it would be wearing a little propeller hat and hovering over a school hallway, waiting for its next contract to clear.
(Sources)
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