Hosanna Christian Academy, Austin, Texas
With student welfare an ever-present concern among our nation’s parents and educators, Hosanna Christian Academy is among the latest schools to rely on Austin, Texas's Athena Security for campus safety. The Baton Rouge, Louisiana, school, which serves children in pre-K through 8th grade, has installed a system designed to detect guns and weapons.
Leaders at Hosanna Christian Academy report that they wanted a high level of threat detection without making students feel as if they were entering a high-risk area.
Manufacturer Athena Security’s frictionless detection systems is designed to offer a slim footprint for screening as people enter the building. Traffic flow can continue as normal, without troublesome delays, for known adults and students, with adults and older children the primary focus of detection on campus through a single point of entrance in the school’s front office.
This next generation of weapons screening can spot the difference between innocuous items—like keys, phones, and metal water bottles—and legitimate hazards.
The detection system uses high definition metal detection combined with other sensors to understand the type, shape, and size of metal in transit through the system to identify metallic threats immediately. This next generation of weapons screening can spot the difference between innocuous items—like keys, phones, and metal water bottles—and legitimate hazards. With the system, staff is alerted if a potential threat is detected.
“We wanted a system that passed the government standard for weapons detection [and] software to help our operations,” says the school's executive director, Russell Marino. “Athena was ... very helpful in getting the system set up and our staff trained on the supporting software.”
Marino adds, “Parent feedback has been overwhelmingly supportive. This is not your grandma’s metal detector. Parents like the system’s low profile, but more importantly they like that it’s a proactive solution to create a safe, friendly learning environment for their kids.”
