BATON ROUGE - The East Baton Rouge Parish School Board has begun deploying new metal detectors to prevent weapons from being brought onto campuses by students."If we can enhance our safety measures to ensure we are doing everything we can, it creates a more trusting environment, and we are committe d to keeping our students safe," Superintendent LaMont Cole said.Schools within the parish discovered more than 10 guns on campuses this year alone, including two at Woodlawn High School. The district is the latest to join four other schools in utilizing this new equipment."As students walk in, the goal is to have them move as freely as possible, maintaining a pace that resembles normal life to minimize disruptions to their school day and their teaching and learning as they pass through the system," Jill Lemond, the vice president of education at EVOLV Technology, the company that provided the new detectors, said.This is an effect that Woodlawn High Principal John Jenkins says he is already noticing."It makes everyone feel much safer, and it reduces the strain on everyone because we have teachers who face challenges picking up kids who put everything in their backpacks. This way, it makes the job much easier," Jenkins said.Every public school in East Baton Rouge already has either walk-through or handheld detectors. These new weapon detectors require students to remove binders, laptops, umbrellas and eyeglass cases before passing through.Students can keep their backpacks on and the machine will show if and where a weapon is located on a person's body."As you're breaking through a plane it's going to be scanning, you're actually a bag of water to the system it just sees that something moving through and looks for different shapes, metallic attributes, and density," Lemond explained.Cole said that the plan is to first introduce the new detectors in high schools before gradually implementing them in elementary schools, with some campuses using both new and old systems simultaneously during the rollout.A set of EVOLV AI scanners were approved for purchase in January. WBRZ previously reported they cost $21,000 a piece.Permalink| Comments ...read more read less