The drones, which come in boxes of six for $15,000, are permanently stored in ceiling-high containers on site, allowing for instantaneous deployment. The drones, of which there might be as many as 90, depending on campus size, start by locating an active shooter in a matter of seconds and can fly through double-paned glass. Once located, the drones play a deafening siren and can launch pepper spray bombs. They’re also equipped with speakers that can be used by local law enforcement, and in the worst-case scenario, they can be flown directly into the shooter's body at 60 mph.
“Ultimately, if they're [a shooter] still intent on murdering children, then we can escalate further,” said Justin Marston, CEO of Campus Guardian Angel. “When we think about it, it's less militarizing than having police officers carrying guns everywhere."
The high-tech drones, which are piloted by a team of former military men and nationally ranked professional drone racers, are not armed with bullets, but Campus Guardian Angel’s intention isn’t to kill or arrest; it’s to distract. A recurring issue with school shootings is officer response times. Most school shootings are over just minutes after they’ve begun, Marston says, but the quick-response action of the drones might buy the few extra minutes needed for SWAT teams to arrive and arrest, successfully saving lives.
“If you've got something that's preemptive, that's immediate, that's already there, you just can't kill that many people in 10 to 15 seconds,” Marston said.
He added that the additional security measures in schools might just be enough to prevent school shooters from considering an attack.
“You're going to probably be humiliated and ultimately in quite a lot of pain, but you're not going to die, you're not going to go out in a blaze of glory, you're going to be carried out and then put into jail, maybe you do something else,” said Marston.
Campus Guardian Angel launched in March 2025 and has been tested in schools in Waco, Boerne and Miami. But Marston would like to see every school in Texas budget for the tech. He says his team has the capabilities to keep every Lone Star student protected and, with a few more recruits, could scale to every school in the nation.
Sen. Royce West joined the demo show in Lancaster, praising the Campus Guardian Angel mission.
“As far as I’m concerned, we’ve got to protect the children. We have to be able to disrupt intruders,” West said at the demo. “We saw what happened in Uvalde. School resource officers were hesitant to go into that room, and so what you’ve got to recognize is, there’s a danger for them also, but they are there on the front line.”
The Logistics
A fleet of drones comes at a cost. For a fairly large high school, 90 drones installed throughout the campus cost about $225,000, with the district paying an additional $2-4 monthly fee per head. If the Dallas Independent School District were to install the drones to protect its roughly 139,000 students, it would cost around $550,000 in monthly service fees, or an additional $5 million each year.Just this week, Dallas ISD Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde told the Dallas Morning News editorial board that the district is facing a $22 million gap after a recent federal funding freeze from the Oval Office. So, funding for drones may be left to state departments. While signing off on the drones isn’t at the top of Gov. Greg Abbott’s to-do list, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has already approved $557,000 in state funding for three school districts to participate in the pilot program.
Marston says his team tries to keep the drones as affordable as possible for schools, even accepting a loss on them.
“Look, would you like to have an Air Force that's on site defending your children against gun violence? I think most parents would say yes,” he said. “That doesn't seem particularly expensive when I think about what it would mean to lose my child. So we've tried to make it affordable.”
Unfortunately, the funding model is based on district contracts, and parents have little to no say on how their tax dollars directed towards education will be used.
Marston says several boxes of the drones are a necessary part of prevention.
“Just putting them in a couple of the entryways is not going to be enough. If something happens and we're not able to get there fast enough, then we would all feel like we've failed.”
In the event an active shooter fires at the drone, Marston doesn’t care too much; better a hunk of plastic than a human life, he says. He also says hacking risks are relatively low. They only use American-made drones, and the command central software is heavily encrypted.
“It would be catastrophically embarrassing and bad if some hacker somehow managed to get a hold of one of our drones and start flying it around,” he said.
Marston started his career in cybersecurity and has worked for federal departments protecting classified information.
“The same blueprint of technology is massively secure enough to worry about bored high schoolers.”
Shooting Statistics
According to the Pew Research Center, over half of students and teachers are concerned about the potential of an active shooter on their campus, and the reality is that those fears are legitimate. There have been more than 1,000 school shootings in the last three years, and 127 deaths across 69 planned school shootings since 2013.“We have talked to lots of police chiefs,” he said. “The reality is they understand that there are guns in their high schools, in their districts, most days of the week.”
His drone program, most obviously, is intended to prevent fatalities in school shootings, but he hopes they can be the first step in a culture shift, reversing the decades of trickle-down trauma forming within today's students.
“The majority of students, and certainly the majority of students we have talked to, either they themselves or one of their immediate friends, have been in a gun-related lockdown that they thought was real,” said Marston. “We think that the normalcy of the availability of guns in schools is creating trauma in our next generation of kids.
