LA Unified students have never known high school without metal detectors
Jed Kim
Staff members at Gardena High School use handheld metal detectors in random weapon checks of students.
On January 21, 1993, Demetrius Rice was shot at Fairfax High School when a gun hidden away in a classmate's backpack accidentally fired. The bullet passed through another student before striking 16-year-old Rice, and killing him.
"It was a boom that you never forget," said David Tokofsky, a former Los Angeles Unified School District teacher and board member who as at Fairfax that day. “The first thought you came to was some joking kid throwing an M-80 firecracker in a trash can. You didn’t think that a gun was in the school.”
That incident led the district to begin performing random weapon screenings using metal detectors.
Twenty years later. Metal detectors are still in schools.
LA Unified requires that all of its secondary schools perform daily random screenings using the devices.
Students streamed into Gardena High School last Tuesday morning, just minutes before the bell. School dean Daron Andrade and a campus aide stopped random students and inspected the contents of their backpacks before scanning them with handheld detectors.
Gardena faced scrutiny in 2011, after a gun that a student brought onto campus
