AUSTIN — Campus Guardian Angel is providing pepper-spraying drones to multiple schools across the United States as part of an active-shooter response system. The drone program is being implemented in schools in Georgia, Florida, and Colorado.

The initiative involves deploying remotely operated aircraft capable of locating and engaging threats within seconds. Deltona High School in Volusia County, Florida, is set to install 39 drones for the upcoming school year. At least three other schools in Florida are set to install the drones, including Amos P. Godby High School in Leon County and Boyd H. Anderson High School in Broward County. Florida has set aside about $557,000 to implement the drone program, and the state legislature has authorized expanding the pilot to three additional school districts to be selected at a later time.

In Georgia, at least four schools are set to install the drones. The participating institutions include Coffee County High School in Douglas, Gainesville High School in Gainesville, River Ridge High School in Woodstock, and Statesboro High School in Statesboro. The Georgia legislature included $550,000 in its annual budget to fund the drone program.

In Colorado, John Adams Academy in Douglas County is preparing to introduce the technology. The public charter school is tapping private funding after the county backed away from providing $200,000 for the program.

The drones are manufactured by Mithril Defense, an Austin-based company. Justin Marston is the CEO of Mithril Defense. Bill King is a co-founder of Campus Guardian Angel and a former senior enlisted leader for Navy Seal teams with 32 years of experience.

Khristof Oborski serves as the tactical operations director for Campus Guardian Angel and is a former team leader with the Austin Police Department’s Special Weapons and Tactics unit. The concept for the drones was inspired by the use of small drones on the battlefields in Ukraine after Russia invaded in February 2022.

The drones launch into action after an alert that a school is under attack and once the response team has confirmed the threat is credible. Teachers can activate the drones during an emergency, and the units can be deployed within seconds. The goal is to locate an active shooter within 15 seconds.

The drones are designed to find a shooter in 15 seconds. The company’s goal is to escalate the effects in waves of 3 or 4 drones to keep the shooter occupied until apprehended by authorized responders.

The aircraft are remotely operated from Austin, Texas, and can be flown from thousands of miles away. They operate at 900 MHz and can remain airborne for about eight minutes on a single battery charge. The drones are housed in secure boxes inside the schools and include their own firmware.

They support two-way communication through an embedded speakerphone. The drones can fly through windows that are not coated with ballistic film using a front lance to break through.

The units are equipped with sirens, strobe lights, and the ability to drop air poppers that create a loud bang. They carry a pepper launcher capable of firing pepper balls or pepper gel at a shooter. The drones can deliver kinetic energy strikes against a confirmed attacker.

The aircraft can ram into a threat at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour, and the drones can ram a shooter at 60 miles per hour as a last resort. The drones zoom through school hallways at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour.

"Once I get the drones on you, you just can’t escape them," Bill King said. "An officer should never have to risk their life doing something that a drone can do, because we don’t care if the drone gets shot. It’s a lump of plastic. We just jump in with the next one. But an officer’s life is irreplaceable," Marston said.

"We think every school should have some kind of active-shooter suppression system, and five years from now, you wouldn’t send your kids to a school that doesn’t have one," he added. More than 398,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado, which killed 14 people. Campus Guardian Angel’s website cited 1,000 school shootings in the past three years, with 800 individuals killed or wounded during those incidents. School shootings reached a peak of 352 incidents in 2023, a rise from the 1970s and 1980s when there were typically fewer than 30 school shootings per year. Officers are shot in about half of mass shootings.

American schools spend about $4 billion annually on physically hardening their facilities, according to the Learning Policy Institute. The cost of the drone system is about $20,000 a year for an 80,000-square-foot school.