Washington Township's school board has approved a $510,012 purchase of six Evolv Express weapon detectors for North Central High School, a decision that comes just two weeks after a 16-year-old student was found on campus with a loaded handgun modified to fire continuously. The incident on August 13 ended with no injuries after a parent called school administrators to report that a classmate had seen the student with the weapon, and police confiscated the modified handgun.
The board approved the purchase at its August 26 meeting, according to IndyStar. North Central began evaluating weapon detection systems from three vendors back in January, months before the August incident, weighing Evolv Express against CEIA OpenGate and Xtract One Gateway. District officials recommended Evolv's technology to the board in spring 2026, and the board had already approved a single test unit in April, which was tried out at a rotating list of doors at the school.
Why Evolv Won Out
Evolv scored four out of five on the district's evaluation for detecting hidden weapons, outperforming the competing systems, per the same IndyStar report. Matt Kaiser, the district's assistant superintendent of operational services, said the devices allow students to walk through without pausing, removing backpacks, or facing unnecessary delays — a throughput advantage that matters at a school with roughly 3,600 enrolled students. Each Evolv unit comes with two tablets that display the location of potential threats detected by the scanner, and the system is built to handle multiple students walking through simultaneously.
The purchase includes two dual-lane and four single-lane Evolv Express models. Superintendent Jagga Rent announced the plans to parents through a voicemail and a ParentSquare message, saying the goal is to screen every student and visitor daily while keeping entry moving smoothly. Once installation is complete, Evolv units will remain active at all late-arrival and visitor entrances for the entire school day, with new detectors also allowing daily screening at all entry doors during student arrival. Installation is expected to be finished by the end of the semester, and some units will be placed at J. Everett Light Career Center, which sits adjacent to North Central and is connected to it through a hallway.
A Recurring Problem at North Central
The August incident was not North Central's first brush with weapons on campus. In August 2019, administrators searched a student's backpack and recovered a handgun after finding the student outside their assigned area, with district police noting at the time that daily screening of every student was unfeasible, according to WTHR. Then in August 2023, a 17-year-old student was arrested after staff discovered a Glock semiautomatic pistol equipped with an auto sear switch and nearly three dozen rounds of ammunition; the student told authorities he was carrying the weapon for neighborhood protection, WTHR also reported. What North Central's current security setup consisted of before this purchase was unclear at the time of publication.
During the testing period, the pilot Evolv unit did not run into major problems from student devices, though large three-ring binders with metal spines caused issues, IndyStar noted. That mirrors a broader pattern seen elsewhere: student devices have sometimes triggered false alarms at other schools using Evolv systems, a concern raised in Gwinnett County's rollout of similar AI scanners, where parents weighed the tradeoffs of false alarms against faster screening.
Regulatory Scrutiny and Mixed Results Elsewhere
Evolv's expansion into K-12 security has not been without controversy. In November 2024, the Federal Trade Commission settled an inquiry alleging that Evolv deceptively marketed its Express scanners by claiming they would detect all weapons while ignoring harmless personal items, and the company agreed to notify eligible K-12 customers with contracts signed between April 2022 and June 2023 of options to cancel without admitting wrongdoing. The following year, Evolv filed restated financial statements with the SEC covering Q2 2022 through Q2 2024 to correct accounting errors tied to premature revenue recognition, correcting roughly $3.1 million in prematurely recognized revenue.
Independent testing by the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security found that Evolv's systems failed to detect large knives 42% of the time, according to Central Current, a limitation tied to the technology's reliance on measuring metallic density rather than traditional full-field metal detection. Results from other districts that have deployed Evolv scanners have been more encouraging on the firearm front: Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky reported that guns found during school hours dropped from 28 in the 2022–2023 school year to just 4 in 2024–2025 following a $4.2 million districtwide Evolv installation, with officials there attributing the decline directly to the scanners, as Hoodline previously reported on a Louisville middle schooler caught with a gun. Not every district has landed on Evolv, however — Clarksville-Montgomery County Schools in Tennessee chose CEIA OpenGate scanners in March 2026 as a cost-saving alternative funded by state safety grants, the same OpenGate system Washington Township evaluated and passed over.
State Funding and Legal Guardrails
North Central's purchase lands amid a broader statewide push for school security funding. On September 1, the Indiana Secured School Safety Board approved more than $26.9 million in statewide matching grants, including $5.2 million earmarked for equipment and technology across 118 school projects statewide, according to WIBC. That program has distributed nearly $242 million across Indiana since it launched in 2013. It follows an earlier state effort in October 2018, when Indiana officials distributed handheld metal detectors under an initiative offering one free wand per 250 students, with 369 school entities requesting 3,228 wands in that initial rollout.
Any expanded screening at North Central will still need to comply with guidance from the Indiana School Boards Association, which requires districts using metal detectors to maintain written policies and conduct student searches either under individualized reasonable suspicion or through non-discriminatory random administrative screening, per reporting from WFYI. Districts are also required to train personnel and build the screening protocols into official emergency response plans. For a school that has now faced three separate weapon incidents in seven years, Washington Township officials appear to be betting that walk-through scanning, despite its documented gaps with non-firearm weapons, offers a meaningful upgrade over ad hoc backpack searches.
