PHOENIX — It was the afternoon of February 2, 2023. The school day was winding down at Red Mountain High School, but it would take a terrifying turn.
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Discipline records show a student reported to the assistant principal that he had seen a tan gun in his seventh hour class. He told the administrator who the student was, but when the administrator went to the suspect's eighth hour class, he was gone.
A frantic search began.
Two officers, the school's security team, and all of administration began sweeping the campus. They finally found the student, prompting him to pick up his pace. An administrator grabbed onto the student's backpack to get him to stop, exposing his back and the grip of a tan and black handgun.
The student broke free and took off running, forcing the school to go into lockdown.
Ultimately, the student was found off campus without the gun. The firearm was later located underneath a tree.
It was a close call that happened more than one hundred times in Maricopa County since 2019.
16 of 20 high school districts seized at least one gun since 2019
"We know these kids are getting a hold of weapons," said Allen Moore, the Director of School Safety and Security for Mesa Public Schools.
Through public records requests, the 12News I-Team obtained gun seizure records from the 20 largest school districts with high schools in Maricopa County. Since January of 2019, at least 114 guns have been found on school campuses, the records show.
Twelve of them came from Mesa Public Schools, the largest district in the state. Half of them happened last school year alone.
"I think guns have been a problem in our society forever. I don't think I'd be naive if I said guns were never in our schools. That's always concerned me over the years that, you know, how can we call our schools gun-free school zones? How do we know that?" Moore said.
It's why Mesa installed a weapons detection system this year.
“How quickly did your weapons detection system actually detect a gun?” asked 12News reporter Bianca Buono.
“Well, that's an interesting story because we launched it at Skyline in April, last April. After about a month or so, we worked out all the protocol bugs and then we launched it the very next week at Mesa High School," Moore said. "About 20 minutes into that, a kid came through with a gun.”
In the West Valley, the Tolleson Union High School District said 15 guns were found on its campuses since 2019.
“We know that when there's 15 that we're able to remove from our schools through our efforts, we still worry about how many we haven't detected and removed," said Superintendent Jeremy Calles. “It's happening everywhere. We're all having guns on campus.”
The most of any district came out of the Phoenix Union High School District, the largest high school district in the state. At least 44 guns were seized and that data is only through the first three quarters of the 2023-24 school year.
However, countywide records obtained by 12News highlight how widespread the problem is. Sixteen of the 20 school districts seized at least one gun from 2019 through 2024.
State not tracking guns in schools
“Well, it's shocking," said Tom Horne, Arizona's Superintendent of Public Instruction.
The I-Team brought its findings to the Arizona Department of Education because right now, Arizona is one of few states that does not track the number of guns found in schools.
Under the 1994 Gun-Free Schools Act, schools must report weapons incidents to the state and states are supposed to then report that data to the U.S. Department of Education.
Arizona's Department of Education, instead, sends out an optional survey to school districts.
In reviewing one of those surveys from the 2022-23 school year, the I-Team found the data was completely different from what school districts directly reported in response to our public records request.
Many districts did not respond at all.
“I'm wondering how you make informed decisions on school safety when you don't know the scope of the problem," Buono said.
“Well, you're giving us an opportunity to ask the public to make sure that their school districts enforce the law against bringing guns to schools and report to us and report the student to the police. When students know that other students have been prosecuted, I think that would go a long way towards solving that problem," Horne responded.
Horne said he would support legislation requiring districts to report gun seizure data to the state.
Tolleson Union High School is one of the districts that did not respond to the survey.
“I'm aware that they send out a few 100 surveys a year, but I wouldn't know that specific survey and I wouldn't do it through a survey," Calles said. "If we're going to do this, we should do it right. Build an actual system. Build a cloud-based service where we could go into this system and not only submit our data, but we can get dashboards back with meaningful insights that will help us with our work.”
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