Following a shooting at a Warner Robins high school, Twiggs County Schools shows why high-security matters in the modern era

In August of 2026, a 14-year-old student at Warner Robins High School brought a gun into a school bathroom and shot a classmate in the leg, leaving him injured. 

Hours later, the student was in custody, the victim was in the hospital and parents were left in shock, wondering how this could have happened at their child’s school.

Houston County Sheriff Matt Moulton later confirmed the school didn’t use metal detectors and students were able to walk into the high school freely and go to class without being searched for dangerous objects. It’s believed the student involved used his backpack to sneak the handgun into the school.

Since the shooting, Houston County Schools vowed to spend $3 million on new metal detectors and security guards to increase security, with the goal of preventing any further incidents occurring. 

The incident echoes a similar situation that occurred at a Twiggs County school in 2017, one that changed the way the school district viewed student safety forever. 

In 2017, two female students at Twiggs County High School got into an altercation in a school hallway when one pulled a knife on the other, stabbing her and leaving her injured. 

The student survived, but it shocked the district. Like Houston County, the Twiggs County school system implemented heightened security to prevent any further incidences. 

Since then, Twiggs County Public Schools has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on security, including the purchase of 22 hand-held metal detectors, 6 large metal detectors at every school entrance and 1 weapons detector used for after-school events. 

“Every student gets checked before they enter the building,” Interim Superintendent Tyrone Bacon told the TJP. “[The procedure] is pretty robust.”

Every morning, students line up at a school entrance. They’re asked to take out all metal objects in their clear or mesh book bags and place the items into a bin. Spiral notebooks, pens, calculators, anything that might set off a detector must be checked.

Students then walk through a large metal detector to make sure they don’t have any non-permitted item, and if necessary, they’re checked with a hand-held detector.

Teachers, tasked with arriving at school early to help facilitate this process, go through the students’ belongings for added measure. 

Once a student is cleared, they’re free to go to class.

The process can be invasive, but according to Bacon, that’s just the price they pay to make sure students are safe.

“Sometimes people think we’re being heavy handed. ‘They’re checking everything, why can’t it just be this way?’ But when something happens…” he trailed off. ”We try not to be intrusive, [but] security trumps that.”

Bacon discussed why he thinks parents are having a tough time navigating this exchange of their child’s privacy for safety.

“No one believes their child is going to do anything. They think about when they were in school,” he said. 

“It was a totally different time in the 80s and 90s when I was in school. We hadn’t had Columbine,” he continued. “It was maybe a couple of years into my teaching career that Columbine happened, and that changed everything.”

Since the tragedy at Columbine High School, which killed 12 students and 1 teacher at a Colorado high school, school shootings have dramatically increased in American schools.

According to the K-12 School Shooting Database, a database that tracks school shootings across America created by a professor at Idaho State University, 23 school shootings were recorded in 1999, the same year the Columbine tragedy occurred. In 2025, 235 shootings were reported across American schools.

The database reached its peak in 2023 with 352 reported shootings.

“You don’t know it’s going to happen because you’re not thinking about it. You’re thinking about football. You’re thinking about kids graduating. The dance and the pep rally, and then all of a sudden, this happens,” Bacon said.

The student metal-detection process can also be lengthy.

According to Bacon, the district is actively trying to purchase more weapons detectors to shorten the time it takes for students to get to class each morning. 

As its name implies, metal detectors detect metal, which can be useful for detecting threatening objects like handguns and knives, but can also be time-consuming when they detect harmless items like spiral notebooks. 

Weapons detectors, on the other hand, use special technology to identify dense, threatening items like guns, which could significantly reduce the time it takes for students to pass through detectors in the morning.

The only set back is the cost. While a regular metal detector can cost anywhere from $5,000-$6,000, weapons detectors can cost the district upwards of $30,000 per set. This is why they only have one.

Bacon says that Twiggs schools get their funding for security measures through a handful of grants, and once those grants come in, the school can use them to purchase more detectors. He even plans for the high school to receive a new weapons detector by February.

On top of the metal detection system, the school also uses Centegix, a school-wide alert system that allows staff to alert the entire school when there is an emergency. 

As Bacon described, every staff member wears a lanyard with buttons on it that, when pressed, can send the entire school into a lockdown. Alerts are sent out over the intercom, and teachers can take meaures to lock down their classrooms.

Once in a lockdown, administrators try to isolate the students involved until help arrives. 

Another way the district implements heightened security is with their student resource officers. 

According to Bacon, the middle-high school campus has two SROs on campus at all times throughout the school day. Each SRO is a post-certified police officer and carries a gun with them for added protection.

The school also has a working relationship with the Twiggs County Sheriff’s Office, who according to Bacon, understand exactly how their security systems work, and should they need it, can be present on campus within minutes during a lockdown scenario.

Bacon estimated the district has spent close to $200,000 on security updates in the past year alone. Some of these updates include updated locks on school doors and security cameras in the classroom. 

Another update they’ve made recently is vape detectors, which Bacon said he hopes will cut back on the amount of vaping-related incidents in their schools.

According to Sheriff Moulton, the shooting at the Warner Robins school allegedly began over an argument about a vape. 

“Our number one problem and issue in schools, and not just ours, is vaping,” Bacon said. He talked about the ongoing issue, saying it’s been a major issue at the joint middle-high school in the past couple of years.

Bacon said that the school is specifically having an issue with teens using THC vapes containing Delta 8 and Delta 9.

Delta 8, while legal in the state of Georgia, is only legal for adults ages 21 and up.

Delta 9, in the form of a vape pen, is illegal throughout the state.

Another issue in schools, which many worldwide cite as being a major root cause for school shootings, is bullying.

According to Bacon, Twiggs County schools have implemented an anonymous bullying tip line for situations involving bullying so that students can reach out for help before a situation escalates, and can do so without revealing their identity. The system allows students to anonymously report bullying situations to administrators, either involving themself or another student.

From there, Bacon says administrators address the situation within 24 hours.

Since the shooting in Warner Robins, Bacon says Twiggs County schools haven’t made any adjustments in their security protocol. According to him, the 2017 stabbing on campus served as a wakeup call to the school system, calling metal detectors “game changers” for added security.

“We take it pretty seriously,” Bacon said. “We want to make sure the kids are safe and parents don’t have to worry. It’s a lot for parents to have to worry about. They have to work, they have to put food on the table. We don’t want them to have to worry about this.”