Nine schools in Florida, Georgia, and Colorado will open the school year with pepper-spray drones stationed in their hallways, ready to launch at an active shooter within seconds of a teacher hitting a panic button. The aircraft come from Mithril Defense, the Austin, Texas company behind the Campus Guardian Angel platform that DroneXL has tracked since a Wall Street Journal investigation put it on the national map in April.
The plastic, nonlethal drones sit in storage boxes on campus. Teachers activate them through an app or classroom panic buttons, and Mithril’s professional pilots take over remotely from Texas. The company says a drone can reach a shooter within 15 seconds, then disorient the target with strobes and sirens, spray pepper gel, or ram into a person at 97 km/h (60 mph). The systems have run through simulations and staged demonstrations. They have never faced an actual shooting.
Deltona High Leads A Nine-School Rollout
Deltona High School near Orlando became the first campus in the country to install the system at the end of last school year, and it now anchors a rollout that spans three Florida schools, five in Georgia, and one self-funded charter school in Colorado. Florida’s Department of Education selected three districts for its $557,000 pilot: Deltona in Volusia County, Boyd H. Anderson High School near Fort Lauderdale in Broward, and Godby High School in Tallahassee in Leon County.
Georgia legislators approved a $550,000 pilot of their own covering five high schools. Five candidate schools circulated in June, but the state has since walked that back: according to the Washington Post, Georgia has not finalized which campuses will participate, though Mithril says the systems come online during the upcoming school year. State Rep. Matt Dubnik, who chairs the House appropriations education subcommittee and steered the funding through, told the Post he believes in the technology and sees it protecting schools that lack resource officers. The Georgia pilot will run in schools both with and without officers on campus.
Colorado rounds out the nine. John Adams Academy, a public K-12 charter school in Sterling Ranch, is paying for its own program without state money. That tracks with what Mithril co-founder Justin Marston told an Arkansas audience two weeks ago, when the company pitched hundreds of school resource officers in Little Rock and projected a dozen schools across Florida, Colorado, and Texas within weeks.
Marston has been consistent about the project’s origin. The 2022 massacre in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students and two teachers died while law enforcement waited more than an hour to enter the classroom, convinced him that the cheap drones proving decisive in Ukraine could work as nonlethal defenders in American schools. Co-founder Bill King, a retired Navy SEAL, put the operating theory bluntly to the Post: “Once I get the drones on you, you just can’t escape them.”
Florida Renews Funding Before The First Real Test
Florida has already approved another $564,000 for the following school year, committing a second round of money while the first drones sit at Deltona awaiting their first activation. The state plans to review violent incident numbers at participating schools, measure response times to threats, and survey parents, students, and staff on whether the devices make them feel safer.
That evaluation plan matters, because the criticism aimed at this program is specific. Curtis Lavarello of the School Safety Advocacy Council told the Post he worries a remote pilot making a split-second call could target a fleeing student instead of a shooter, or mistake a responding officer for the threat, particularly after a false alarm. Security consultants have argued for years that low-tech measures like locking exterior doors deliver more protection per dollar than the multibillion-dollar campus security industry’s hardware.
The industry has been down this road before. Axon Enterprise halted its taser-drone program for schools in 2022 after its ethics board resigned en masse over fears the devices would stun innocent students or fall to hackers. And Jaclyn Corin, who survived the 2018 Parkland shooting and now leads March for Our Lives, raised the opportunity-cost question: districts spending on shooting response are, by definition, not spending that money on prevention.
Not every parent objects. One Atlanta-area mother who learned from local TV that Georgia had solicited her child’s school told the Post she has spent six figures on worse ideas and is willing to give the drones a chance.
DroneXL’s Take
I’ve now covered Campus Guardian Angel across four states, and the drones themselves bother me less than the sequencing. Florida approved $564,000 for year two before year one produced a single real-world data point. Call it what it is: a procurement program wearing a pilot’s badge.
The frustrating part is that the underlying case remains stronger than critics allow. The Uvalde arithmetic is real: 77 minutes of police inaction against a promised 15-second drone response is the entire argument. And Mithril made the right design call by keeping a human pilot accountable for every spray and every strike, as I wrote when Georgia funded its pilot. This is a company taking the problem seriously.
But the legal vacuum hasn’t moved an inch since the EFF warned in June that no federal law governs when a security drone can use force against anyone, let alone a minor in a hallway. Nine schools are about to field weaponized aircraft under contract law and state budget line items, a gap I’ve been flagging since Skydio walked back its no-weaponization pledge. Florida’s own evaluation plan, with its incident counts and response-time data, is the accountability mechanism this program has. Watch whether that data surfaces publicly before Florida’s 2027 legislative session sets the next budget. If the state renews a third time without publishing it, the pilot was never a pilot.
Source: The Washington Post
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
