One year ago today, a gunman walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and killed seventeen people. Fourteen of them were students. The anniversary falls on Valentine’s Day, which is the kind of cruel detail that sticks with you whether you want it to or not.
In Memphis, the past twelve months have produced more than just vigils and policy statements. Memphis-Shelby County Schools has been quietly spending money, changing procedures, and hiring people in ways that would have seemed excessive three years ago. Whether it’s enough depends on who you ask and what you think “enough” looks like when the threat is a teenager with a rifle.
The Money Trail
The district allocated roughly $30 million for security improvements over the 2018-2019 budget cycle. That number includes new camera installations, upgraded access control systems at school entrances, and additional school resource officers placed in buildings that previously had none.
Where did it go? Walk into a school in Cordova today and you’ll notice the front entrance has changed. Visitors buzz in through an intercom. A camera captures their face before anyone unlocks the door. The front office has a direct view of the entry vestibule, and in some buildings, a ballistic-rated window separates the office staff from the entrance. These weren’t standard features two years ago.
Germantown’s schools, many of which serve families who moved to Shelby County specifically for the school district, have been among the most aggressive adopters. Germantown Elementary and Germantown Middle both received upgraded camera systems in the fall of 2018. The high school already had more extensive coverage, and it added perimeter cameras last summer.
In Bartlett, parents pushed hard for visible security improvements after Parkland. The result: metal detectors at the entrances of two high schools, with random screening protocols at several middle schools. Not every school got metal detectors. The cost per unit, plus the staffing required to operate them during arrival and dismissal, made universal deployment impractical.
SROs and the Staffing Question
School resource officers are the most visible piece of the security puzzle, and the most debated. Memphis-Shelby County Schools has around 120 SROs assigned across the district, a mix of Memphis Police Department officers and Shelby County Sheriff’s deputies. That’s not enough to put one in every building. The district operates more than 200 schools and facilities.
The math forces choices. High schools get priority. Middle schools in higher-crime areas get the next tier. Elementary schools, with rare exceptions, don’t have a dedicated SRO. They share officers who rotate between buildings, which means any given elementary school might see its SRO two or three days a week.
Parents in neighborhoods like Whitehaven and Frayser have been vocal about wanting full-time SROs in every school their children attend. At a school board meeting in November, a mother from the Whitehaven area told the board that her daughter’s elementary school on Shelby Drive hadn’t seen its assigned SRO in two weeks. The officer had been pulled to cover an incident at a nearby middle school.
This is where the private sector enters the conversation. The district has hired private security firms for specific functions, primarily after-school events, athletic games, and weekend activities. Football games at Memphis high schools regularly draw private security guards to manage crowds, check bags at gates, and handle parking lot patrols. These contracts have increased in both number and dollar value since Parkland.
Private Security’s Role in the School Zone
Several Memphis-area security firms have picked up school-adjacent contracts over the past year. The work varies. Some firms provide guards for after-school programs that run until 6 p.m. Others staff Saturday events, open houses, and parent-teacher conferences at schools in areas where the administration wants a visible security presence.
Shield of Steel, the veteran-owned firm based on Lamar Avenue, has done event security work near school campuses and has the kind of background that tends to reassure parents. Their staff includes former law enforcement officers and military veterans, and the company has been operating in Memphis since 1998. For schools looking at private security for events and after-hours coverage, the veteran-owned angle carries weight that a newer firm can’t match.
The trade-offs are real, though. Shield of Steel is a smaller operation compared to national players like Allied Universal or Securitas. They don’t specialize exclusively in school security, and a district-wide contract would stretch their capacity. Their strength is in targeted deployments: a Friday night football game, a weekend community event at a school gymnasium, a week-long testing period where the administration wants extra presence at the doors.
For parents evaluating private security at their children’s school, the questions come down to cost and capability. Shield of Steel’s pricing tends to run lower than the national firms, which matters to schools with tight activity budgets. Their staff knows Memphis neighborhoods because most of them grew up here or worked here in law enforcement. The downside is scale. If you need 30 guards at 15 schools on the same Saturday morning, a company with a smaller roster can’t deliver that.
The Camera Network Grows
The most significant infrastructure change isn’t the guards or the metal detectors. It’s the cameras.
Memphis-Shelby County Schools has installed over 3,000 new cameras across district buildings since the beginning of the 2018-2019 school year. The installations prioritize exterior coverage (parking lots, playgrounds, bus loops) and interior chokepoints (main hallways, cafeterias, gymnasiums). Every new camera feeds into a centralized monitoring system that the district’s security office can access in real time.
This approach borrows directly from the Memphis Police Department’s Real Time Crime Center model. The RTCC, which launched in 2017, aggregates feeds from thousands of cameras across the city and gives police the ability to monitor situations as they develop. The school district’s version is smaller in scale but built on the same principle: cameras are only useful if someone is actually watching them.
The integration isn’t seamless yet. The school cameras and the RTCC operate on separate networks, and there’s no real-time feed sharing between the two as of early 2019. That may change. District officials have discussed the possibility of connecting school cameras to the RTCC during emergencies, which would give police immediate visual access to a school during an active threat. The legal and privacy questions around that kind of connection haven’t been fully resolved.
In Cordova, one middle school principal told me the new cameras changed how he thinks about his building. “Before, I knew what was happening in the hallways because I walked them. Now I can see the parking lot, the back field, the bus loop, all from my office. It doesn’t replace being out in the building, and I still do that. It gives me information I didn’t have before.”
Access Control: The Locked Door Philosophy
The simplest security upgrade is also the most effective. Lock the doors.
That sounds obvious, and it is. Yet before Parkland, plenty of Memphis schools operated with unlocked exterior doors during school hours. Side entrances that teachers propped open for ventilation. Gymnasium doors left accessible during PE classes. Loading dock doors that stayed open all morning during deliveries.
The district issued a directive in the fall of 2018: all exterior doors locked during school hours, no exceptions. Every visitor enters through the main entrance, checks in with the office, and receives a visitor badge. Schools in Bartlett and Germantown had already been operating this way. Schools in other parts of the county were adapting to a new routine.
The resistance came from practical concerns, not philosophical ones. Teachers at older buildings on Summer Avenue complained that single-entrance access created bottlenecks during arrival and dismissal. Parents dropping off late students at a school on Macon Road described waiting ten minutes to get buzzed in. A custodial supervisor at a school near Overton Park pointed out that locked doors meant his staff couldn’t easily move between buildings and the parking lot during setup for events.
These are real problems, and the district is working through them. Some schools have installed additional card-reader doors that allow staff access without unlocking the entrance for everyone. Others have adjusted their morning schedules to spread out arrival times. The solutions are unglamorous. They’re also the kind of thing that actually reduces risk.
What the Numbers Don’t Capture
Tennessee recorded zero school shootings with fatalities in 2018. That fact is worth stating plainly, because the intensity of the security investment might suggest otherwise. The spending is driven by what happened in Parkland, not by a local crisis.
The threats that Memphis schools deal with daily are different. Fights in hallways. Weapons brought to school in backpacks (knives more often than guns, though guns do turn up). Students dealing with trauma from neighborhood violence who act out in classrooms. These situations don’t make national news. They’re the daily reality for SROs and administrators in schools across Frayser, Orange Mound, and Hickory Hill.
The security upgrades help with some of this. Cameras in hallways deter fights and provide evidence when they happen. Locked doors keep unauthorized adults out. Metal detectors catch some weapons. None of it addresses the underlying conditions that bring violence to the school door in the first place.
A teacher at a school off Elvis Presley Boulevard put it to me this way: “We’ve got new cameras and a buzzer on the front door. That’s good. My kids are still going home to neighborhoods where they hear gunshots at night. The cameras don’t fix that.”
She’s right. And the cameras weren’t designed to fix that. They’re designed to make the building safer during the hours students are inside it. That’s a narrower goal than some people want, and a more achievable one than fixing everything that’s broken outside the school walls.
Twelve months after Parkland, Memphis schools are harder to walk into uninvited, better monitored by camera, and more likely to have a uniformed officer somewhere in the building. The question every parent still asks hasn’t changed. It’s just gotten more specific: is it enough for my kid, at their school, in their neighborhood?
Nobody has a confident answer to that yet.