DOUGLAS, Ga. (WALB) – Coffee High School is taking a major step toward advancing school safety, hosting a live demonstration Friday of the Campus Guardian Angel drone program — a high-tech initiative that could soon be tested in Georgia.

The event, held inside the Coffee High media center, brought together school officials, safety experts and invited legislators to see how the drone system could enhance emergency response on school campuses.

Joel Wiggins with The Southern Group is seeking a state appropriation to fund the program in Georgia.

Florida has already invested in similar school-safety drone systems, and Georgia is now exploring potential pilot communities. Coffee County leaders say they want to show strong community support to increase their chances of being selected. Public Relations representative

Benita Lott says hosting the event was a meaningful opportunity, adding, “It’s exciting to host this on our campus. This is another way to protect our children.”

Coffee County High School hopes to bring the safety drones to campus to help protect students, teachers and staff. The system is designed to detect weapons, suspicious movement and perimeter breaches and send live video to law enforcement during an active-shooter situation. According to Campus Guardian Angel, more than 900 schools nationwide have experienced a shooting incident, and safety experts say the first one to two minutes are when most injuries and deaths occur.

Justin Marston, CEO of Campus Guardian Angel, explained how the drones can escalate their response if needed.

“We start with a distraction, like a siren, and we tell the person to surrender and drop the weapon. We can talk to them through the drone,” Marston said. “If they aren’t doing it, the next step is pepper spray, so we can cover their face and body. Pepper spray makes it incredibly hard to see anything for hours, and we can again tell him to get on the ground, surrender, and not target children.”

The drones can move through hallways at 50–60 miles per hour. If a threat alert is triggered, a monitoring site in Austin, Texas responds within five seconds. The drone can be on an intruder in about 15 seconds, ready to intervene.

Chief Pilot Christian Van Sloan said the technology is far more advanced than what people commonly imagine.

“These are not the drones people think of that slowly fly in the sky taking pictures. The drones we have are capable of moving incredibly quickly, navigating very tight spaces, and the response time is the big thing,” Van Sloan said. “You can have as many SROs as you want on site; we’ll still be able to get there quicker because we are already there by nature.”

Coffee County School Superintendent Dr. Morris Leis says the system could be a major enhancement to school security.

“If you look at the display that we’ve seen here today, this technology is very robust,” Leis said. “It seems very capable of protecting students, and this is really just the future of school safety and security in general.”

As Georgia prepares to explore pilot locations for the program, Coffee County hopes its demonstration and community support will help secure a place at the top of the list.

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