Sunday, February 9, 2025

NHCSB discusses committee dispute, AI pilot for school safety

The New Hanover County Board of Education discussing the recent controversy over the board chair committee assignments at its Jan. 29 agenda review meeting. (Port City Daily)

NEW HANOVER COUNTY — The New Hanover County Board of Education discussed several items of note at its Tuesday agenda review, including the recent controversy over the board chair committee assignments. 

READ MORE: GOP chair stirs political drama over NHC schools committees, members say no quid-pro-quo

Board member Pat Bradford, who said she was planning to bring the committee issue up at the next board meeting in an interview last week with Port City Daily, prompted Tuesday’s discussion. 

There have been several switch-ups across the board’s 25 committees since the assignments were shared on Jan. 7. Mason referred to the initial list as a draft in her statement to PCD, but board member David Perry posted to Facebook that he was awarded the coveted chair position on the policy committee following the initial hand-out, only to be removed in the days after. 

New Hanover County GOP chairman Nevin Carr also issued a newsletter condemning Mason, a Republican, for appointing the board’s two Democrats, Judy Justice and Tim Merrick, to lead the curriculum and Title IX committees. However, Justice told PCD she had already been removed from the curriculum committee before Carr’s newsletter.

On Tuesday, Bradford criticized the lack of board discussion on the topic in the wake of Carr’s statement, as well as how late Mason made the committee appointments — a month after her induction as chair. 

“The process was flawed and I hope that we never repeat it again,” I can appreciate the complexity of the situation, but it did not seem to be as fair as I would have appreciated and it had a lot of bumps in it. 

A noticeably agitated Mason said Tuesday she did not appreciate the “lack of respect for her integrity” and the political drama that seemed to her a waste of time. 

“We’ve lost focus,” Mason said. “The fact that we are focusing on committee assignments instead of on students and teachers and the things that we need to do is a little disturbing to me.” 

The chair defended her actions, saying she communicated with the board throughout the process; she also shared her thought process for the assignments. Mason’s goal was for every board member to be on at least one committee they expressed passion for and one that would stretch their knowledge base. 

As confirmed by other board members earlier this month, Mason asked for the top requests of each board member, along with justifications for their appointment, and tried to accommodate as much as possible. On Tuesday, she said the most switch-ups in committee assignments she did to herself.

“The collaboration of the board, because it is not just me, was absolutely imperative, and I wanted to be sure that all of the voices — all of the voices — were heard before I made final decisions,” Mason said. 

Merrick and Justice followed Mason’s statement by commending the chair for her inclusive efforts, as they similarly relayed to Port City Daily last week.

“I do appreciate that she looked at all of our interests and all of our strengths and all of our desires to maybe go into another direction, and she did it fairly,” Justice said.

Even Perry, who had criticized Mason’s process in a subsequent Facebook post after his removal from the policy committee, agreed Mason had sufficiently communicated with the board. His only qualm was the lack of clarity that the Jan. 7 list was a draft.

AI pilot 

The board also received a presentation on the district’s state-funded AI pilot program from the software vendors, Raptor Technologies and Eviden. 

The companies provide a camera system using artificial intelligence to identify weapons, trespassers or dangerous situations. The systems have been installed in universities, school systems, government facilities, airports, train stations and have been used at the Olympics since 1982. 

The NHCS pilot would begin with three schools — an elementary, middle and high school — to test each school’s needs that can then be replicated among the other schools in the district. 

The camera system uses what’s called computer vision AI, a neural network training of objects so computers can recognize what it’s looking at from a video image. 

Hall said the team pre-trains the cameras, showing them “thousands and thousands and thousands of pictures and then it knows that when it sees an orange,” for example.

Hall said its system uses this training to identify weapons, but also slip-fall detection, intrusion detection, smoke detection and mass crowd movements. When these events occur, the Raptor system sends an alert to the proper parties — including first responders and parents — who can then take action. 

Additionally, each school will get its own server and the data collected in the system will never be transmitted or stored outside the school. 

“It looks at that image a couple seconds in the image, it analyzes it, it decides whether or not an alert used to get sent out, and then deletes that footage,” Hall said. 

The system will also not be used for facial recognition of students, which concerned Merrick. Hall said the technology doesn’t have the power to identify that many people, but it could build a database of sex offenders, for example, to recognise them if they came on campus. It can also be used to identify license plates of people not supposed to be on campus or buses when they leave and return to campus. 

The district can decide which features it wants to implement. 

Merrick also questioned the false positive and false negative rates in the system. Hall said this varies from camera to camera depending on the lighting and positioning of them, but all cameras have rules they must follow before sending an alert. For example, if someone were to cross a perimeter into the school, but only for a few seconds, the system could be trained not to alert.

“And false alerts are good sometimes, because what we do is the false alerts, we can go back and we can request those false images, and we can train those back into the system to make the system better,” Hall said. 

The state is covering the implementation of the system for two years; after that, the cost to run the program is estimated at $300,000 to $400,000 a year. 

When implemented, New Hanover County Schools will join the increasing number of school districts using AI for school security, including Brunswick County Schools. 

Over the privacy concerns of some parents and the Brunswick County Democratic Party, the district purchased a $40,000 AI-camera system for weapons detection. Less extensive and sophisticated than the Eviden and Raptor models, BCS’ pilot involves portable bases that will be used at school events and sporadically at school entrances while the pilot is ongoing. 

The New Hanover County Schools pilot comes a year after staff have found guns on students in several instances in recent years. Though the AI system cannot detect weapons that aren’t brandished or in plain view, they would be able to more quickly notify school administrators if they are.


Reach journalist Brenna Flanagan at brenna@localdailymedia.com.

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