North Carolina Reports 1,875 School Weapons-Possession Offenses in 2024-25, Lowest Since 2006-07

A Report Card the Grader Wrote About Itself

Weapons found in North Carolina schools dropped to their lowest level in nearly two decades. That's the number. But the school year that produced it ended over a year ago, and the report describing it came out back in February^[4][5]. What's actually new, as of this August, is that districts keep buying metal detectors anyway^[1].

That gap — a falling number and a rising security budget moving in opposite directions at the same time — is the real story here.

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction told the State Board of Education on February 4, 2026, that schools recorded 1,875 weapons-possession offenses during the 2024-25 school year^[4][5]. That's down from 2,378 the year before, a drop of about 21%^[2]. It's the fewest since 2006-07, as far back as the state's comparable records go^[2][3]. Firearm cases specifically fell to 103, from 159^[2]. DPI's own headline for the release: "North Carolina's Public Schools Show Strong Levels of Safety^[4]."

Out of roughly 1.5 million public school students, about 9,966 — 0.66% — committed any reportable offense at all, and DPI says four out of five schools had five or fewer^[2][5]. A separate check on the same trend, the 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, asked students directly whether they'd carried a weapon on campus. That figure fell too, from 3.1% in 2023 to 1.1% in 2025^[2]. Two different measurement methods, pointing the same direction — that's about as solid as this kind of data gets.

Why "Fewer Weapons Found" Doesn't Settle Anything

Here's the catch that both sides run into. A "reportable offense" isn't a weapon — it's a weapon an adult found, wrote up, and sent to the state^[2]. The count tracks enforcement as much as it tracks behavior. If a school changes how it disciplines students, or how carefully it documents incidents, the number can move without a single backpack changing what's inside it.

That cuts against the districts installing scanners in an odd way. If a detector works, it should catch more weapons at the door, at least at first — not fewer. So when Cumberland County reports installing scanners at all 86 of its schools, or when Sampson County switches its systems on this August, and both expect the count to fall, they're really making a claim about deterrence^[1]. The argument is that a scanner at the entrance changes a student's decision before they ever leave home with something in their bag. If that's true, the number of weapons found should drop specifically because fewer are ever brought.

An earlier WRAL Investigates review found exactly that pattern in three districts that installed detection systems between the 2021-22 and 2023-24 school years: weapons cases fell about 75% in Edgecombe County, 70% in Johnston County, and 50% in Charlotte-Mecklenburg^[12]. Districts point to numbers like these as their strongest evidence.

Wake County's Bet, and Why It's Not the Same as Denial

Wake County, the state's largest school district, hasn't bought the technology^[1][12]. That's not a claim that student safety doesn't matter. It's a spending argument: screening every student at every entrance every morning costs real money and staff time, and Wake would rather put it toward counselors, social workers, and school resource officers.

Wake also has a data point of its own. The statewide drop to a 20-year low happened across districts with scanners and without them^[1][2]. If the whole state fell no matter which door had a detector, the case that detectors specifically caused it gets harder to make.

There's a documented reason to hold vendor claims loosely, too. In November 2024, the Federal Trade Commission took action against Evolv Technologies, a leading maker of AI-based weapons scanners, over how it marketed the systems' accuracy^[7][9]. At the time, Evolv had scanners running in more than 800 schools across 40 states^[7]. A federal judge approved a settlement in January 2025 that barred certain accuracy claims and let schools cancel their contracts^[7][9]. The BBC had run its own tests on Evolv scanners before that, and reported the regulator's finding as a story about a company that oversold what its product could do^[9]. Critics use that record to argue districts are buying confidence they haven't actually purchased — and that a false sense of security, paired with real gaps in coverage, can be worse than no scanner at all.

Whose Budget, Whose Risk

Underneath the dueling numbers sits a basic mismatch in how the two sides are doing math. DPI's report describes the state on average. A school board isn't budgeting for the average — it's trying to prevent the one catastrophic day that can't be undone. That's why a district can look at a statewide number falling to a 20-year low and still conclude it needs to spend more, not less: a rare, irreversible event doesn't get less worth guarding against just because it's rare^[1][11].

Civil-liberties groups read the same pressure differently. The American Civil Liberties Union and similar organizations argue that daily scanning normalizes searching minors, and that the burden falls unevenly — screening shows up more often in schools serving lower-income and Black student populations^[15]. Their preferred fix is the same falling numbers DPI is celebrating, treated as proof the scanners were never necessary in the first place, and money redirected toward counseling instead of hardware^[8].

State legislators sit in a third position. Even a 20-year low still means 103 firearms turned up in North Carolina schools in one year^[2]. And one figure moved the opposite direction from almost everything else: assaults on school staff rose over the same period, even as most other offense categories fell^[6]. At least three states are now weighing whether to require detection systems at every school entrance, on the argument that a student's safety shouldn't depend on which county they happen to live in^[11].

The Number Behind the Number

One more figure belongs in this picture, because it's easy to miss inside a good-news headline. Total reportable offenses of all kinds fell 6.1%, to 11,470 from 12,212^[2][13]. That's a real, third-consecutive-year decline^[5]. It's also still above where the count stood in 2019, before the pandemic^[13]. Both "things are getting better" and "we haven't gotten back to normal" are true descriptions of the same line on the same chart.

Coverage of this story split less over the facts than over which half of that sentence got the emphasis. Carolina Journal, published by the free-market John Locke Foundation, granted the decline and then pivoted quickly to the rising staff-assault number and dropout risk at the transition into ninth grade^[5][6]. EdNC, an education-focused nonprofit outlet, ran closest to a straight recap of the DPI data, including the rate-per-1,000-students figure other outlets left out^[2]. Undark and The 74, both education- or science-focused nonprofits, gave sharper scrutiny to the scanner vendors specifically, with Undark's headline framing the technology as one where "questions persist^[10]." No outlet outside the U.S. covered North Carolina's numbers at all — the only overseas pickup was the BBC's reporting on the Evolv settlement, framed purely as a consumer-protection story with no reference to American school-safety politics^[9].

No study has isolated how much of the statewide decline came from the scanners, the discipline changes, or something else entirely, and one may not arrive soon — districts adopted the technology at different times, alongside other changes, making the causes hard to untangle. For now, the number and the spending keep moving in opposite directions, and nobody has published the study that would say why.