Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) renewed its Emergency Management Software Solution for Safety and Security contract with Raptor Technologies, an integrated school safety software company, on July 1. The renewal came despite administrative concerns about accidental alerts and functionality issues.
LCPS’s contract with Raptor Technologies was originally signed in June 2021 and has been renewed each year since. The contract was renewed for a fourth and final time with a 4% price increase and will remain contracted through June 30, 2026, the date of its expiration.
Raptor operates a visitor management program that captures the name, date of birth, and photo of all who enter the school building by scanning government-issued IDs. The system automatically checks this data against the Virginia Sex Offender Registry as required under Virginia Code 22.1-296.1. The software is also used for all emergency drills including secure-the-building, lockdown, evacuation, shelter, and hold drills with an emphasis on monitoring student attendance.
“We want our staff to be able to, in a lockdown situation, communicate with the admin team so that all of their students are accounted for at the moment,” Safety and Security Officer (SSO) Melissa Bridge said. “We’ll be able to see all of the students that are in the building, and we can go through [the attendance] for each classroom…we haven’t done a very good job of ensuring that we have that accountability with Raptor for lockdown drills.”
Raptor’s software allows teachers to enter their student’s attendance directly into the program during lockdowns specifically. The Sheriff’s department is then notified immediately of all lockdowns and drills through the Raptor system.
This type of operating system is critical for school safety amid the nationwide increase in gun violence as this technology helps alleviate concerns of school-shootings with quick and efficient emergency operations.
“The teacher [accidentally activates a lockdown] in the Raptor [system], and then we get a notification,” Student Resource Officer (SRO) Jesse Southward said. “Our emergency communication center gets a notification, and then my work phone starts ringing. People call and ask me what’s going on, and they try to reach me on my sheriff’s office radio ready to come figure out what’s going on. So, when it’s a false alarm, there’s still people coming to the school, until I tell them there’s nothing.”
Although Raptor’s programming is quick to respond to potential emergencies, it lacks guardrails to prevent unnecessary use of emergency resources; the system has no mechanism to filter out false triggers before law enforcement is mobilized.
Raptor Technologies’s website boasts of 75 sex offenders flagged and 150 custom alerts sent daily across U.S. schools, but it does not include the number of accidental alerts the system causes. Stone Bridge has already experienced two accidental Raptor alerts this year.
“We’re trained in Raptor when we were hired,” Mrs. Bridge said. “[Teachers] are not to utilize it other than when a drill or the actual lockdown has been activated…Raptor has a place where you can actually click on a drill and swipe it. To initiate it, anyone with a link can do that. But they’re not supposed to. I think our teachers are so concerned about logging in attendance…if you slide the bar, then it initiates for the whole building and the whole Sheriff’s Department. Everybody comes running.”
This is not Raptor’s only flaw. The company made headlines in January 2024 following a data-security leak uncovered by a cybersecurity researcher Jeremiah Fowler. Raptor Technologies’s misconfigured cloud database was exposing sensitive information, including medical records, from over 5,300 school districts. Beyond its vulnerabilities with data security, the platform’s day-to-day usability has drawn even more criticism.
“I think the primary function of it is a good idea to help give an early warning system to teachers in their classroom, but I don’t think it’s very user friendly,” SRO Southward said. “It’s just like a website on a phone…I guess that’s the primary thing that LCPS uses for notification for staff at the schools if something happens.”
LCPS’s safety precautions will not be limited to the Raptor system: Superintendent Aaron Spence’s proposed budget includes $7.9 million for safety and security improvements, including panic buttons and a VOLT AI camera monitoring system to be installed in the existing security cameras within schools beginning this fall. Through various methods, LCPS students will be protected.
“I think it’s just about taking a look at last year, taking a look at the overall scope of what safety and security look like, and how we can better ensure that our schools and our students are safe at all times,” Mrs. Bridge said. “It’s not about trying to get all their names clicked, but we’d like to, because, if it is a real deal, we want to make sure all our kids are safe and accounted for.”
