Georgia Moms Want Metal Detectors in Every School

In the aftermath of the Apalachee High School shooting in Georgia on Sept. 4, two moms are taking action.

Candace Williams, 49, and Rebekah Rico, 42, have launched Moms for Metal Detectors – a movement asking for metal detectors at every school door in the state of Georgia.

“This is really close to home,” Williams, an attorney from Gainesville, Ga., and mom to a 15-year-old girl.

“Barrow County is one county over from Hall County.”

“When you see these incidents happen in different states, it doesn’t resonate as powerfully as it did when you have a neighboring county where this kid just walked into the school and opened fire with an assault rifle,” she said.

“It could happen anywhere.”

The shooting left her sleepless.

“I kept going through my mind, ‘How did this happen? How did this happen?’” she recalls.

“So, I was looking at different school systems and what they had in terms of their infrastructure for school safety, not only safety resource officers and security systems.

“Then I posted on Instagram, ‘Metal detectors save lives.’”

It was that post that caught Rico’s attention.

“I saw Candace’s post early in the morning — around 5:45 — while I was getting my kids ready for school, and I thought, ‘You said it. Why don’t we have metal detectors in our schools?’” Rico, a cookie company owner and mom to five children ages 19, 18, 17, 12 and 8, says.

From there, the two women started a conversation which became Moms for Metal Detectors.

What started as a call for metal detectors quickly grew into a broader dialogue about school safety.

Their plan is to assist in writing legislation that’s passed by the state of Georgia requiring the use of metal detectors in schools. Aside from metal detectors, the Williams and Rico want to introduce psychological testing to screen potentially dangerous students.

In just seven days social pages dedicated for the movement gained 2,000 followers on TikTok and 700 on Facebook.

Rico says: “I think we’ve realized that what started as sort of common-sense thinking — ‘Why don’t we have metal detectors?’ — has turned into something more complex.

“I was reaching out on social media to people all over the country asking, ‘Do you have these in your schools?’

“A lot of them said, ‘Yeah, we have them, I’m surprised y’all don’t.’ That spurred us to start debating the issue.”

Both women have since met with local school officials to learn more about existing security measures.

“We’ve met with officials from Gainesville City and Hall County, and they’re doing so many things that we weren’t even aware of,” Rico says.

“We sat down for two hours with Dr. Jeremy Williams from Gainesville City Schools and some of his board members and head of security.

“We learned so much about what they’ve already implemented, and I really do believe that they’re preventing something tragic from happening in our area.”

Still, Rico and Williams are pushing for more.

“We’re pressing on issues like more SROs (Student Resource Officers) at every school, armed guards, and mental health awareness,” Rico says.

“There’s a lot involved, and we don’t mean to oversimplify it by saying, ‘We want metal detectors,’ because we realize it’s a lot more complicated than that.”

Williams adds, “We’re asking ourselves: is there anything we could do, or that our schools could do, that would prevent the likelihood of someone walking in the front door with a weapon?

“It’s a complex issue, but that’s where we were landing on metal detectors.

“We use them in so many other places — courthouses, sporting events, concerts, even at UGA games — so why not at our schools?”

While they acknowledge the challenges, the two women remain focused on their goal: creating safer environments for students and staff.

“Our children go to school to do what they came to do — learn in a safe environment,” Williams explains.

“And our educators, who are now living in fear every day, need to feel safe too. We want to unify local schools and law enforcement to stop this evil from repeating itself.”

Although there is no data yet, many of the metro area schools across the country are known to have metal directors — but the smaller schools do not.

Earlier this month, two students and two teachers lost their lives in the attack at Apalachee High School. A 14-year-old student, Colt Gray, has been arrested and charged as an adult with felony murder.

His father, Colin Gray, faces charges of four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder, and eight counts of child cruelty.

Originally published by Talker News