ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Executive Education Academy Charter School has added ZeroEyes’ AI gun-detection software, which monitors the school’s security cameras for guns and alerts police, the company announced Wednesday.
The K-12 school on Allentown’s east side, which ZeroEyes says serves 1,735 students, had been weighing the system since at least March, its board minutes show. The minutes record no board vote on it, and neither they nor the company’s announcement says what it costs.
The software runs on the school’s existing cameras across the campus and its athletic facilities, ZeroEyes said. When it spots what may be a gun, the images go to a ZeroEyes monitoring center that the company says is staffed around the clock by military and law enforcement veterans. If they confirm a threat, they alert police and school security with a description, the type of gun and where it was last seen, often within seconds, according to the company.
Minutes of the March 26 board meeting say the school was “considering purchasing the Zero Eyes Camera/Weapon detection system.” The CEO’s reports in the April and June minutes say the system “has been engaged.”
Minutes from every board meeting from March through August, except July’s canceled meeting, record no vote on the system. ZeroEyes’ announcement gives no price or contract length and does not say how the system is paid for.
ZeroEyes does not publish prices. Its website says most customers pay less than $50 per camera per month, and the per-camera price drops as more cameras are added.
School contracts StateScoop obtained through public records requests in 2024 show what that looks like. A two-school Iowa district paid $22,500 a year to monitor up to 38 cameras, plus a $5,000 setup fee. Across the contracts it reported, prices worked out to about $14 to $49 per camera a month, with the largest districts paying the least.
The school’s CEO told trustees in 2022 that it had more than 50 security cameras in its building. At those rates, 50 cameras would cost about $8,400 to $29,600 a year, or less than one-tenth of 1% of the $31.6 million in revenue the school budgeted for 2026-27. The campus now also includes a field house and a new football stadium, and neither the school nor ZeroEyes has said how many cameras the system watches.
“Safety is our number one priority,” Bob Lysek, the school’s CEO and founder, said in the announcement. “We have built strong relationships with local law enforcement and continuously evaluate technologies that can help us better protect our students, staff, and community.”
Some school safety experts question how much such systems can do. Michael Dorn, executive director of Safe Havens International, a nonprofit that does safety assessments for K-12 schools, told StateScoop that an alert can speed the response but can’t stop a shooting once a gun is out. “A lot of the active shooter events I’ve worked on, it’s nine seconds from when the gun comes out ’till they’re done shooting,” he said.
Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project warned in a 2022 analysis on the group’s website about false alarms and about cameras watched for guns being used for other surveillance, such as face recognition. “ZeroEyes has humans in the loop that review camera images before alarms are sent, which is helpful — but that’s no guarantee against errors,” he wrote.
The board’s next public meeting is Oct. 22 at 6 p.m. at the school, 555 Union Blvd., according to its posted schedule. Anyone who wants to raise a topic must submit it in writing to the school’s business office 48 hours before the meeting.