Most school and district leaders have no reliable way to know whether their school security camera setup is normal.
Is 30 minutes to find footage after an incident slow, or about average? Does everyone else have this many systems that don't talk to each other? How are other K-12 schools getting buy-in to modernize aging systems? There has not been a good benchmark to check against.
So we built one. For the State of Physical Security 2026 report, we surveyed 241 verified security, IT, operations, and facilities leaders across seven industries about how they run physical security day to day: investigating incidents, managing connected or disconnected systems, paying for upgrades, and deciding what to do about AI. K-12 was the largest group in the study, and the one that looked least like everyone else.
What follows is the responses from the survey's K-12 segment: 85 school and district leaders in their own numbers, along with reactions from Seth McDaniel, Police Chief at Commerce Independent School District, who has spent much of his career leading law enforcement, security, emergency preparedness, investigations, and threat management operations for public school districts.
What schools want, and what's in the way
Ask school leaders what they want from physical security this year and the answers cluster tightly around safety. 90.6% name improving safety and threat response as a top goal, the highest of any sector we surveyed. Speeding up investigations (61.2%) and expanding coverage to more buildings (49.4%) come next. Lowering security costs (42.4%) ranks higher for schools than for most other groups.
"As a chief of police for a school district, my top priority is always going to be safety, security, and threat response. I understand that isn't the same viewpoint for every staff member.
If teaching in a classroom is your biggest goal, you still have to be safe to do it. At the end of the day, safety and security is what allows for everything else. It's always interesting to me to hear anything other than safety and security named as the most important aspect of a campus." - Seth McDaniel, Police Chief, Commerce Independent School District
Budget is the constraint on all of it. 89.4% say it is holding them back, and forced to pick one biggest challenge, budget still wins at 32.9%, ahead of aging cameras (23.5%) and slow investigations (15.3%). For about a quarter, the sticking point is not the money itself but proving an upgrade is worth it to a school board or safety committee.
"Proving the worth is really just explaining it. I think districts are having trouble explaining the worth, not proving it. It's a lapse in communication, not a lapse in what's actually needed."
Where the money comes from is the genuinely K-12 part. Operating budget leads, but only at 57.6%, well below the rest of the market, because grants make up the difference. Around 29% of districts fund security through state or federal safety grants like NSGP or COPS, versus under 5% of corporate buyers. A grant window, a bond, and an operating-budget line don't just carry different dollars. They run on different calendars and answer to different people.
"The only reason we were able to purchase our current system is a federal grant. My police operating budget outside of salaries is $41,000 a year. That's all I have. I've brought in about $1.75 million in grants over the past three years.
Around 85% of districts in Texas are small districts, and small districts are going to have to find grant funding. It's not that they don't want to do the work. I don't think they know the work is there to get the grants."
Everyone wants one system. Schools have it least.
80.0% of school leaders would prefer one connected system across video, access, emergency response, and visitors. 15.3% have one, a wider gap than the 22.4% across all industries. Nearly half (48.2%) run a few connected systems with the rest separate, 36.5% run everything on its own island, and 64.7% are managing more than one location.
"It's interesting to me that the age of districts with one unified system is so low, but we're part of that group. We still run multiple providers to cover the whole district, partly because of the cost of changing everything over and partly because of contracts a previous administration signed.
One campus is on a system we bought with ten-year licensing, so we're stuck with it. In my opinion it's worth cancelling a contract, or even paying for two, to get to one unified system if you can."
Finding footage after an incident is the task these teams do most, and it is where fragmentation bites. More than 40% take longer than 30 minutes to find the right clip, and only 7.1% get to it in under two.
"On our old system, 30 minutes to find an incident was a good day. We were usually running about an hour and a half to find it and watch it. We're at maybe 10% of that now."
Day-to-day monitoring is thinner than the coverage numbers suggest. 16.5% say no one is actively watching the cameras.
"We now have a drop in each of my officers' offices that goes to a big screen on the wall, so they can watch the cameras live. They keep those on constantly."
Schools are ahead on the safety tools
Schools have adopted the safety-specific capabilities faster than any other sector. Emergency alerts and lockdown are in place at 83.5% of districts, guest and visitor management at 68.2%, and weapon detection at 31.8%. Video surveillance (98.8%) and access control (94.1%) are nearly universal.
A lot of it runs on its own, though. Emergency alerts are fully integrated at just 61.2%, guest management at 44.7%, weapon detection at 20.0%. A district can own a lockdown system, a visitor kiosk, and a camera network and still have to pull them together by hand when it counts.
"We run weapon detection on all of our exterior cameras, and we also have weapon detectors on the interior. You have to have redundancy and additional layers."
Modernizing physical security without replacing everything
Most districts cannot start over, and most do not have to. 90.6% of K-12 leaders believe they could keep some or all of their existing cameras if they switched platforms, 56.5% think they could keep all of them, and only 9.4% expect a full replacement, the lowest of any sector.
That optimism is worth testing against the math. McDaniel expected to reuse his newer cameras and reached a different conclusion.
"We thought we could keep some of ours because they were newer cameras, but they were still four or five years old. I'm figuring out that four or five years in a camera system is a hundred years."
The useful distinction is between what you can keep and what you should keep. Doors, cabling, and a good share of camera fleets do carry over, and that is a real advantage over starting from scratch. Whether they should carry over is a five-year cost question, and it is better answered before a platform decision than after.
Cost and compatibility top the list of what schools look for: clear, no-surprise pricing (81.2%) and working with the cameras they already own (67.1%), with support and reliability tied at 67.1%. Storage is split fairly evenly across hybrid (36.5%), cloud (32.9%), and on-site (30.6%), more local than any other sector.
How K-12 schools think about AI
School leaders are pragmatic about AI. 29.4% call it a must-have or very important, but 71.8% rate plain-language video search, describe what you're looking for and get the clip, as very or extremely useful. What they want is the capability, whatever it ends up being called.
They do not expect it to change the staffing math much. 12.9% think AI will significantly reduce their reliance on staff, the lowest of any sector, and 45.9% expect no change at all. For most schools it is a way to get through footage faster during an investigation.
"Where AI genuinely helps is the video. Finding people, pulling footage up. We can search for a guy in a blue shirt with a black backpack and we'll find him.
Five years ago when AI came around I didn't want any part of it, and I'm 37. I felt like a 90-year-old man about it. Now it's a daily occurrence on my phone. I think the 45% expecting no change just haven't been exposed to a system that can do it yet."
What stands out for K-12
Most of the K-12 gap is funding structure, not indifference. Schools want what everyone else wants. They are just working grant windows and bond cycles to get there, which is a different game than the ROI conversation the rest of the market is having.
And schools have already bought the safety tools. Emergency alerts, visitor management, weapon detection, they are further along than any other sector. What is missing is the wiring between them, which is usually a cheaper and faster problem to solve than buying more.
The rest is more familiar: benchmark your investigation time, confirm you can keep your cameras before assuming a rewrite, and treat AI as something to test on real incidents rather than a category to believe in.
If you carry one figure into your next safety committee meeting, make it the gap: 80% of schools want one connected system, and 15% have one. Closing it is mostly a matter of wiring and funding, not ambition.
.png)
