APS found over a dozen guns at schools last year. What is the district doing about it?

More than 64,000 students are expected to head to classes at Albuquerque Public Schools beginning Thursday.

But at least 15 students can’t return, including a 12-year-old caught with a 9mm Smith & Wesson handgun with a laser sight in his backpack. The status of two other charter school students caught with firearms on campus last school year wasn’t immediately available Friday.

Federal law bars the students from attending school for at least a year after they were charged with unlawful carrying of a deadly weapon on school premises. A conviction on that charge also could result in probation or commitment to a juvenile facility for a period of time.

So why would someone bring a firearm to school?

“Either they try to look cool or they bring it for protection,” APS Police Deputy Chief Steven Marez said in an interview Thursday.

Too often, they feel the need for protection on the way to and from the school grounds, said Shantail Miller, the district’s student threat assessment and integrated support director.

“It wasn’t that they feared someone at school, it’s that they feared the consequences between here and their home,” she added.

The prevalence of guns at APS campuses and at a handful of charter schools, at which the district doesn’t directly oversee day-to-day operations, reflects an increase in violent juvenile crime in the Albuquerque area and elsewhere in New Mexico.

More than two dozen juveniles were charged with murder in Bernalillo County alone from January 2023 to November 2024, most involving firearms, according to 2nd Judicial District Attorney Sam Bregman. Recently dominating New Mexico headlines was a shooting in March allegedly perpetrated largely by teens who killed three teens in Las Cruces and the fatal shooting of a 14-year-old on the University of New Mexico campus, allegedly by an 18-year-old.

APS officials interviewed last week echoed a common goal — to catch struggling or conflicted students before they bring a gun to school. And this school year, they say they are better equipped to head off trouble thanks to panic buttons, increased scrutiny of visitors, capital improvements in school buildings and fencing.

Other proactive steps: Specialized support teams, additional training of teachers, 5,000 surveillance cameras and the re-launch of Crime Stoppers on campus to receive anonymous tips.

“The overwhelming majority (of guns) are found because somebody saw something ... and reported it to an adult. We were able to intervene and ensure that the unthinkable didn’t take place,” said Antonio Gonzales, APS superintendent of operations.

Since the pandemic, APS campuses have seen an uptick in guns found on campuses. During the 2021-22 school year, 10 guns were recovered; for the 2022-23 school year, a record high 17 guns were found; and in the 2023-24 school year, 15 firearms were found, according to Journal archives.

Coming into the new school year, APS will implement several strategies and initiatives to try to keep guns off its campuses at a time when juvenile crime has become a focal point of political discussions in the state, with Bregman and some lawmakers calling for action.

During the 2024-2025 school year involving 14 incidents, 15 firearms were recovered and 17 students are facing — or have faced — criminal charges as a result, according to records obtained by the Journal through an Inspection of Public Records Act request.

In one case, at La Cueva High School, a student brought a gun to campus to fend off bullying, stating he had no intent to use it. In separate incidents at Valley High School, a student athlete in good academic standing was found with a firearm. In the other, after a gym coach suspected a student had tagged school property, a search turned up a loaded gun, not spray paint, in the student’s backpack.

Of the 17 students, according to the Bernalillo County District Attorney’s Office, only two received a year-long juvenile sentence; three have been put on probation; and 11 cases are pending. The unwillingness of witnesses to cooperate in a Cleveland Middle School incident in February has put that case in limbo.

The ages of those arrested ranged from 12 to 18 years old: three were 17; five were 16; three were 15; two were 14; two were 13; one was 12; and one was 18.

The spike in firearms found on campus is not out of line with national trends. A 2023 investigation by The Washington Post found that gun seizures in the largest school districts in the country jumped nearly 80% over a five-year span.

“The country saw a notable uptick in gun violence post-COVID,” Sonali Rajan, a professor of health promotion and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said in a Friday interview. “I do think that at its core, ensuring that all of our states are implementing reasonable evidence-informed gun safety laws that reduce access to firearms for kids and teens is just so crucially important.”

Intervention

With the school year starting in just days, APS has adopted a few new strategies and made key investments to try to stop firearms from making their way onto campus.

In April 2024, APS introduced an integrated support team, headed by Miller and made up of five social workers. Since then, the team has taken 450 calls, targeting kids who are displaying concerning behavioral trends.

“It’s really looking at, what are the factors, the root causes of whatever’s going on, what are the mitigating factors around the situation?” Miller said. “We’re bringing those people at the school level together to say, ‘Hey, what can we do to support this kid and family?’”

The district has also invested in increased security infrastructure, including badges with panic buttons given to staff and teachers that can alert campus cops when pressed enough times and cameras across campuses to make up for the shortage of officers.

“When people talk about security, they think about fences and gunshot detection and metal detectors — which we really don’t have for various reasons,” Kizito Wijenje, executive director of the district’s capital master plan, said in a June interview. “Our security is based on family and emotional health.”

He added that staffing requirements to utilize metal detectors would be unreasonable, that patting down and scanning students in the morning could have poor impacts on their mental health and that it’s practically impossible to make every student go through a detector and get to class on time.

In April, the district resurrected a partnership with the Albuquerque Police Department called Campus Crime Stoppers, which gave all students in APS middle schools and high schools a sticker with a QR code for a link to report activity on campus. The district said those statistics are tracked by the city’s police department and APD did not respond to a request for those numbers Friday.

However, there are “probably” more guns on APS campuses not being found, according to Marez.

“But I think those are fewer than in the past. I just, again, fall on that to ‘see something, say something’ — we’ve built those bridges with our students,” Marez said. “One of the things I emphasize to all my officers is we’re not the muscle, we’re not the consequence, we’re the safe place that we want our students to go to.”

When it comes to the reasons that kids bring guns to campus, many of the criminal complaints provide little explanation.

“What is the environment in which our kids are growing up in and where they live, part of why are kids choosing to carry firearms? They’re not doing it for no reason. They’re often doing it because of that perceived lack of safety,” Rajan said. “I think that’s really, really important to bring into this conversation, because it’s not just some random decision that a kid or teen makes.”

But the consequences of such decisions are significant: one year of mandatory expulsion from school under the 1994 federal Gun-Free Schools Act and criminal prosecution in Children’s Court.

Under a policy adopted Jan. 1, 2024, by Bregman, all youths charged with gun crimes are asked to divulge the source of the weapon they were carrying. One social media website, Telegram, was the second most commonly listed. The top response: “friend.”

Where are the guns coming from?

According to the reports provided, in just one case was an officer able to track down the origin of a gun purchased by a student. Following the initial arrest of the student at Valley High School, officers were able to track down a suspect — not named in the report — the next day, who admitted they sold the student the gun for less than $400.

“We started working harder to try and once that case is adjudicated, we’re trying to find out where it came from,” Marez said. “We’re finding that to be extremely difficult because of social media. There, those guns ... they can be bought anywhere, and they’re extremely difficult to track.”

Marez noted that often, students don’t even have to purchase the firearms that they bring to campus.

“I would think the majority of the guns that we’re finding, unfortunately, are coming from home,” Marez said. “This isn’t just an APS problem, it’s an Albuquerque problem. It’s a countrywide problem.”

In one case when a student brought a gun from home in May to Atrisco Heritage Academy High School, a parent reported their gun missing to school administrators. It was later found in the center console of a car and three students were arrested.

“A significant number of firearms that are used in school shootings, the firearms often come from the home of either a parent or a caregiver or someone else who the perpetrator often knows,” Rajan said. “For all gun owners, storing firearms unloaded and locked in a safe and separately from ammunition, those very key best practices are so crucial.”

When guns are recovered by APS officers, the procedure is to take them to APD for ballistics testing and also to track if the guns have been stolen.

What’s next

“It’s an all hands on deck venture, we need our community, we need the ‘see something, say something,’” Gonzales said. “The overwhelming majority of the guns found at schools are found because somebody said something, because somebody saw something and said something.”

The district is also banking on the intervention team, early warning systems, threat assessments and teacher input to provide students with resources before they resort to bringing firearms to campus.

“Now we have people, student success, systems, resource teachers that are looking at this data and basically working in conjunction with the wraparound support personnel at every school, your counselor, your nurse, your community, school coordinator, teachers, administration,” Gonzales said.

It’s a strategy and investment that could be effective in continuing to reduce the number of firearms making their way onto APS campuses.

“Gun violence prevention interventions that we scientifically have seen to be the most effective are those that actually break cycles of disenfranchisement and actually address the upstream root causes of gun violence way, way, way before gun violence is a threat to a school community in any way,” Rajan said. “By the time a student is choosing to carry a firearm, we have already failed that kid in so many ways.”