At Kirby High School on the morning of August 4, a sophomore walked through the front entrance carrying a clear backpack for the first time. You could see his binder, two textbooks, a water bottle, and a pack of Skittles. He stopped just inside the door, looked around at the other students holding identical transparent bags, and shrugged. “Feels weird,” he told his friend. “Everybody can see your stuff.”
That moment, repeated across more than 150 Memphis-Shelby County Schools buildings on the first day of the 2025-26 school year, marked the most visible change in a package of new security policies that MSCS rolled out this fall. Clear backpacks are now required for all students. Cell phones must be stored and silenced during instructional time. Formative assessments, which the district had moved away from, are back in classrooms. And behind the scenes, plans are underway for expanded camera coverage and a centralized safety monitoring operation.
Interim Superintendent Roderick Richmond, who took the helm of MSCS this year, has framed these changes as part of a broader effort to create what he calls a “culture of focus” in the district. The security measures are one piece of that. Whether they’ll actually make schools safer is a question parents, teachers, and security professionals across Memphis are watching closely.
Why Clear Backpacks, and Why Now
The clear backpack policy didn’t come from nowhere. Memphis-Shelby County Schools has been wrestling with weapons on campus for years. In the 2023-24 school year, the district reported multiple incidents involving students bringing firearms to school. Metal detectors at high school entrances catch some weapons. They don’t catch everything, and they create bottlenecks that eat into instructional time every morning.
Clear backpacks offer a different layer of deterrence. The logic is simple: if a student knows their bag contents are visible to every teacher, administrator, and school resource officer they pass in the hallway, the calculation around bringing a prohibited item changes. It’s not a guarantee. A determined student can hide a small weapon under a binder or inside a sealed container. No security measure is foolproof. The question is whether it raises the difficulty enough to prevent some incidents.
Other school districts that adopted clear backpack policies in the years following the Uvalde shooting in May 2022 have reported mixed results. Some saw measurable declines in weapons confiscations (which could mean fewer weapons being brought to school, or fewer being detected, depending on your interpretation). Others found that compliance was inconsistent, with students showing up with non-clear bags and schools lacking the staff to enforce the rule at every entrance.
MSCS appears to be taking enforcement seriously, at least at the start. District communications sent to families in July emphasized that non-clear backpacks would not be allowed past security checkpoints. Schools were instructed to have extra clear bags available for the first two weeks to avoid turning students away.
The early reports from teachers I spoke with suggest compliance on day one was high, somewhere around 85 to 90 percent at the schools they observed. The real test will come in October and November, when the novelty wears off and enforcement fatigue sets in.
Cell Phones: The Other Battle
The cell phone restriction got less media attention than the clear backpacks, and it may end up being harder to enforce. MSCS now requires students to store cell phones during class time. They don’t have to leave them at home or in lockers (some districts have gone that far), though phones must be put away and silenced during instruction.
This isn’t really a security measure in the traditional sense. The district frames it as an academic focus issue. Teachers across the district have complained for years that phones are the single biggest classroom distraction, worse than talking, worse than tardiness, worse than anything else. Research backs this up. A 2024 study from the National Education Association found that teachers reported spending an average of 20 minutes per class period managing phone-related disruptions.
The security angle exists too, though. Cell phones have been used to coordinate fights, record and distribute videos of altercations (which sometimes escalate conflicts), and communicate with people outside the building during lockdowns in ways that can compromise security protocols. The Uvalde after-action reports documented how chaotic cell phone communication became during the crisis, with parents outside the building receiving real-time texts from students inside.
The enforcement question is straightforward: who takes the phone when a student won’t put it away? Teachers don’t want that confrontation. Administrators can’t be in every classroom. The policy works only if there are clear, consistent consequences, and if those consequences are actually applied evenly across the district’s schools.
Camera Upgrades: What’s Happening on Campus and at the University
While clear backpacks get the public’s attention, the camera infrastructure changes happening in Memphis school buildings may matter more for long-term security.
MSCS has been upgrading its camera systems incrementally over the past several years. Many school buildings in the district still run aging analog camera systems that record to local DVRs with limited storage and poor image quality. The district’s plan calls for transitioning to IP-based camera systems with higher resolution, wider coverage, and centralized monitoring capability. A centralized safety center is in the planning stages, though the facility hasn’t opened yet.
The concept behind a centralized safety center is borrowed from the Memphis Police Department’s Real Time Crime Center, which monitors hundreds of camera feeds across the city. The school district’s version would allow trained security staff to watch camera feeds from multiple school buildings simultaneously, spot developing situations, and alert on-site personnel before an incident escalates.
It’s an ambitious plan for a district the size of MSCS. The technical challenges alone are significant: networking hundreds of cameras across 150-plus buildings to a central monitoring location requires serious bandwidth, equipment, and staffing. The personnel challenge might be even bigger. Monitoring camera feeds effectively requires trained operators who know what to look for. That’s skilled labor, and the cost adds up fast.
Separately, the University of Memphis has been expanding its own camera coverage, particularly on its South Campus near the Park Avenue area. The university announced in July 2025 that it was adding cameras and upgrading lighting in several areas that students had flagged as security concerns. The South Campus expansion is part of a broader campus safety initiative that also includes increased patrol presence and improved emergency notification systems.
The university’s approach differs from the K-12 district’s in an important way. The University of Memphis police department is a fully sworn law enforcement agency with arrest powers. Their camera monitoring feeds directly into a police operation. MSCS security staff, by contrast, are not sworn officers (though many schools have Memphis Police Department school resource officers assigned to them). The monitoring structure and response protocols will necessarily look different.
Private Security in Schools: A Growing and Complicated Market
One of the less discussed aspects of school security in Memphis is the role of private security companies. MSCS contracts with private security firms to supplement its own safety staff and the MPD school resource officers. These contracts cover building access control, event security for athletic games and school functions, and in some cases, patrol services around school perimeters.
The private security contracts raise questions that the district hasn’t fully answered publicly. What training do private security guards assigned to schools receive beyond their TDCI licensing requirements? Do they receive training specific to K-12 environments, de-escalation with minors, and active threat response? Who supervises them on a daily basis: the school principal, the district safety office, or the security company?
These aren’t hypothetical concerns. In school environments across the country, incidents involving private security guards using excessive force on students have generated lawsuits and public backlash. A guard trained for warehouse perimeter patrol has a very different skill set than one working the hallway of a middle school. The stakes of getting that wrong are high.
The post-Uvalde environment has accelerated private security’s involvement in education. School districts across Tennessee increased their security spending after 2022. Some hired more school resource officers through partnerships with local police departments. Others turned to private security companies to fill gaps, especially in districts where police recruitment challenges made it hard to find enough SROs.
In Shelby County, the demand for school-trained security personnel outstrips the supply. Security company owners tell me that contracts for school work are the fastest-growing segment of their business, and also the hardest to staff properly. Finding guards who can pass a background check, hold a valid TDCI registration, AND have the temperament to work around teenagers all day is a narrow hiring window.
The Formative Assessment Connection
The reinstatement of formative assessments might seem unrelated to security. It’s not, not entirely.
Formative assessments give teachers and administrators more frequent data points on student performance and engagement. Students who are disengaged, failing, or showing sudden academic declines are statistically more likely to be involved in behavioral incidents. Early identification through regular assessment data gives counselors and administrators a chance to intervene before a struggling student reaches a crisis point.
This isn’t a direct security measure. Nobody is suggesting that a math quiz prevents a school shooting. What the data does is give the adults in a building more information about which students might need additional support, attention, or resources. In a district of MSCS’s size, with tens of thousands of students, that kind of systematic early-warning data can be the difference between catching a problem in September and discovering it in January.
Richmond’s decision to bundle the formative assessments with the security policies under a single “culture of focus” umbrella is smart messaging. It positions the clear backpacks and cell phone rules not as punitive security crackdowns, though that’s how some parents and students see them, rather as part of a district-wide effort to create environments where learning can actually happen.
What Parents Should Be Asking
If your child attends an MSCS school this fall, here are the questions worth raising at the first PTA meeting or parent-teacher conference:
How many cameras are operational in my child’s school building right now? Not how many are installed, because some older systems have cameras that haven’t worked in years. How many are actually recording and being monitored?
Is there a school resource officer assigned to this building full-time, or is the SRO shared between multiple schools? In shared arrangements, which hours is the officer physically present?
What happens when a student brings a non-clear backpack? Is there a defined protocol, or is it left to individual school discretion?
How are private security guards assigned to this school trained for working in a K-12 environment? Can the district provide documentation of that training?
These are reasonable questions. The answers will tell you more about your child’s school security than any policy announcement from the district office.
The Bigger Picture
Memphis-Shelby County Schools is doing what school districts across the country are doing in the post-Uvalde era: layering security measures and hoping the combination adds up to something meaningful. Clear backpacks address one risk vector. Cell phone policies address another. Camera upgrades address a third. None of them alone would make a parent feel confident that their child’s school is truly safe.
The honest truth is that no combination of policies, technologies, and personnel can guarantee safety in a school building. What they can do is reduce risk, increase response time, and create systems that catch problems earlier. The district’s effort this fall is a genuine attempt to do all three.
Whether it works will depend less on the policies themselves and more on whether the people implementing them (principals, teachers, security staff, SROs) have the resources and support to do it consistently, across every building, every day, for the entire school year. Policy is easy. Execution in a district with 100,000-plus students spread across a county the size of Shelby is something else entirely.
That sophomore at Kirby High with his clear backpack and his visible pack of Skittles will probably stop noticing the bag within a month. The adults around him can’t afford to stop noticing what’s inside it. t.