In January 2023, at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia, first-grade teacher Abby Zwerner was shot by a six-year-old student in her classroom. The child had reportedly brought a firearm to school despite multiple warnings being raised earlier in the day. The incident shocked the community and reignited urgent conversation about how educators and administrators can protect students and staff in real time.

At Netsweeper, our mission is clear: safeguarding children and strengthening institutional safety must go hand-in-hand. It’s not just about filtering content or managing access, it’s about creating an environment where critical threats are identified early and acted upon decisively. Our onGuard platform is built precisely for this purpose.

Why the Zwerner case matters

  • When early warnings were raised about the student possibly bringing a weapon, the school administration allegedly failed to respond with adequate urgency.
  • The result was catastrophic: Abby Zwerner did everything she could to protect her students, but the system around her failed to safeguard her. The physical and emotional aftermath are still playing out.
  • This is not merely about one isolated event. It highlights systemic vulnerabilities — information silos, delayed responses, unclear escalation paths.

How onGuard changes the game
Here’s how onGuard helps school districts, government agencies and private institutions strengthen their threat-detection posture:

  1. Real-time intelligence integration. onGuard constantly aggregates data streams, from user behaviour and flagged web content. That means potential threats—even subtle ones—don’t linger undiscovered
  2. Behavioral risk scoring. Rather than simply blocking keywords, onGuard uses contextual models to surface unusual behavioural patterns, for example a user researching firearms, or downloading content outside typical norms. Those alerts can trigger a chain of oversight workflows.
  3. Escalation workflows and dashboarding. Once a risk is flagged, onGuard routes it through configured workflows: notifications to designated administrators, logging for compliance, recommended next-steps. In a school setting this means suspected student risk behaviour, timely alerts to school safety officers, and integration with incident response plans.
  4. Analytics and historical insight. Post-event reviews are crucial. With onGuard you get dashboards that show both what was flagged (and perhaps overlooked) and how future thresholds could be adjusted. This has direct relevance to preventing scenarios similar to the one at Richneck.

Translating insight into action
Had a system like onGuard been active at the school in question, multiple warning signals, from staff reports about the student, behaviour concerns, possible weapon possession, might have been routed and escalated far more quickly. The case underlines that simply having warnings is not enough; it’s how those warnings are captured, triaged, and acted upon that matters.

A call to leaders
School systems face digital and physical threats simultaneously: from cyber-predators and radicalisation to firearms and behavioural violence. The tools that worked five years ago no longer suffice. onGuard represents the kind of proactive, holistic solution that today’s safer-schools strategy demands.

Let’s work together to ensure no teacher walks into the classroom thinking “this could happen to me” and that no school is undermined by the failure to turn warnings into protections. With onGuard, we can help shift the narrative from reaction to prevention.