A new survey shows most Wake County students feel safe in school but finds several things schools can do to ensure their safety.

Students said the top ways to enhance security are staff monitoring of hallways and other shared spaces and ensuring external and classroom doors are always locked. They largely want existing measures to be strengthened. They also highlighted bathrooms as areas that don't always feel safe and need improvement.

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Wake surveyed students as it continues to implement different safety measures in schools and weigh future options. Safety measures have largely concerned visitor management and emergency response.

District leaders went over the results of the survey with the school board's safety and security committee Tuesday.

Several school board members asked what could be done to improve bathrooms.

"We know the students' biggest concern," Vice Chairman Sam Hershey said. He added that he understands bathrooms are also supposed to be private.

Board Member Wing Ng said he wants students "to be able to go to the bathroom without fear of being bullied."

About 46% of students said bathrooms need safety improvements, far higher than the school locations that received the second-most votes: Outside on school grounds and the cafeteria, which both received votes from 16% of students.

When it comes to bathrooms, students said they want staff to monitor the bathrooms somehow. That would include addressing vaping, smoking and drug use inside of them, as well as fixing broken stall locks and managing fighting and bullying in the bathrooms.

District Security Director Kendrick Scott declined to answer questions about bathrooms during the public portion of the meeting but said he would discuss possible solutions with the board during closed session. He would also address in closed session how and when principals will receive survey results to begin making improvements.

The district hasn't implemented one measure that's grown significantly in popularity: artificial intelligence-powered weapons detectors for secondary school entryways. About 23% of students said they believed those would enhance their safety.

Wake has grappled with instances of students bringing weapons on campus, often reported to authorities by other students. In 2023, one high school student stabbed and killed another during a fight in the school's cafeteria.

School system leaders presented the results of the survey to the school board's safety and security committee Tuesday, along with updates on upcoming safety initiatives this school year. They'll also present the results of a school resource officer survey that largely shows officers are satisfied with the SRO program. Some information Tuesday will be delivered during a scheduled closed session and not delivered publicly. Certain safety issues can be closed off from the public discussion under North Carolina law.

The survey was for high school students only, and nearly half -- about 23,000 students -- responded.

About 82% of the students said they generally feel safe at school.

Most students would report a concern to an adults in or out of school, and the district believes relationships with staff need to be improved. About two-thirds say they're likely to report safety concerns to adults at their schools, and about three-quarters said they were likely to report safety concerns to adults outside of school. About 44% are likely to use the Say Something anonymous reporting app to report a concern.

About a third of students believed staffing and keeping exterior and classroom doors locked would enhance their safety. Smaller percentages of students said they wanted to see more lockdown drills, more school resource officers, weapons detection systems, vape detection systems, and more school-entry security measures.

Wake hasn't installed vape detectors or weapons detectors. Dozens of North Carolina school districts have installed different kinds of weapons detectors, largely in middle and high schools. They cost hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. Some districts believe their installation has served as a deterrent to students bringing weapons to school, noting declines in the number of weapons they've found on campuses since installing them.

School board members also asked how the district can better get the word out about the survey, saying they wanted to see more than 42% of high school students participate. They also want to see more granular data in the future, broken down by demographics or school.

It's the first time the district has done the survey, and leaders think they can talk more about it at the beginning of the school year. The survey was conducted in the winter, after students had been at their schools for at least a few months. District leaders asked principals to encourage teachers to give students time to complete the surveys during class.

CORRECTION: Forty-four percent of Wake high school students say they are likely to use the Say Something App. An earlier version of this article cited a statistic that has since been updated.