At a Glance

Background

Berni Westleigh is the school resource officer for RSU 16, a public school district covering Mechanic Falls and Poland in central Maine. The district serves roughly 1,700 students across five schools: three elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school.

Berni took over the SRO role in 2023 and inherited a security stack that had not aged well, including a Halo vape detection system that had been installed across the high school and middle school in 2021. What followed was a multi-year effort to make the existing system work, a hard pivot to evaluating alternatives, and a single-sensor Triton pilot that has reshaped how she and her team approach vape and bathroom safety district-wide.

After enough complaints, Halo's final answer was that her sensors had reached "end of life" after roughly three years in service, and they refused to replace them. The quote to start over with new Halo units came in around $100,000, for a product the team had already lost confidence in.

Berni had exhausted every option before that point. She became a self-taught Halo expert, worked every troubleshooting path the vendor offered, sent sensors in for service, and built her own workflows to validate alerts by reading particle counts directly. None of it produced a system she could trust.

The Pilot: One Sensor in the Busiest Bathroom

Berni went looking for something that actually worked and could scale across the district, including the three elementary schools Halo had never covered. Triton stood out for a reason she didn't expect: the company was founded by people close in age to the students themselves.

Triton sent a single test unit. RSU 16's IT team installed it in the downstairs girls bathroom, which is the highest-traffic and most consistently problematic location in the building. Within hours, Berni was walking administrators through the live dashboard on her phone and showcasing features like the real-time person count, cell phone detection, and vape alerts. The vice principal pulled it up on her own phone and computer the same day. The operations manager asked for a quote.

With Triton and Halo running side by side in the same building, the difference was impossible to ignore.

Results From a Single Sensor

Staff began pulling 2 to 3 vapes per day from the single Triton test unit, including THC and dab pens. One Triton-triggered intervention recovered seven dab pens at once, contraband that had been moving freely under Halo. Just as important, staff finally trusted what they were getting. Years of Halo false alarms had trained them to ignore notifications. With Triton, every alert got a response.

The Conference Moment

Shortly after the pilot went live, Berni attended an industry conference. The instructor leading a session told the room that vape detection was largely a waste of money, that false alarms were too common, and that students were typically gone by the time staff arrived. The room nodded along. When Berni spoke up to ask what sensors they were using, the instructor replied with “Halo.”

Triton vs. Halo at RSU 16

Looking Ahead

RSU 16 is finalizing a grant submission to fund a district-wide security overhaul, including 20 to 25 additional Triton sensors. The plan calls for replacing every Halo unit currently installed in the high school and middle school, adding five additional sensors to those buildings to expand coverage, and bringing vape detection to all three elementary schools for the first time.

For Berni, the test sensor coming down at the end of the pilot was a low point. Now the focus is on getting funding through and getting Triton across the entire district as quickly as possible.