quote:

After the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Goudreau saw dollar signs. “I saw Parkland, and I was like, ‘Well, nobody’s really tackling this, so I want to fix this,” he told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper during an expo on campus safety later that year. So he created his company, Silvercorp USA, to fill what he deemed a hole in the lucrative school security market.

His big idea: have ex-special forces operatives embed in schools and pose as teachers. Since students would not know their instructors’ actual identities, they might be more willing to describe how they’re feeling, or maybe even reveal their intentions to shoot up the school.

“He’s just a — he’s a cool shop teacher: ‘Hey, what’s up, fellas,’” Goudreau said at the expo, per the Sun-Sentinel, play-acting an imagined conversation that might take place between a student and his teacher-cum-Jack Ryan. “I go sit down with a kid who’s alone, playing ‘Dungeons and Dragons,’ and I just try to see whether there’s any problems.”

Goudreau’s business plan was to charge the parents of the students — not the school directly — $8.99 a month for this service. (He wanted to work directly with the parents, he told the Sun-Sentinel, “so his staff could remain independent from any district’s ‘chain of command.’”)