The hall monitor model was bound to fail. Think about it. You give a student an orange sash, a rule book and a badge and expect them to keep the peace. But what about said student’s friends? They’ll get away with murder with their insider connection. (Pro tip: Stash the body in the library’s microfiche room. Nobody ever goes there.) Then you’ve got the incompetent hall monitors, the ones who spend their shifts staring at their shoes or staring out the window. And obviously these kids can’t see everywhere. While they’re trying to keep kids from running in the hallways, there are kids smoking angel dust under the bleachers and having sex in the concession stand. This, school administrators, is why the world invented closed circuit television cameras.Indeed, principals and teachers have been well aware of the irresistible appeal of surveillance cameras. They’ve actually been pushing the envelope when it comes to installing these all-seeing eyes in school. A recent survey by Big Brother Watch estimates that there are CCTV cameras in 90 percent of Britain’s schools. That’s amounts to 106,710 total in-school cameras watching 1.8 million pupils, or one for every 38 students. And here’s the kicker: over 200 of these schools are using CCTV cameras in student bathrooms and changing rooms.“Schools need to come clean about why they are using these cameras and what is happening to the footage,” said Nick Pickles, director of Big Brother Watch. Sharon Holder, national officer for the GMB trade union, echoed this sentiment. “Placing CCTV in school bathrooms poses a worrying development in school policy and raises a number of questions,” she said. “How many parents have given headteachers permission to film their child going to the toilet or having a shower? What happens to the film afterwards? How much discussion has there been on governing bodies and to what extent have councils and councillors had any input into these developments? What problems are the schools trying to solve?”All good questions. When asked about the bathroom cameras, many school administrators said that they were just trying to keep an eye on areas where there were no teachers or other forms of surveillance. These are the zones where bullies thrive, after all. But the excessive surveillance doesn’t just stop there. A number of schools in the United States have issued laptops to students with preinstalled spy software that uses the computer’s webcam to keep an eye on what kids are doing. One school in Philadelphia even kept watching students after they went home, and drew widespread criticism for the practice after they punished on student for “improper behavior” in his own house. These are the kinds of scenarios that make privacy advocates breathe fire and file lawsuits.Nevertheless, there’s no sign of slowing down in the school surveillance arena. Parents may cry foul, but inevitably, teachers and administrators decide how they’ll keep track of students when they’re in their care. Lawmakers are aware of the issue, but no real measures to limit the use of CCTV cameras have been put in place. It’ll probably take some awful pedophile of a janitor stealing the school’s bathroom tapes before they realize that recording endless hours of footage of kids taking their pants off might be a bad idea.At least some kids, however, don’t seem too bothered. “CCTV just encourages, you know, beauty, and everyone wanting to be perfect,” one female student told experts researching the issue at the University of Hull, “like everybody wanting to be a size 8 or really skinny and really, really beautiful.” Another girl added, "The cameras are trying to control us and make us perfect."
h5. Image via Flickr
Advertisement