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Illinois School Board Journal
September/October 2005

TechnoTracking: Surveillance, safety and privacy in the digital age

by Scott Lafee

Scott Lafee is a contributing writer for California Schools magazine, a publication of the California School Boards Association. His article originally appeared in the Spring 2005 edition and is reprinted with permission.

Once school security was mostly about locking doors and perhaps dealing with the occasional act of vandalism or theft. Okay, that memory is probably apocryphal, or at least rose-colored. But there seems little doubt that the subject of school security these days conjures up far more serious, even ominous, concerns than it ever did in the past.

In the wake of school shootings at Columbine and elsewhere, in the aftermath of the horrors visited upon the nation September 11, 2001, no responsible and prudent educator can avoid wondering whether a school or students might be the next target of terrorism or violence.

This concern has manifested itself in myriad ways, from numerous conferences and reports on school security issues to a rising reliance on technology. From surveillance cameras and electronic keys to computer chip-embedded ID cards and iris recognition scanners, schools across the country are going high tech in the belief (or hope) that it means a greater measure of security and safety.

Is more technology the answer?

There's no simple answer. Indeed, it seems there's no single answer. Plenty of districts can cite the benefits of technologies like surveillance cameras in reducing vandalism or ordinary student mischief, but its preventive effect upon more horrendous acts is unknown. There's simply no evidence to say, one way or the other.

In a sense, that's good news.

"The likelihood of a terrorist attack in any American community is incalculable," said Lauren Bean, editor of the report "School Safety in the 21st Century" from the National Strategy Forum, a Chicago-based think tank.

There has not been a catastrophic terrorism incident within the United States since 9/11 but "speculation may become reality without warning," she said. "There is one certainty: all parts of the U.S. critical infrastructure are vulnerable, including schools and their neighboring communities.

Certainly the target is big enough. On any given weekday, some 53 million children and six million adults go to school to learn or to work. That's roughly one-fifth of the nation's total population.

"So far, I think we've had a very lame national discussion, if we've had any at all, on the issue of schools as potential targets of terrorism," said Ken Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, a Cleveland-based consulting firm.

"I don't want to be an alarmist, but if you want to strike at the heart of an enemy, you strike at his children. You see that sort of thing all of the time in the Middle East. Schools, buses attacked."

All of which begs the question: What are schools doing for protection and prevention?

Some are doing nothing. Some are doing the best they can, which may effectively be the same as nothing, depending upon their financial circumstances. And some — a growing number — seem to be turning to technology, everything from surveillance cameras to computer chip-embedded ID cards to iris scans.

Late last year, the Spring Independent School District, a middle-class suburban school district located north of Houston, gave all 28,000 students identification badges containing a computer chip that was automatically scanned when students entered or exited school buses.

The $200,000 system is based on radio frequency identification technology, or RFID. Embedded computer chips are each programmed with a unique number and a tiny antenna that transmits the information to nearby scanners.

Large-scale retailers like Wal-Mart use the technology to track pallets of merchandise. Ranchers use it to track livestock. Pet owners can have the chips inserted beneath the skin of cats and dogs as a way to identify them if lost. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last year approved the implantation of RFID chips in human patients. The chip's number would link to the patient's medical records.

The use of RFID chips in the Spring Independent School District isn't quite so dramatic. District officials hope the chip-equipped ID badges will help them monitor the whereabouts of students using district buses.

"We had a couple of incidents of kids getting off at wrong apartment complexes," said deputy superintendent Margie Cain. "The kids were misplaced for just a few minutes, but parents understandably got upset. Nextel had approached us a few years earlier about an RFID system, but we passed. This time, we thought we would try it as a pilot.

"It's worked pretty well. The response from the community has been very positive. The whole thing is structured to simply keep track of where students are on buses. We don't track them once they get off ... . It's just another level of security."

Security has long been a significant concern in The School District of Palm Beach County in south Florida. The nation's 14th largest district, Palm Beach maintains a police department that is larger than many towns — 137 officers plus support personnel — to oversee 162,000 students and 18,000 staff working in 170 buildings.

Some of those buildings belong to an experimental middle school that serves as a testing site for new security tools: continuous surveillance cameras, a system that prints out photo ID cards for visitors on the spot, biometric scanners in classrooms to take attendance (children place their hands on a pad, each child's hand being uniquely shaped and sized) and an electronic card key system that can be modified at any time to grant greater or lesser access to school facilities.

The latter has proved particularly useful, said Jim Kelly, chief of the district's police department.

"Previously, we had a master key system. A master key got you into any room or building — everybody wanted one — but if you lost it, it meant we had to re-key the whole school, which cost $10,000 to $20,000.

"The card system is much cheaper over the long-term. Each card is programmed to open only those doors the person is supposed to be able to enter. It can be changed if necessary and if the card is lost, we simply invalidate it."

Step inside the main entrance of the New Egypt Elementary School in rural Plumsted Township, New Jersey, and you are met by a locked inner door and a small, gray box mounted on the wall.

Directions advise visitors to look into a lens, which, in a matter of moments, scans the iris for its unique markings. If you've been to the elementary school before, and your iris is already in the database, a door buzzes open. If you're new to the school and not in the database, the door stays locked and you must buzz for assistance, meaning a person watching a monitor decides whether to let you in or not.

When school officials first volunteered to be part of a study to see whether iris recognition technology would work in a school environment, they weren't sure what to expect.

"But after 9/11, we knew we had to do something," said Jean Morgan, the principal at New Egypt Elementary.

Two years later, Morgan says the system is, by and large, a success. District officials worked hard to make sure everybody understood how it would work, and that it was strictly voluntary. The iris scanner is used only during school hours, when all other entries into the school are locked.

"At first we weren't sure the technology was appropriate for a school," said Morgan, "but everybody's gotten used to it and it's given us a greater sense of security."

So much so, in fact, that the township's middle school and high school have also implemented iris scanners.

Is technology the solution for better security? It depends on who's answering the question.

There's no doubt surveillance cameras can be effective at deterring commonplace vandalism or helping police and school officials solve criminal or malicious acts lacking witnesses or evidence. Numerous districts have reported sharp declines in vandalism damage and/or insurance costs after installing cameras to survey public spaces, such as playgrounds, building entrances, hallways and the like.

(For obvious reasons, restrooms and locker rooms have never been suitable sites for cameras. Nor have classrooms.)

That said, various groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group advocating greater digital freedoms, have tended to view technologies like surveillance cameras as ineffective at best and an abuse of personal privacy at worst.

"We've thought a lot about this stuff, about surveillance in institutional locations," said Emily Newitz, a policy analyst for the EFF. "It's certainly understandable that parents, teachers and administrators are concerned about security. We don't doubt that they've given the subject of technology genuine thought, but things like surveillance are not the answer.

"There are legitimate concerns about privacy, not so much activities like monitoring public spaces but what happens down the line. Who has access to the cameras? Who makes sure the technology is not abused by others? And what about ‘usage creep,' going from an original, accepted use to something entirely different? What happens to all of the data collected? Is it saved? To what purpose? These are questions that I'm not sure schools are always thinking about or thinking through."

"It's hard to know in every instance whether technology is the answer," added Dale Kelly Bankhead, public affairs director for the San Diego ACLU chapter. "Let's go back to Columbine. It's not clear that camera surveillance would have solved that problem. What might have worked better were policies that dealt with bullying or creating smaller, more personal academic settings. People often think technology is the solution when the real answer is a human resources issue."

Kelly in Palm Beach would agree: "Technology is not meant to replace people, a body walking around with eyes and ears. I don't think of just using technology and forgetting everything else. That would be putting too many eggs in one basket. Technology enhances security. It especially helps in coping with budget cuts, which schools have been enduring now for more than a decade."

Another NASRO survey backs up Kelly's point about diminishing monies. More than 41 percent of security officers surveyed said funding for school safety was decreasing. More than half said that, despite the rhetoric about the war on terrorism, current federal funding efforts for school security issues were inadequate.

"Public policy and funding trends are clearly headed in the opposite direction of what front-line school safety officers are saying is needed," wrote Curtis Lavarello, executive director of NASRO and author of the 2003 survey.

Take the case of West Hills High School in Santee, California, east of San Diego. In 2002, officials installed surveillance cameras at the 74-acre campus following two separate student shootings at nearby high schools.

But budget woes compelled officials in the Grossmont Union High School District to eliminate the safety coordinator position that monitored and maintained the cameras at West Hills.

"It was a great system. We had six cameras. You could use a handheld PDA to punch up any of the views," said Joe Schramm, who held the coordinator position but is now a special education teacher. "It definitely improved security. I had conversations with kids who said they didn't do things because they were afraid the cameras would catch them. Now, as far as I know, none of the cameras is working. There's no money or people to maintain them."

The price of technology is always dropping but the use of it isn't cheap, said Peter Blauvelt, president of the National Alliance for Safe Schools, a school security advocacy and consulting organization based in Slanesville, West Virginia. High-tech cameras can cost thousands of dollars each. Whole security systems cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And while technology companies frequently offer to install initial systems at significantly discounted prices (sometimes for free), there are the maintenance and repair expenses, the cost of hiring and training people to run the systems and the prospect that what's hot technologically today may become obsolete or incompatible tomorrow.

"Remember when everybody thought metal detectors were the way to go," said Doug Reynolds, safe schools and security coordinator for the Beloit, Wisconsin, school district. "Most of them are now piled up in corners somewhere, gathering dust."

Still, that's no consolation or excuse for school district officials who understand that they hold a singular responsibility: the safety of the children in their care. There is no greater obligation and nothing less than maximum effort will suffice.

"I don't know if there's any data that shows whether technology is making schools safer," said Blauvelt, "but schools with the resources are doing so because they can."

School officials say they're doing their best and that their ultimate goal is beyond reproach.

"I think that anything we do in school districts, someone will always criticize and find, if they look far enough out, some reason why we shouldn't do it," said Cain, the deputy superintendent in Texas' Spring Independent School District.

"From standardized testing to having football, there's always somebody who doesn't think you should do something. But for most students and parents, the idea is that they can come to school and feel safe — maybe not 100 percent guaranteed, but comfortable. If we prevent one bad thing from happening or save one life using technology, people will applaud that."

Most people assume they will be asked to show a driver's license to write a check, to get on an airplane or to prove their age to buy alcohol. Now schools are finding they can beef up security by asking visitors and volunteers to produce their license.

Will County School District 92 in Lockport went to a license scanning system for all of its buildings about midway through the last school year, according to Superintendent Richard Maier. He has received no complaints about the new system and feels the district is giving parents an extra sense of security.

The system, which District 92 runs on laptop computers in each of its four attendance centers, scans a driver's license and then checks the information against a national database of known child sex offenders. No other information, like parking tickets, or specific information about any crimes is accessed. The system merely alerts office personnel that the person has a record as a child sex offender. As an administrator, Maier said, he has the authority to deny admittance or alert local authorities, depending on what is warranted by the situation.

Once the database has cleared the visitor, the computer prints out a badge that contains the person's name, the reason for the visit, the time in and the expected departure time, in addition to the person's picture from the driver's license. Visitors then wear the badge while they are in the building.

If someone is seen in the cafeteria, for example, but the name badge says they were supposed to be at an activity in the gymnasium on the opposite side of the building, then staff would know to question their activity or alert administration.

In addition, Maier said, the system can be helpful when construction workers need to be in the facility. The badges would not restrict activity, but they would act as an alert to staff if someone is not where they are supposed to be.

The system, he said, also can be set to page the local police department if a name from the registry list tries to enter the building.

Initially, District 92 tried the scanner system in its K-1 attendance center because of some problems with building security, Maier said. Even though visitors had to be buzzed in under the previous system, a man who started acting erratic was able to come into the building. He was later apprehended by police down the street from the school and told authorities he had attended school there and just wanted to visit.

Even though that situation ended well, Maier said, the episode acted as a wake-up call for everyone.

That's when Maier read about the new scanner capabilities in the newspaper and asked the board to appropriate money for a trial system in the K-1 building. Since then, the board has approved systems for its three other buildings at a cost of between $2,100 and $2,500 each.

So far, most visitors have been very willing to have their driver's license scanned, he said. Those who might have left their license in the car are willing to retrieve it for entrance. Those who don't have a license or don't have it with them can be admitted by simply giving their name and birth date. That information can be entered in the computer, which will then search just like it would with the license and will produce a visitor badge. The only difference is that those without a license will have a black silhouette instead of their picture on the badge.

Once a visitor's license has been scanned into the system, Maier said, a visitor will only need to sign in and give their name and birth date the next time. The system will check them from the previous license picture, confirming their status against a registry that is updated every two weeks.

The other advantage of the computerized system is the constant updating of information on the number of parents and visitors in the district's buildings — statistics that districts need to maintain for school improvement plans.

The only drawback, Maier said, is that functions where large numbers of people try to enter the building at once can back up the check-in process. However, in those instances, visitors are asked to sign in and staff check only those who are unfamiliar or acting suspicious.