Durango High School students: Welcome to the panopticon.
Durango School District 9-R is in the final stages of installing a $200,000 closed-circuit television system, with nearly 80 cameras positioned on school grounds.
The new system will be state-of-the-art and is the same as the system used in prisons, hospitals and airports, said Kathy Morris, regional safe school coordinator at San Juan Board of Cooperative Education Services.
Chris Lake, the IT officer overseeing the installation, said once everything is in place, there will be 45 cameras inside the school building and 32 outside overlooking places like bike racks and the parking lot.
A history of surveillance
Mischief-makers have dreaded the panopticon since the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham first envisioned it in the 18th century. His idea was to make inmates live in a state of constant insecurity, unable to know whether or not they were being observed by unseen guards.
Modern technology has made Bentham’s design – a circular building with its core formed by a central inspection house – hopelessly obsolete.
DHS principal Leanne Garcia said school surveillance isn’t new. DHS has had cameras on school premises for years.
The problem with the old CCTV system, she said, is that it is hopelessly defunct: The cameras often don’t work at all, and when they do, the images they record are too blurry to make out who exactly is doing what.
Morris said it’s likely that DHS’s new CCTV system is just the beginning.
“We’re actually looking at putting cameras up on all our transportation and in our bus barn,” she said.
Morris recalled a recent incident in which school bus drivers arrived at the district’s depot to discover their tires had been slashed.
“We’ll catch them now,” she said.
School District spokeswoman Julie Popp said DHS’s new CCTV system isn’t “surveillance” in the classical sense of the word.
“No single person will be behind the screens, watching it live at all times,” she said.
But the CCTV system will offer school administrators a valuable record of students’ comings and goings.
She said that students often make accusations against each other that school administrators can’t verify.
“There have been accusations of students bringing weapons to schools,” she said, “but the students didn’t know the other students.”
The nature of high school is that students outnumber the people paid to enforce rules.
Garcia said when it comes to intelligence gathering, “our kids are really good. They really are our eyes and ears, and most of the time we don’t need a surveillance system because kids will tell us what is really going on.”
But Garcia said there were many times when it would have been wonderful to consult a working surveillance system. She pointed to the notorious hay prank that took place three years ago, when graduating seniors festooned the hallways with rotting hay, causing the high school to be shut down for days for health and safety violations.
(She said that those students, aware of the school’s existing CCTV systems, had taken precautions and disguised their faces.)
She said even in non-malicious instances – like students postering school hallways without permission – the new CCTV system will allow DHS staff to quickly identify students and start a dialogue.
Revolution from above
The new CCTV system’s revolutionary potential is clear.
Popp said going forward, when a student makes an accusation against another student – whether it’s bullying, theft, fighting or vandalism – administrators will be able to call up various camera feeds and verify that Bobby really did get into Laura’s locker, or establish that between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m., four students entered the boys’ bathroom where a bomb threat was later found scrawled on a stall door.
The system also offers emergency personnel a powerful took in an age when school shootings seem increasingly horrific and commonplace.
Within seconds of getting the first 911 call, emergency personnel will be able to access the schools’ camera feeds through their laptops, providing a live-stream of vital information.
In the unlikely but sadly conceivable event that a person with a semi-automatic weapon opens fire in the cafeteria, or a fire – whether deliberately or accidentally ignited – engulfs the school, Morris said this capability could save lives.
Deterrence
Just like Bentham imagining the panopticon, Popp said the CCTV system promised to improve life at DHS by altering its students’ psychological expectations.
From here on, if you do something – no matter in which hallway or at what time – it will be observed.
“I anticipate it will correct a lot of behaviors,” Popp said. “With the increased likelihood that somebody could have video footage of the occurrence, it might encourage them to have a fight elsewhere.”
Morris agreed that the CCTV system could not only help emergency staff deal with threats from without, but could reduce the number of threats from within.
“Hopefully it’s a deterrent for bad behaviors as well, without making it feel like there’s too much security – like they’re not in school but in an institution,” she said.
Though DHS’s CCTV system marks the beginning of unprecedented intrusion on student life, Garcia said no students have complained about privacy violations.
Garcia said her students are a thoroughly lovely and well-behaved bunch, and trouble rarely arises.
“Right now, we can go weeks at a time without consulting the cameras,” she said.
But the lack of uproar may also indicate a seismic shift in student expectations of surveillance.
“It’s the Facebook age, a totally different era,” Popp said.
Popp said that although she’s shocked whenever she Googles herself and finds pictures of herself online, to today’s kids, it’s normal.
Morris agreed.
“Ten years ago, it might have been a different story. But the trend is that 90 percent of middle-schoolers already have smart phones.”
Even in the surveillance state, the kids, it seems, already are ahead of the adults.
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
