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  3. Fairfax Principals Want Indoor School Cameras One day in March, people turned the cafeteria at Robert E. Lee High School in

Fairfax Principals Want Indoor School Cameras One day in March, people turned the cafeteria at Robert E. Lee High School in

admin2012-07-05  48
问题                 Fairfax Principals Want Indoor School Cameras
    One day in March, people turned the cafeteria at Robert E. Lee High School in Fairfax County into a storm of milk boxes and leftover lunch.
    Close to 100 teenagers joined the bad situation, throwing sandwiches and water bottles. Hundreds of others, caught in the crossfire, screamed and ran for the exits.
    Two students—recent immigrants who probably had little experience with the modern American food fight—are too frightened to have heart stroke that officials called 911.
    The episode at Lee was part of a large quantity of food fights last spring that left a trace of trash filled with cafeterias and had a bad effect on principals at Fairfax high schools. Nearly every guilty student escaped unpunished, protected by the disturbing situation that made it nearly impossible for school officials to figure out who did what.
    Now, activated by food-fight frustration, Fairfax’s 27 high school principals are banding together to ask for a powerful disciplinary and security tool, one the county School Board has long prohibited: indoor monitoring cameras.
    "When you have a situation like that, you think you’re going to remember everything you saw, but you just can’t," said Paul Wardinski, principal of West Springfield High. He said he caught only one of dozens of students responsible for a food fight in May. " If we had video, we would have gotten them. "
    The principals made their request to the School Board last week, stirring a frequent debate in Fairfax over how to protect students’ civil liberties while maintaining safe schools. The request could come to a vote as early as November.
    The interest in school monitoring comes at a delicate time, after months of public arguing over disciplinary practices that many parents said were overly serious. The School Board repaired its policies in June, scaling back the practice of forcing students in trouble to switch schools.
    Some say installing cameras would be a step backward—a new way to police students who are already tired of policing. The debate could factor into School Board elections this fall.
    " It looks to me like all they want to do is catch kids being bad when they wouldn’t normally be able to do that," said Michele Menapace, a parent and discipline-reform activist. " Kids who really want to commit a crime are going to find a way to do it. "     Monitoring of cafeterias, hallways and other interior spaces is common in suburban schools across America, including those in Montgomery, Prince George’s, Prince William and Loudoun counties.
    Fairfax—the region’s largest school system, with more than 174,000 students—allows cameras on building exteriors and inside buses but has resisted indoor monitoring in the interest of protecting student privacy. A few years ago, the school system experimented with using cameras to stop theft in cafeteria lunch lines. They proved useless and were removed.
    But several board members say their feelings have begun to shift.
    "Now You have YouTube. You have Facebook," said Tessie Wilson (Braddock). "I don’t believe that kids have an expectation of themselves of privacy, because they’re putting so much out there for everybody to see. "
    James L. Raney (At Large) remarked: " I support the troops, and in this case to support the troop commanders—the principals. Students apparently cannot be trusted to have a safe and secure cafeteria environment. "
    Fairfax officials estimate that installing cameras just in cafeterias would cost $ 8,000 per high school. Installing additional cameras in crowded common areas such as hallways, lobbies and stairwells would increase the total cost to $ 120,000 per school—or more than $ 3 million for all high schools, a significant investment after three years of painful budget cuts.
    All but three of the 27 principals said they would be willing and able to use school funds—money from parking fees, vending (出售) machines and building costs—to foot the bill.
    They said that beyond aiding investigations, cameras would help secure schools in the evening hours, when facilities are open to the community for classes and recreation. During the day, they said, cameras would make schools safer by stopping drug dealing, fighting and theft.
    " This is just something I think would help change the behavior of students in the building," said Nar-dos King, principal of Mount Vernon High. "Anybody who is being filmed on camera acts differently. It’s just human nature. "
    Students against disciplinary in Fairfax schools have decreased in the past five years, according to data from the Virginia Department of Education. But principals said the food fights were occurring in a new and unpredictable era of flash angry people organized by social media.
    "At any given time, any school could experience an unfortunate event, and having a video record of that event would be useful, if not expected," said Abe Jeffers, principal of Lee High.
    He pointed out that monitoring cameras helped authorities catch a group of teens who robbed a Montgomery convenience store in group this summer.
    Punishment for participating in a food fight could range from a warning to a recommendation for expulsion (开除)—with the latter applied to a student who threw something dangerous and was charged with assault. At West Springfield, Wardinski considered canceling the senior ball after the food fight but instead assigned students to a day of community service.
    One afternoon this month at J. E. B. Stuart High School, senior Mayss Saadoon, 16, showed no interest in the prospect of more surveillance (监视). "They can already search your backpack at school. They can search your car and your locker," she said after the dismissal bell sent students streaming outside into the sun.
    But junior Evan Finley, 16, said cameras would be an "invasion of my privacy," and his mother, Marilyn Finley, agreed. She said she supports having cameras outside schools. But inside? "I guess I get a little funny feeling about cameras inside,", she said. "I think it’s a little extreme. "
    The number of schools using cameras has increased since the mass shooting at Colorado’s Columbine High School in 1999 growing concern about school security, said Lynn Addington, an American University professor who studies crime and school violence.
    More than three-quarters of public high schools use video surveillance, according to 2007 data published this year by the National Center for Education Statistics and Bureau of Justice Statistics.
    But there is little evidence that cameras make schools safer or change student behavior, Addington said. "It isn’t something that has been studied that much," she said.
    Board members said they will seek public comment before preparing rules for placement and funding of cameras. Several members asked principals to evaluate whether the cameras are worth the cost in dollars and loss of privacy.
Since the teachers can already search so much of the students’ personal belongings, Mayss Saadon has______the indoor cameras.
选项
答案no interest in
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