ABSTRACT
Electronic surveillance technology is a growing presence in public schools. High-profile school shootings in the late 1990s, such as the Columbine shootings in Colorado, hastened a trend that had already begun. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reports that in the 2003-4 school year, 60% of U.S. high schools used surveillance cameras (Dinkes et al., 2006). According to another study of school district safety personnel in 2001, 90% of sampled school districts were using video cameras and 87% were using video recording systems (Garcia, 2003).2 The same study also reported that 40% of the school districts had spent over $500,000 on the new surveillance technology. Journalists report that spending on security technologies in some districts is surging into the multimillion-dollar range (see, for example, a report from Florida districts in Tobin, 2005). The use of electronic surveillance cameras is now a reality in most schools across the United States, even with the substantial cost associated with them. The shootings at Virginia Tech University in 2007 may further intensify this trend and expand the use of security technologies in higher education environments.
