Weighing in on School Video Surveillance Policies

A new "best practices" policy from the Arkansas School Boards Association suggests how to deal with video surveillance footage captured at the state's public schools.

Not surprisingly, the suggested policy (download it from the ASBA [MSWord document]), which was released earlier this summer, does not get into details of frame rate, or video resolution, or any technical specifics. Rather, the ASBA looks at such issues as how to transfer video footage to other schools, whether video surveillance clips should be attached to the student record, and how the campus should be notified that cameras are being used.

Some highlights include the fairly obvious suggestion that school boards retain surveillance "until the issue of the misconduct is no longer subject to review or appeal", and that "Parents of students 'inadvertently' caught in the video do not have the right to inspect then. Please note, however, that if a student was not 'involved' in the altercation prompting the disciplinary action, but happened to get pushed by one of the students in the fight, the pushed student's parents have the right to review the video."

The policy recommends that all requests have to be submitted within 45 days of the incident/recording, which implies that surveillance records should be archived for 45 days, which is less of a problem with today's newer, high-capacity DVRs and low-cost (DVD, CD, multi-gigabyte hard drives).

The document, says former Washington, D.C., schools security chief Pat Fiel, who now works with ADT on school security projects, is a great start, and something that many school boards should consider working up.

"It's a good document," said Fiel, who review many such documents in his role as an advisor with ADT. "It's good that they are putting together policies on security and video [surveillance], and it's critical to have the board (of education) review these policies like they have done."

Fiel, says, however, that there are a few things he would change to fit with modern ideas for using video surveillance. First, although the policy generally recommends saving video of incidents for 45 days, Fiel says it's quite possible to archive video of incidents for a year now without incurring much, if any, added expense thanks to hard drives or inexpensive CD burning technology.