Vernon Hills High School installs surveillance cameras

Surveillance cameras will be installed outside bathrooms at Vernon Hills High School this summer, following bomb threats there and at its sister school, authorities said.

Prompted by those unfounded threats, surveillance equipment was quietly installed near bathrooms and in other locations at Libertyville High School this past spring, too.

Some Libertyville-Vernon Hills Area High School District 128 officials called security cameras part of life in a post-Sept. 11 world. Board Vice President Judy Sugarman hopes the cameras will prevent students from vandalizing school property or committing other crimes.

"If kids know there are cameras throughout the school, maybe they will think twice," Sugarman said.

A national privacy advocate said cameras provide a security benefit in school, but urged administrators to destroy the images daily to prevent abuse.

Stockpiling recordings is "nothing but trouble for later," said Jim Harper, director of information policy studies with the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.

Camera use rising

The District 128 school board agreed Monday to buy cameras for Vernon Hills High. The move is not uncommon.

Sixty percent of U.S. high schools used one or more security cameras to monitor activity during the 2003-04 school year, according to a report from the National Center for Education Statistics. That's up from 39 percent from four years earlier.

Cameras are being used at elementary and middle schools, too. In the 2003-04 term, 28 percent of primary schools and 42 percent of middle schools used cameras, the nation education report said. Both figures were up from 1999-2000.

Antioch Community, Warren Township, Round Lake, Naperville North, Naperville Central, and Waubonsie Valley are among the Chicago-area high schools with security cameras.

District 128 board President Anne Landgraf said her panel first discussed adding cameras to both schools several years ago when putting together a facility-improvement plan. The notion was inspired by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, she said.

But it was four recent bomb threats that really drove the purchases. The threats first appeared in late February and continued sporadically for a few months.

They prompted hundreds of students to skip classes. Access to the campuses was temporarily limited, too, and police presence increased.

No explosives were found at either school, nor were any arrests made. Rewards have been offered for information leading to arrests in the cases.

Following the threats, 16 cameras were added at Libertyville High in the spring, District 128 spokeswoman Mary Todoric said. The video is recorded on DVDs. They can be monitored but have only been viewed as needed, she said.

The equipment and installation cost about $40,000, Todoric said.

The deal approved Monday calls for 18 cameras at Vernon Hills High, Todoric said. The work will cost about $38,000 and should be completed in August, before classes start.

The cameras will be placed outside bathrooms and in other locations, Todoric said. Officials insist the cameras won't spy on activity inside the bathrooms.

Vernon Hills High senior Kelsey Guglielmi, the school's student representative to the school board, feels the cameras will infringe on students' privacy. Even so, she believes the safety of students and staff is more important, especially because of the recent bomb threats.

Bombs or graffiti?

The Cato Institute's Harper suspects the District 128 cameras probably have less to do with bombs than with graffiti, teen smoking and truancy.

"I'm not terribly concerned about there being bombs at school," said Harper, who also edits Privacilla.org, a Web site dedicated to privacy issues.

School administrators can offset the potential privacy invasion by destroying recordings at the end of each school day, Harper said.

"There's no security benefit for keeping (a DVD) 72 hours over 12 or 24," he said.

District 128 officials don't have a formal policy regulating when the DVDs should be destroyed, Todoric said. Administrators declined to say how often discs are destroyed, citing security concerns.

U.S. courts have upheld schools' right to install cameras where students or employees don't have an expectation of privacy, such as public hallways, said Ed Yohnka, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

It's sensible for schools with security concerns to think cameras are a potential solution, he said. But the increased surveillance might affect how students feel about their schools, Yohnka said.

For example, students might be reluctant to visit teachers to talk about problems if they feel they're being monitored, he said.

"How far down this road do we go before we do some substantial damage to the school's primary function, which is to educate children?" Yohnka said.

The school board's Sugarman believes students won't mind the intrusion -- especially if the cameras could end the "psychological terrorism" caused by the vandals who disrupted classes a few months ago.

Plus, the only time anyone will view the videos is when a problem arises, Sugarman said.

"Which we hope is never," she said.