"Eyes on Me Regardless": Youth Responses to High School Surveillance‪.‬

In public schools across the country, students are encountering the effects of a variety of security measures designed to make schools safer. Students enter and exit their schools through metal detectors, scanning machines, and under the suspicious stares and booming shouts of security officials and police officers. On their way to classes, they move through hallways, stairwells, and sometimes classrooms mounted with surveillance cameras. From California to Florida, Washington to Maine, urban and suburban public school officials and government policymakers are choosing to respond to issues related to student violence and school safety by deploying an array of surveilling techniques and technologies. New York City, home of more surveillance cameras per square foot than any other city in the country, leads the pack in developing and implementing school-based surveillance initiatives (Ruck et al., 2005; Boal, 1998). In 2004, City Council passed a bill to install surveillance cameras and metal detectors in every public school by 2006 and allocated $120 million in the five year capital budget for new security cameras which cost approximately $75,000 per school to install (Bennett, 2004). In fact, the City's Impact schools and nine other large high schools, with large African-American and Latino populations, were top priority to receive cameras, metal detectors, and heavy police presence. Ostensibly designed to improve school safety, the effects of the technologies and personnel required to implement surveillance are manifold--many of which are counterproductive to safety, and, in some cases, actually foment violence. Instead of a greater sense of safety in and around school, along with an active and civicly-minded sense of school community, students describe a feeling of danger and disillusion.