Gross Negligence
Kids Videotaped While Undressing
By Daniel Muniz

There are some school districts that are just asking for a lawsuit and the Overton County School Board in Livingston Tennessee is one such place. And because of their gross negligence and disregard to the well being of students, they definitely got one as well as a black eye to their local community.

Security video cameras in school campuses are now fairly commonplace throughout the country. The cost of obtaining such surveillance equipment has now become ridiculously cheap and better software makes them fairly easy for just about anyone to use. And an increasingly popular option that is now being included for many of these monitoring systems is the ability to remotely access the cameras from the Internet. Such a feature is also becoming routine now that broadband is affordable to many schools.

Perhaps the greatest advantage for school districts in using these surveillance systems is that violators of school policy and state laws, regardless if they are students, teachers, or anyone else, can be caught red handed. A picture says a thousand words so the videotapes are invaluable when it comes to justifying punishment to students. In addition, they can also be introduced as reliable evidence for any criminal offenses.
 

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Overall, surveillance cameras have been proven to be a useful tool for enhancing security and maintaining order.

The security company Edutech Inc. installed a set of security cameras throughout the Livingston Middle School campus for the Overton County School District.

The school wanted a video camera placed inside a storage room with the intent of monitoring a hallway and an outside door. It was a reasonable request that was not out of the ordinary since it is paramount for a school to be able to have all the strategic points of their campus available for observation.

However, the storage room was then converted into locker rooms and used as an area for dressing and undressing of visiting athletic teams who came to the middle school.

School officials didn’t bother to make any adjustments to the layout of their monitoring system after the conversion of their storage room into a locker room even though they were aware of the presence of the video camera and that it would still be operational when kids were in that room. Apparently, nobody at the middle school thought that this new development would present any kind of problem. As a result, young children from other middle schools between the ages of 10 through 14 were videotaped putting on and taking off their clothes.

And since the cameras could be accessed over the Internet, it made this bad situation even more embarrassing.

Such an incident like this has the word “lawsuit” written all over it and rightly so.

This oversight was nothing but sheer carelessness. Somebody obviously dropped the ball.

A basketball team from another school first noticed the video camera which was only one month after it was first installed but it actually took a while before anything was done about it. Consequently, the cameras were rolling and videotaping the students undressing for approximately five months.

Naturally, the parents of these kids, who attended three different schools in the county, were outraged when they discovered the truth. Although surveillance systems like the one that Overton had are now prevalent in schools across the country, there is an expectation of privacy in places like bathrooms, showers, and dressing rooms. Minors and adults alike do not expect that they will be monitored in such places.

Parents could not imagine the purpose of having their children videotaped while they were taking their clothes off.

Consequently, the families slapped the Overton County School Board and Edutech with a lawsuit.

And just like in any civil lawsuit, they were asking for an outrageous sum of money. Eventually, a jury awarded 32 students a sum of $40,000 to each of them.

Overall, the award was a paltry sum but admittedly, any obscene amount per student would have bankrupt the school district which defeats the purpose of punishing the educational leadership because every student in that county would have been severely impacted.

But in a situation like this, heads also need to roll in addition to being slammed with a lawsuit.

Although technology like a security monitoring system is extremely useful, it also carries a tremendous responsibility in that it must be used correctly by school officials. This carelessness had the potential of inflicting tremendous harm to very young children if it were to get out of control.

Perhaps this incident can send out a loud message to other school districts that they have to take their responsibilities more seriously.

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