Keep Cameras Out! by Keegan M.

Attention School Officials:

Imagine; kids walking in the halls silently, sweat dripping from their brow, glancing around nervously, hoping that for some reason they won’t get in trouble. One kid “pops” out his phone to check the time, a few seconds later school security comes in hauling the boy off to an administrator’s office, all thanks to a shiny black lens out of sight. This is what will happen if you continue to go along with the plan of putting security cameras in schools, you will have stressed out kids, kids that can’t work, and kids getting in trouble all the time.

         

One of the first bad things to happen would be that kids would start getting stressed out; you know that felling when you feel like someone’s behind you, that kind of stress. Kids would nervously look up hoping the cameras wouldn’t notice and then “bam!” he/she gets in trouble because he/she should have been focused on his/her classwork!  You can see school rules do need to be followed, but not word for word, strictly, with no exceptions, whatsoever.

The next bad thing that would happen would be that kids would start failing their tests and their grades would gradually decline into a horrible mixing pot: stress, anger, guilt, sadness, and despair. All because he/she will be yelled at by his/her teachers and family members with put downs and “You need to get this done”, and “There’s a thirteen paragraph essay due tomorrow about how waffles played a major role in the civil war”. The kid would be showered by due dates and report cards; without cameras, that would be challenging, with cameras, impossible.

So after all that; the reports, the essay about the waffles, and under the stress of the mysterious man behind the black lens he/she still had six more periods to go through! And there was no way he/she could keep this up. The kid by the end of the day ends up getting several warnings by the teachers her phone and iPod taken from the teachers, and a phone call home, all in just one six hour school day! This kid wasn’t even a bad kid either because before the cameras he/she had B+’s and A-‘s across the board. But after the camera “experiment” he/she had C-‘s if he/she was lucky but mostly D’s and even an F-! Whoa, talk about a dramatic result, right?

A small minority of people may argue that security cameras “keep kids in line” although all they really do is scare them into submission and force them to act like robots; following every rule down to the letter having no emotion, and no reaction to anything, or else they will be punished.

In conclusion I think that even considering the option of putting security cameras inside school classrooms is a rather inane concept, with kids not focusing, dropping grades and constant trouble. Schools in the United States wouldn’t be as effective or efficient as the method we are using right now. So I must insist that security cameras in classrooms law may not go in effect under any circumstances.

Keegan Metcalf