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
