For district leaders, new issues being raised by surveillance tech are less about any single incident than how such systems are governed in practice: what federal law allows, how access is granted and what safeguards are in place to ensure footage is used appropriately.
THE INTENT OF SCHOOL SURVEILLANCE
The drive to adopt school security cameras, according to many experts, is primarily rooted in three pillars: physical safety, behavior monitoring and general operational oversight.
As described by researchers in a 2016 report by the nonpartisan, nonprofit National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE), “schools watch their students. Nearly every responsibility that schools shoulder includes an element of surveillance — from ensuring that preschoolers do not wander off, to keeping third graders on task, to stopping bullying.”
What has changed in recent years is not just adoption of infrastructure, but capability. According to Amelia Vance, president of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Public Interest Privacy Center, modern systems allow for continuous monitoring and more robust data collection, providing much broader visibility into student behavior than was previously possible.
“It’s an excellent illustration of how much technology is used by schools that people don’t think about ... that I don’t think would ever really be considered by anyone who works at a school,” Vance said, adding that as these tools advance, so does the potential for secondary or expanded use of the data they collect.
THE LEGAL FRAMEWORK: FERPA
Vance said the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) governs how student information is handled, but its application to surveillance recordings is highly situational. She said understanding the limits of federal law is necessary for school officials navigating requests for surveillance footage.
Moreover, she noted that the distinction between “incidental” and “protected” footage is a critical nuance in how schools manage this data, as routine recordings may not be protected until a security event occurs. In many cases, she said, general surveillance footage, for example capturing students moving through a hallway, is not protected by FERPA because the recording is not focused on any specific person.
However, “at the moment something happens, the footage becomes directly related to a student or students, and then it’s protected by FERPA,” Vance said.
This creates a significant legal opening for non-incident footage, which she noted “can be shared with whoever or with whatever limitations might apply outside of school.” In other words, while schools are not strictly required to disclose this data, they maintain the discretion to do so.
Because general footage is not considered a protected education record, the decision to grant access — whether to local police or federal agencies — rests largely on the district’s internal policies and local governance, rather than federal privacy mandates. Together, these factors create a case-by-case legal landscape that has proven difficult for districts to navigate in real time.
ACCESS IN PRACTICE
While federal law sets the parameters, the process for accessing security footage varies significantly by district.
Rick Francis, chief of the School Safety and Security Department in the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office in Florida, emphasized that access to surveillance footage in the schools he oversees is typically tightly controlled and incident-driven.
In his jurisdiction, Francis said the police or other agencies are “not going to just simply look at a video or look at school cameras … every day,” but that the process to retrieve surveillance video is defined by strict checks and balances.
For federal agencies to access footage, they would need an investigative subpoena processed through the state attorney’s office, which involves multiple layers of approval — including the school district’s legal team — to ensure the request is legitimate and privacy issues are addressed, he said.
Even then, access is not automatic. According to CIO Kris Hagel of Peninsula School District in Washington state, local districts play a central role in reviewing and approving requests, often in coordination with legal teams.
“We have two different law enforcement agencies, the city police and the county sheriff’s. Neither one of them have access directly into our system,” he said. “Our school safety officers will work with them, depending on the case, and typically we go through the public records request process if necessary.”
Hagel said his district limits camera access to a small group of administrators and principals, and that all external requests must go through the tech department or legal office. Regarding federal or immigration-related requests, Hagel was clear: “We don’t honor administrative warrants. We only honor judicial warrants that have been signed by a judge.”
However, Hagel, who has over two decades of experience in school safety, acknowledged that his district’s practice is not standardized across the country. While his district does not allow law enforcement direct access to live feeds, he said other districts in the Seattle area have formal memorandums of understanding that grant local jurisdictions direct access.
“I’ve been doing this long enough to know that things happen ... We’re really fortunate that hasn’t happened here yet,” he said, referring to federal agencies asking for access to camera footage.
VARYING DISTRICT PRACTICES AND POLICIES
Despite these protocols, experts said gray areas remain in how surveillance systems are governed. According to the NASBE report, “districts generally get to decide which technologies to use and how intensive surveillance will be,” indicating that local control is often the ultimate driver of security intensity.
Vance, Francis and Hagel all expressed that this leads to a reality where implementation of surveillance tools frequently outpaces governance. Beyond the questions of legal interpretation, school districts face a gauntlet of risks that stem from surveillance tech. One of the most persistent issues is that “most people don’t change the default setup” of those tools, which Vance said can leave gaps in how data is managed. Districts may unknowingly operate surveillance systems with configurations that are not optimized for privacy or FERPA compliance, simply because they haven’t walked through every setting in a privacy-protective way, she said.
Districts also contend with significant vendor uncertainty, as they often rely on third-party infrastructure. Hagel pointed to a troubling uncertainty regarding federal reach: “Could the federal government theoretically go to Motorola ... and say, ‘Give me all the camera footage from Peninsula School District,’ and would we be able to stop it? I don’t know that we would.”
Finally, the nature of surveillance data itself introduces risk, because once collected, footage can be reused or reinterpreted in ways that extend beyond its original purpose. For example, the NASBE report mentioned that surveillance systems can “uncover evidence of minor offenses that would otherwise have gone undetected.”
As technology expands the scale and capability of monitoring, experts said the likelihood that these tools will be repurposed for originally unintended functions, like immigration enforcement or strict disciplinary tracking, continues to grow.
IMPLICATIONS FOR ED-TECH LEADERS
The question for modern school districts is no longer just whether to install cameras, but how to govern and constrain those systems once they are in place. Experts thus underscored a pressing need for robust data governance, and districts taking active responsibility for defining access policies and monitoring usage.
This should include a trust-but-verify approach to vendor accountability, according to Hagel, who suggested that districts closely scrutinize their agreements with vendors to make sure they actually enforce privacy protections.
“School districts have to just hold their vendors to the contracts that they signed, the privacy protections that they get,” he said. “That’s got to be the No. 1 place that people start right now is, what is your agreement?”
Beyond legal compliance, there is the matter of sustaining a positive school climate. Surveillance affects student behavior and willingness to participate in the educational environment, the NASBE report details: To maintain community trust, “it [is] vital that state policymakers create guardrails around school surveillance” based on principles of transparency, equity and proportionality.
