Summit K2 High School installed security cameras adjacent to the elevator, during field day festivities, to “maintain the integrity of the physical school building” read an email from K2 Admin on Friday, October 28th. The location where they were installed was unsupervised and less accessible to hall monitors.
“The cameras are activated by motion detection and recordings are viewable only by K2 High School Administration” read the same school-wide email. “The footage will only be reviewed in the case of an incident.“
We reached out for further comment from Summit K2 High School’s Dean of Operations, but we did not receive comment.
The cameras were bought from Blink, a subsidiary of Amazon, for $250. Blink Outdoor, the model installed at K2, is wireless and requires a Wi-Fi connection to operate.
“It’s a waste of school funds, honestly.” Tosh D., K2 Student Government President and 11th grader at K2, said in an interview with The Independent Dragon. “What are they preventing? A few bits of graffiti? Is there not a better way of going about doing that?” He said that he would have liked to see the money spent on field trips, a budget which was cut earlier this year.
Most of the students we interviewed had a negative reaction to the cameras being installed. “I feel like the cameras really took away my freedom,” Tannia G. told The Independent Dragon.
“It felt like [admin was] just trying to use [the email they sent out] as a cover-up and they don’t really have the students’ best interests in mind when they make decisions, or at least it’s not at the forefront of their decision making process,” said 12th grader Manny R. “The cameras are doing nothing besides trying to restrict students and make them feel watched.”
Not all students had a problem with the new security cameras. “I don’t have very much of an opinion on [the security cameras but] I don’t think that it really changes the safety aspect of it [though]…” said 9th grader Selena M.
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(cover image photo credit: James Tyler)
