Sit and Smile : Education: With a focus on improving student behavior and curbing horseplay and vandalism, some San Diego school buses have been equipped with video cameras.

Attention! San Diego junior-high students! Big Teacher is watching you! Maybe.

For the next two months, there will be a video camera box staring down the aisle of each of the six buses that carries students between Southeast San Diego and Standley Junior High School in University City.

But only in one or two of the boxes will there actually be an 8-millimeter video camera to record horseplay and vandalism that damages the interior or causes the driver to look at the passengers--away from the road.

The other boxes will still blink a red light as soon as the driver turns on the ignition, and, from the outside, a potential troublemaker will find it impossible to discern whether a given box hides a camera behind its shiny one-way mirror.

The Texas company underwriting the free pilot says the “mind game” being played with students cuts problems aboard a bus up to 60%, based on testimonials and data from school districts already using the system.

And, so far into the first month, the deterrent effect appears to be working in reducing the number of incidents on Standley buses from one or two a day, to about three a week, San Diego administrators report. Further, none of the 300 sets of parents who received letters about the pilot project objected, they said.

“We’re looking for better behavior on the part of students and, while all we’ve got so far is anecdotal evidence, the drivers tell us the kids are behaving better,” Peter Goings, bus operations supervisor for San Diego city schools, said.

Driver Ed Kirkpatrick told the editor of the transportation department’s newsletter that, “even before the kids knew it was a camera, they assumed it was a camera. . . . The kids all sit in their seats nice and neat, and do what I ask them to do because they know they are being watched.”

Because the drivers themselves have to scrub away graffiti and keep students from etching on the windows, most welcome anything that makes their job a little less aggravating. Damage to seats and windows cost the San Diego Unified School District $39,000 last year.

“Districts that have equipped all of their buses usually rotate one camera among 25 to 30 buses,” Gordon Wells, national sales manager for Billingsley Parts & Equipment of Huntsville, Tex., said.

“But all the boxes look and operate the same, they’re durable and fireproof, and they’re mounted where the students don’t have access to them. We’ve got them in about 36 states now. It’s not a trap for students; it’s meant to be a deterrent to allow the driver not to have to turn his back from the road.

“And they work beyond belief.”

Those boxes with a camera have a two-hour tape that can be reviewed daily. If incidents are reported by drivers, a district needs to copy only the affected portion of the tape onto a standard videocassette tape, Wells said.

Two districts in Riverside County--Val Verde Elementary in Perris and Hemet Unified--have purchased the black box system for their buses, Wells said.

It would cost San Diego about $43,000 to equip all 146 of its buses, at a per-bus charge of $310 for the black boxes. Goings said a recommendation to trustees will be based on the fewer number of times a bus was vandalized, or the driver forced to stop, or the school police contacted, compared to a similar two-month period without the video camera boxes.

The buses used at Standley, as well as those transporting students to Pershing Junior High in San Carlos, have also been altered so their windows only open 6 inches. That is enough to let air in but not enough to let students hang out, or toss objects in or out, Goings said.