School District to Use Surveillance Cameras on Buses : Safety: The pilot program involves four vehicles and is believed to be state’s first. The goal is to discourage unruly behavior by students.

The Las Virgenes Unified School District will begin using video surveillance cameras on some of its buses starting today to curb disciplinary problems and unruly behavior among students.

In a pilot program believed to be the first of its kind in California, the district and Laidlaw Transit have installed cameras on four of the 32 buses that the company uses to ferry youngsters to and from school in the Calabasas-based district.

The newly equipped vehicles will carry mostly junior high school students, who officials say are most prone to disruptive behavior while riding the bus.

“If you’re going to have student management problems, that’s the age group you usually have it in. That’s the age that needs the most attention,” said Bill Young, director of operations for Laidlaw, one of the largest providers of school transportation services in North America.

Las Virgenes district officials hope that the presence of cameras will deter rowdy students who might otherwise divert the attention of bus drivers and delay bus service. Drivers are required by law to stop their vehicles and quell any misbehavior before continuing the ride, Assistant Supt. Don Zimring said.

“We’ve had ongoing discipline problems on the buses, particularly at the middle-school level,” he said. “Any kind of disciplinary problem on a bus usually becomes a safety issue also. Anytime that a driver’s attention has to be taken off the road, you’re creating an unsafe situation.”

The district, which paid about $1,000 total for the cameras after splitting the bill with Laidlaw in a joint venture, performed a trial run with a camera-equipped bus earlier this year, an experiment that Zimring said was successful.

“The youngsters now know there’s a photographic record of what’s going on, and they can’t hide behind the fact that the bus driver didn’t know what occurred and how,” he said. “This has been used in the Midwest, and it apparently has been very effective.”

But Jonathan Turley, a civil-liberties advocate and professor of law at George Washington University in Washington, called the cameras an ominous step in what he considers to be a steady erosion of privacy rights.

“At a very young age . . . the students learn to accept that their public lives are under surveillance and review,” he said. “If there is one place besides the bedroom that we would want to protect from governmental surveillance, it would be the schools. The last thing that we want children to learn in schools is that they will live their lives in a fishbowl society.”

Zimring acknowledged that the district received one such complaint from a parent during the trial run.

“Obviously, we don’t feel it’s that way. If the parent feels that a school bus is a private place, then I’d question whether the parent has ever been on a school bus” and whether it would be wise for the person to continue use of the district’s transportation services, he said.

The four buses--serving about 400 students, primarily from A. E. Wright Middle School--were selected to inaugurate the policy because they consistently logged the most discipline problems on a weekly basis, Zimring said. Actual videotapes will rotate among the cameras, which are mounted over the driver’s seat, but students will not be informed of the filming schedule.

About 1,800 youngsters ride district buses each day, Zimring said. Officials will decide after several weeks whether to expand the program to include more buses.