Teachers Union Complains About Concealed Video Cameras

It was a typical day in kindergarten at Mesquite Elementary School in Palmdale. The teacher was overseeing her young charges busily involved in various activities.

Then she happened to notice extra wires snaking up an interior classroom wall and disappearing above a ceiling tile.

Curious, the teacher called a male colleague, who climbed a ladder and found the wire hooked up to a video recorder that was taping the activities in that room and another kindergarten class nearby.

So began the tempest over 16 surveillance cameras bought by Palmdale School District Supt. Nancy Smith, who apparently made the $12,000 expenditure without school board approval and then installed the equipment without telling teachers and parents, union officials charge.

The discovery of the video cameras was made in August, but the unorthodox purchase did not become public until Feb. 3, when members of the Palmdale Elementary Teachers Assn. confronted Smith at a school board meeting. Armed with the old purchase orders, which were made out for fire equipment instead of surveillance cameras, the union officials launched their latest salvo in a continuing war with the superintendent.

The resulting uproar has been chronicled in several local newspaper stories and stirred debate on talk radio.

A spokeswoman for Smith said the district hooked up the cameras--which were removed in August--hoping to catch a computer thief or tagger, but may have only caught a couple of women elementary schoolteachers changing their clothes for an after-school workout.

“Originally, there were concerns about the cameras being in the classroom and why,” said union President Kris Clarke. “Then the kindergarten teachers were upset because they remembered they had changed clothes in the classrooms.”

No union or school official acknowledged seeing partially clad women on any of the tapes they viewed. They said it was possible that the Mesquite teachers had been captured on video changing clothes, but that the images may have been taped over when the tape began a new 24-hour cycle.

The cameras were installed in schools last spring and were programmed to run from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., school officials said. When school let out for summer vacation, cameras at closed schools ran for 24 hours on a continuous loop.

At the start of this school year, maintenance workers were supposed to reset to the original program, school officials said.

“Maintenance forgot to go and change the time on the video camera at Mesquite,” said Diana Beard-Williams, a school district spokeswoman. “It never occurred to us to double-check. The camera was running 24 hours instead of only in the evening. As soon as we found out, the superintendent immediately dispatched someone there to take care of the situation.

“The cameras were put in because of the extensive amount of theft and vandalism in the district,” Beard-Williams said. “It had nothing to do with monitoring teachers, but everything to do with protecting property.”

Still, union officials maintain that the cameras should not have been in the classroom without teachers’ and parents’ knowledge. They also questioned why the equipment was purchased without board approval.

“We have been trying to build a trusting relationship with the board and now we feel betrayed and deceived,” Clarke said.

At a school board meeting Tuesday, Smith said the purchase and installation of the equipment was kept secret because district officials did not want to tip off would-be thieves.