A week after a spate of violence in Baltimore schools, officials announced yesterday their latest strategy to keep children safe: blanketing campuses with digital surveillance cameras.
The city's school system and Police Department have received a $500,000 federal grant, which must be matched with local money, to install 280 cameras at 10 schools. Over the summer, the city spent $1.1 million to install about 575 cameras in 11 other schools, averaging 52 cameras per school.
Booker T. Washington Middle, the school with the most cameras, has 99 of the devices, three outside and 96 inside. Calverton Middle has 92.
At a news conference at Pimlico Elementary/Middle School, officials stressed that the initiative was under way long before last week, when a 14-year-old girl was stabbed by a classmate and an 8-year-old boy brought a loaded gun to school.
Schools Police Chief Antonio Williams said the cameras already installed seem to be effective in curbing student mischief, though he did not offer any preliminary figures on the opening weeks of classes.
"The students are literally saying, `We can't get away with anything,'" said Williams, appearing with Baltimore Police Commissioner Leonard D. Hamm and schools interim Chief Executive Officer Charlene Cooper Boston.
Surveillance cameras are used to some extent by school systems around the region, including those in Anne Arundel and Baltimore counties. Around the country, they are commonly found in urban school systems, and sometimes in suburban and rural systems.
Before this school year, the Baltimore school system had digital cameras on four campuses: Harlem Park Elementary, Mount Royal Elementary/Middle, Northwestern High and the Walbrook high school campus. In addition, many schools have a closed-circuit camera at their entrances, enabling front-office staff to buzz visitors into locked buildings.
This summer, the city paid to install cameras at 11 schools that would be receiving more students as a result of other schools closing and consolidating. Most of those cameras are inside the school buildings, said Kristen Mahoney, chief of technical services for the city Police Department.
For the next batch of schools, Mahoney said, most of the cameras will be located outside in an attempt to make students feel safer coming to and from the buildings and to deter break-ins of teachers' cars. The schools were selected based on the frequency of problems inside and outside their campuses.
