Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins/Futurism. Source: Getty Images
Public places aren’t the only places you should be worried about being monitoredIn 2025, officials are also installing AI monitoring gadgets in school bathrooms,
New reporting by forbes A worrying increase in AI surveillance revealed at Beverly Hills High School could be a sign of things to come for school districts across North America.
From video drones capturing campus footage to behavioral analysis AI cameras monitoring the hallways, the Los Angeles school district is increasingly beginning to reflect the dystopian panopticon of “The Minority Report.” As forbes It turns out, no walkway is left unmonitored: swarming license plate readers survey the comings and goings of every visitor, and perhaps most astonishingly, AI audio capture devices line the bathroom walls.
For school officials, it’s all just part of doing business.
“This community wants … to do everything we can to make our schools safe,” said district Superintendent Alex Cherniss. forbes“If that means you have armed security and drones and AI and license plate readers, bring it on,”
“We are in the center of the urban environment of Los Angeles, one of the most recognizable cities on the planet. So we are always a target and that means our children are a target and our employees are a target,” Cherniss said, noting the surveillance panopticon poses “multiple threats per day.”
District officials did not say what exactly those threats are. However, they noted that they have spent $4.8 million on security in fiscal year 2024-2025 alone – an expensive solution to an unclear problem.
still like forbes Note, Beverly Hills is not exactly an outlier. Like in the US, from coast to coast, school districts are turning to AI products in an effort to prevent school violence school shooting problem It continues unabated. Although the fear of school shootings is entirely rational, it is on the rise unregulated AI monitoring tools Student security and privacy comes with its own costs.
For example, in Baltimore County Public Schools, district officials have contracted a company called Omnialert to monitor approximately 7,000 school cameras for deviant activity. In one horrific case, Omnialert’s system misidentified a student’s bag of Doritos and labeled it a handgun. It was not until an armed police squad detained the 16-year-old student at gunpoint that they realized the flaw in the system.
And in Florida, a middle school recently went into lockdown after a similar AI monitoring system faulted A student’s clarinet as a gun. Fortunately, no one was hurt in any of the cases, but the potential for false positives is extremely worrying. Meanwhile, experts doubt that these systems actually make schools safer.
“It’s very strange to claim that this will keep your children safe,” said Chad Marlow, senior policy adviser for the ACLU. forbes,
Marlowe was the main author of 2023 report It found that eight of the ten largest school shootings since Columbine occurred on heavily monitored school campuses. Meanwhile, focus group testing by the ACLU found that widespread school surveillance makes kids much less comfortable telling teachers and administrators about issues like mental health struggles and domestic abuse.
“Because kids don’t trust people they see as spying on them, it breaks down trust and actually makes things less safe,” Marlow said.
It remains to be seen whether this compromise is worth it – Marlow says more independent research is needed to tell whether these AI systems actually produce safe outcomes for students. Meanwhile, it seems some school administrators are willing to take the risk.
More on monitoring: Regular people are rising up against AI surveillance cameras
