School-security plan: Place cameras ‘everywhere’
By Bobby Bryant, Editor, editor@newsandpress.net
The Darlington County School District is moving ahead with a nearly $5 million plan to blanket the county’s public schools with surveillance cameras and to have students start using electronic key cards.
At a work session Feb. 25, the county school board agreed that county Education Superintendent Tim Newman will develop detailed plans for rolling out a new and tighter security system over a two-year period, then bring those plans to the board for consideration.
The discussion at the board’s work session picked up from where officials had left the debate in December, when the board was briefed on a $4.6 million proposal to tighten security at county schools.
Some high schools would get more than 100 video surveillance cameras under that original plan, the board was told, and the cameras would account for most of the plan’s costs.
The board appears to agree that security at county schools should be tightened, but members had many questions and concerns about exactly how that should be done, and some members were worried what might happen if the computer systems controlling the security network either malfunctioned or failed because of a power outage.
“You’ve got a kid, Johnny, out there on the playground in a thunderstorm, or whatever else, a tornado, or whatever else, or — worst-case scenario — you know what. Then you’re locked out,” board member Jamie Morphis said. “ … What are the chances of someone being locked out or something happening to the child?”
“Think about the alternative,” another board member said. “Right now, you’ve got doors that are open on every campus.”
“(Right now), I could walk through Hartsville High School and go wherever I want to go,” Morphis agreed.
The discussion bounced back to the security cameras.
“What we’re talking about here, 85 percent is the cameras; 15 percent is the card access,” Newman told the board. “I definitely want to start with the cameras.”
The cameras would be “everywhere,” Newman said, including playgrounds and athletic fields.
The video cameras would act as a deterrent, Newman said.
Other business before the board centered on the county’s “magnet schools,” schools that have special programs on subjects like science, technology or the arts.
Students in any attendance zone can apply to these magnet programs.
Darlington County has one school (Mayo High School for Math, Science and Technology in Darlington) that is entirely a magnet school and seven others that offer magnet programs, including Brockington Elementary in Darlington, Thornwell School for the Arts in Hartsville, Darlington Middle School and Hartsville Middle School.
Newman and at least some board members felt that the school district needs to take a detailed look at the county’s magnet programs, determine which are working well, which are having problems, which ones need to be strengthened and which ones might need to be modified.
Newman said he would continue discussions with principals and staffers at the county’s magnet schools and would return to the board with proposals on what might be changed and when.
Some changes, Newman said, could begin as soon as the next school year; some others might be two or three years away.
