Our Kids Deserve Safety, Not Surveillance

Surveillance technology has invaded nearly every aspect of our lives. From facial recognition at protests and grocery stores to location data from our phones that can just as easily be used to sell us a sandwich or prosecute someone for helping a friend get an abortion, we are living in a moment where being watched is the default.

Local law enforcement departments have become miniature NSAs, while the corporations selling these tools have turned into multi-million and even billion-dollar industries. One place we don’t talk about enough, though, is how surveillance is invading our schools. This is the rise of the EdTech surveillance industry—companies marketing software and devices that monitor children under the promise of keeping them safe.

In Wisconsin and across the country, these corporations have capitalized on parents’ and teachers’ fears about school shootings, raking in taxpayer dollars while providing little transparency about what data is collected on our kids, with no real evidence that these tools actually work.

The scale of this industry is staggering. In 2021, K-12 schools and colleges in the U.S. spent an estimated $3.1 billion on EdTech surveillance technologies, up from $2.7 billion in 2017. A Wisconsin bill in 2023 proposed spending $4 million in grants for “proactive firearm detection software”—a system that even its manufacturers admit is far from perfect.

That money doesn’t come from thin air; it comes from taxpayers. And while you can’t put a price on safety, we owe it to ourselves to ask: does this stuff even work? The evidence so far says no.

Omnilert, a gun detection system used in Nashville schools, failed to spot the firearm that a student brought into Antioch High School this January—one that ended up being used in a fatal shooting. Meanwhile, Evolv, another highly marketed system, triggered more than 3,200 alerts in one Illinois district during the last school year—over 99% of which turned out to be calculators, lunchboxes, staplers, or other ordinary objects.

High false positives aren’t harmless. They waste staff time, create unnecessary panic, erode trust, and risk triggering dangerous police encounters in schools that already over-police marginalized students. And research is conflicted on whether security cameras actually reduce school crime rates overall, especially violent crimes.

At Madison East High School, administrators took it a step further by installing hidden cameras inside smoke detectors, including in an area where disabled students changed clothes. The supposed rationale was safety, but hidden cameras don’t deter bad behavior—they just create new privacy violations.

At Arrowhead High School, the company Edlastics has taken surveillance to a new level, installing a system that tracks and limits how often students use the bathroom, capping them at 21 passes per week. Ask yourself: Do we really need to log and limit teenagers’ bathroom breaks? Beyond being invasive, it’s simply weird.

The ACLU’s recent report, "Digital Dystopia," makes clear that this is not about safety, but control. LGBTQ+ students, students of color, students with disabilities, low-income students, and students from immigrant families are hit hardest. Seventy-eight percent of teachers surveyed reported that digital monitoring tools were used to discipline students, with Black and Hispanic students disproportionately punished.

Furthermore, students under high levels of surveillance are less likely to reach out to adults or teachers for help. Nearly every student who participated in the ACLU’s focus groups reported that surveillance had a negative impact on their interactions with staff, communication with friends, the clubs they felt safe joining, and their overall school experience. Surveillance doesn’t create safety; it creates fear, mistrust, and a chilling effect on student life.

So, if these technologies don’t keep kids safe, why do schools continue to buy them? The generous answer is that teachers, administrators, and parents—living in an age of mass shootings—fall for the industry’s slick promises. The more skeptical answer is that this is not really about protection at all but about policing young people and conditioning them to accept a world where constant monitoring is normal.

Wisconsin has repeatedly flirted with throwing more money at these systems, from firearm detection software to bills that would add more armed officers to schools. But the evidence is clear: more cops and more cameras don’t reduce shootings. They just push students—especially students of color—deeper into the criminal legal system. Meanwhile, the things that actually make schools safer—counselors, mental health services, supportive environments—remain chronically underfunded.

So again: why are we doing this? A mix of fear and control, because those two things are not mutually exclusive. But fear is a poor foundation for billion-dollar industries, especially when what’s at stake is our children’s education and well-being.

We should be investing in people, not products. In trained counselors, in conflict resolution, in mental health resources, in commonsense gun reforms. Not in bathroom trackers, hidden cameras, or AI gun detectors that can’t tell a stapler from a Glock. The lesson we risk teaching kids is not resilience or safety, but how to live under surveillance. And with the rising threat of authoritarian politics in this country, that should alarm us all.