High School Not So Confidential

by digby

The principal of Gig Harbor High School said Thursday that a school official should not have shown the parents of a student the video-surveillance footage of the girl kissing another girl in the cafeteria. And he vowed that such an incident wouldn’t happen again.

But Principal Greg Schellenberg said an investigation has found that no rules or policies were broken.

“It wasn’t a violation of policy and procedure … but we all agree it was not a good use of surveillance,” Schellenberg said. “It was an abnormal use of our equipment and it won’t happen again. This is not a Big Brother institution.”

Even so, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington said the group plans to look into the matter.

“I have a hard time believing this incident would’ve been handled the same way if it was a heterosexual couple,” said spokesman Doug Honig.

Earlier this year, Schellenberg said, the parents of the sophomore girl asked the school’s dean of students, Keith Nelson, to alert them if school officials noticed their daughter engaged in any “unusual behavior.”

Then in early February, a video camera in the cafeteria recorded a kiss between the sophomore and a senior girl, Schellenberg said.

Nelson showed the video to the sophomore’s parents, who then transferred her to a school outside the Peninsula School District, Schellenberg said.

[…]

Schellenberg granted that Nelson could have simply told the girl’s parents what had happened without showing them the video. But he said that the school would have handled it the same way had she been kissing a boy.

Well that’s a relief.

When did they start putting teen-agers under constant video surveillance in high schools? Or maybe I should ask when America the free decided that East Germany and the Soviet Union weren’t all bad?

Somehow I can’t help but think it isn’t a coincidence that all this stuff started happening when the anti-communist freedom loving conservatives became dominant in our culture.

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