Hard Lessons In School Security

Some countries have been reluctant to follow the English example. German authorities question whether electronic eyes staring down on students and teachers do more harm than good. "Unless there is an actual threat, it's important that we don't shake the kids' feeling of being safe at school by an atmosphere poisoned by insecurity," says Josef Kraus, headmaster of an 800-pupil high school in Bavaria and president of the German Teachers' Association. "We need them to be carefree, and that carefreeness would vanish in a Big Brother climate."

But Germans don't discount the threat. Just days after the Beslan massacre, a delegation from the German federal intelligence agency (bnd) flew to Beslan for a briefing on the hostage crisis, North Ossetia parliament chairman Taymuraz Mamsurov told TIME. He said the visit came after the group realized that a school seizure could happen anywhere. (Moscow area schools plan to respond by issuing identification documents to students and installing panic buttons, city and regional officials said.) A move toward increased security in schools could, [an error occurred while processing this directive] however, find favor among Germans — a poll in February found that most respondents approved of cameras in schools, though only a handful of Germany's 42,000 schools have invested in surveillance.

Berliner Tor Commercial School in Hamburg installed 14 cameras in 2001 at a cost of $74,000. Headmaster Heinz Fänders can watch the monitors from his desk. He has little patience for privacy concerns. "The collective security interests of the school community are more important than the rights of the individual," he says. "It's not that we'd have them in the classrooms — they'd be totally out of place there."

The Capitanio Institute in Bergamo, Italy, installed 24 interior cameras before reopening this September — some in classroom laboratories — without consulting parents or unions. When word got out, the strongest opposition came from the latter. The chief of the Bergamo chapter of the cgil teachers' union, Corrado Barachetti, said: "Teaching a lesson is one thing; teaching while you are constantly being monitored is another."

Students appear more relaxed about the issue. Since Heinrich-Mann high school, in a tough working-class district of Berlin, installed a cctv camera above its high, green iron gates in April, "It's rare now that something happens," says Benjamin Schrör, a 16-year-old smoking with friends outside the school. "Ever since they put in the camera, the police aren't here that much anymore."

Surveillance itself probably couldn't stop a Beslan-style rampage — it would merely document it. So schools that consider themselves at risk, such as Jewish, international and American schools, take extra precautions. The American School of Paris levies a j270 "exceptional surcharge" to cover the cost of such features as a heavy metal gate, security guards, dogs, fences and cctv monitors at its closed suburban campus 15 minutes west of Paris. The International School of Paris in the 16th arrondissement has cameras, but another of its defensive measures is remaining anonymous. "There is no sign," says Isabelle Giraud-Carrier, the business manager. "We do not advertise that we are an international school."

School officials don't kid themselves about what such measures can achieve. "You will never have 100% security," says Hamburg headmaster Fänders. "If somebody intentionally sets out to kill others, there is nothing you can really do to prevent it — unless you turn a school into some kind of Alcatraz. And that's not something either students or staff will accept."