Correction:
Earlier versions of this article misidentified the school that called 911 for two students who hyperventilated during a food fight. This version has been corrected.
One day in March, pranksters turned the cafeteria at Robert E. Lee High School in Fairfax County into a maelstrom of hurled milk cartons and leftover lunch.
Close to 100 teenagers joined the melee, flinging sandwiches and water bottles. Hundreds of others, caught in the crossfire, screamed and ran for the exits. A 17-year-old, eight months pregnant, was knocked to the ground.
School Days 2011-12
During a similar eruption at Centreville High School weeks later, two students — recent immigrants who presumably had little experience with the modern American food fight — hyperventilated to such a degree that officials called 911.
The episodes at Lee and Centreville were part of a rash of food fights this year that left a trail of garbage-strewn cafeterias and stymied principals at Fairfax high schools. Nearly every guilty student escaped unpunished, protected by chaos that made it almost impossible for school officials to figure out who did what.
Now, spurred by food-fight frustration, Fairfax’s 27 high school principals are banding together to ask for a powerful disciplinary and security tool, one the county School Board has long prohibited: indoor surveillance cameras.
“When you have a situation like that, you think you’re going to remember everything you saw, but you just can’t,” said Paul Wardinski, principal of West Springfield High. He said he caught only one of dozens of students responsible for a food fight in May. “If we had video, we would have gotten them.”
The principals made their request to the School Board last week, reigniting a frequent debate in Fairfax over how to protect students’ civil liberties while maintaining safe schools. The request could come to a vote as early as November.
The interest in school surveillance comes at a delicate time, after months of public wrangling over disciplinary practices that many parents said were overly harsh. The School Board overhauled its policies in June, scaling back the practice of forcing students in trouble to switch schools.
Skeptics say installing cameras would be a step backward — a new way to police students who are already weary of policing. The debate could factor into School Board elections this fall.
“It looks to me like all they want to do is catch kids being bad when they wouldn’t normally be able to do that,” said Michele Menapace, a parent and discipline-reform activist. “Kids who really want to commit a crime are going to find a way to do it.”
Surveillance of cafeterias, hallways and other interior spaces is commonplace in suburban schools across the United States, including in Montgomery, Prince George’s, Prince William and Loudoun counties.
Fairfax — the region’s largest school system, with more than 174,000 students — allows cameras on building exteriors and inside buses but has resisted indoor surveillance in the interest of protecting student privacy.
A few years ago, the school system experimented with using cameras to deter theft in cafeteria lunch lines. They proved ineffectual and were removed.
Views shift on board
But several board members say their feelings have begun to shift.
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