Soon, the yellow school bus will audition for an unusual role in Prince George's County: monitoring street safety.
County school officials plan to mount digital video cameras inside and outside buses to give them extra eyes on passengers and roads as they ferry students.
Using wireless communication devices now being installed to help track bus locations, the cameras would send to a school system transportation center streaming footage of bus cabins and the county streetscape on school mornings and afternoons. School officials said the footage could be used by law enforcement authorities in an emergency.
The surveillance experiment is expected to begin in the coming school year on about 20 buses -- a tiny portion of the 1,300-bus fleet -- with the Maryland State Police and U.S. Justice Department providing a $200,000 grant for the equipment, according to a school transportation official.
"If this resource does something to reduce crime in our neighborhoods and provide a safe environment for our children, I'm all for it," said county schools chief Andre J. Hornsby.
The experiment is part of the Yellow School Bus Project, an initiative of the Points of Light Foundation in Washington. The county sent a school bus to Baltimore in late February for a news conference to drum up publicity for the project.
A news release about the project on the foundation's Web site said it aimed to provide "real-time information of activities internally on the bus, as well as externally on each bus route" and "act as additional eyes and ears for first responders and homeland security officials from the local to the national levels."
The release cited the 1999 Columbine High School shootings, the 2001 terrorist attacks, the 2002 sniper shootings in the Washington area and the 2004 school hostage crisis in Chechnya as reasons for parents and educators to take new safety measures. But it was unclear how school bus cameras might have helped authorities in any of those cases.
The trial run in Prince George's is believed to be a first for the Washington area and one of the first in the country.
A spokeswoman for the National School Transportation Association, an industry group based in Alexandria, said external bus cameras have been tested in North Carolina to help catch motorists who violate laws requiring them to stop when school buses pick up or drop off passengers. "It's relatively new to have these external cameras," spokeswoman Robin Leeds said. "Where I have seen them used, it's not to catch terrorists but to catch violators of school bus stop laws."
Cameras inside school buses are not new. Bus drivers who encounter safety problems have long been able to videotape passenger cabins. The internal cameras planned in Prince George's would upgrade that technology. Officials said the cameras might help authorities if a bus is hijacked or some other crime occurs on board.
As for the external security cameras, school officials and project backers dismissed the idea that they would invade the privacy or otherwise infringe on the civil liberties of people who might be observed unawares by a passing bus.
"Somebody has to step forward and do some things to protect these children and make the school situation safer for them," said Glenn Williams, president of Millennium Technologies, a Baltimore company involved in the project. Asked whether people might protest more surveillance in their neighborhoods, Williams said that was a "selfish issue."
School officials said they have not yet chosen bus routes for the trial. Nearly 100,000 students ride the public school buses.
Rick Tyler, a vice president of the county's council of PTAs, who lives in Temple Hills, said external bus cameras might raise concerns if they are perceived as intruding on a particular community. But he said some parents worry about street and sidewalk safety, particularly at bus stops, and might be glad to have the extra video monitors.
"I don't have a problem with it if it's used randomly to help eliminate problems," Tyler said.
