BY KYLE BARNETT

Staff Reporter

LULING- On April 16, 2007 at Virginia Tech University, gunman Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded a number of others before turning the gun on himself in the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.

“They didn’t know where that guy was or what he was doing,” said St. Charles School Board Member John Robicheaux. “Not that I am faulting their school system, but if they had cameras maybe it wouldn’t have turned out as bad.”

Robicheaux has been leading the cause as the St. Charles School Board looks into surveillance technologies for their school system.

At a recent meeting the school board heard presentations by two leading Louisiana surveillance technology companies.

Robicheaux cites the Virginia Tech massacre as one of the reasons the school system needs more surveillance.

East St. John High School in St. John the Baptist parish has had a surveillance system in place for over 10 years. Cameras are stationed at every entrance, hallway intersection and bathroom.

Recently the system was just switched from an analog to a digital recording system like the ones St. Charles is looking into. In an analog system footage is stored on videotape that can only be searched with rewind, fast forward and play modes. In a digital system footage is stored on a hard drive and can be accessed with surveillance software to zoom in, track items or even recognize student’s faces.

Assistant Principal Rosann Hymel 15-year employee of East St. John High School said that only four days after the Virginia Tech massacre her school received threatening phone calls.

“We did a lot of preventative type stuff,” said Hymel. “We monitored the cameras for a number of hours.”

The phone calls turned out to be a hoax.

“In the case of a crisis you can have a person sitting down monitoring the stations, 16 at once,” said John Braun of Act Technologies, provider of St. John’s surveillance systems. “It is not just for recording but for monitoring as well.”

Monitoring cameras gives administration the ability to identify a threat and dispatch an armed deputy who is stationed on campus.

St. Charles Parish already has deputies stationed at most of its schools although only a few schools currently have surveillance systems.

St. John school system spokeswoman Ann Laborde said cameras not only keep campuses safer but also help in student discipline and deter theft.

“It keeps things more calm. They know they are being watched. It keeps problems to a minimum,” Hymel said. “It has come in handy a number of times to determine if a kid is guilty or not.”

However as St. Charles Assistant Superintendent Larry Sesser points out, cameras are not a cure-all.

“The placement of cameras can’t cover every location,” Sesser said. “You can only do so much to ensure the cameras are serving an appropriate role.”

At East St. John High school this concern is apparent. Student awareness to surveillance can lead to cameras in remote locations being vandalized or students to seek out places out of the camera’s scope.

“We are constantly having to move cameras,” Braun said. “The students see the camera’s location and go somewhere else.”

Another concern is the cost of surveillance technologies.

“There are different positions the board has taken, some of them see the costs justified others don’t,” Sesser said. “It would not be cheap based on the number of cameras in the system.”

The surveillance systems will cost at least $13,000 per school.

“It looks like most of the stuff is on state contract. That is going to make the price a lot better,” said Robicheaux. “I know what could happen and this could prevent something from happening.”