“It’s not a secret,” said Sarah Christiansen, head of security at Santa Fe High School. “They’re pretty visible, and I like to tell students that we have the cameras because then it eliminates a lot of nonsense.”

Among other safety measures used in schools today, security cameras are one of the most prominent. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, during the 2013-2014 school year, 89.2 percent of public high schools, 83.7 percent of public middle schools, and 67.2 percent of public elementary schools used security cameras to monitor school campuses.

Santa Fe High is one of those schools, with 114 cameras on and around campus that can see anywhere from the main gate at the school’s Yucca Street entrance to as far as Albertson’s across St. Francis Drive.

Christiansen said that the cameras are useful in locating missing students. “Students run, sometimes they have drug paraphernalia, sometimes they’re just running,” she said. “It’s important when their parents say, ‘Hey, do you know where they went?’ Because they are minors, we have to actually be able to tell them where they went, so we have to see that far to see where they go.”

The cameras don’t bother senior Elaine Chavez, who recognizes that in today’s technology-driven world security cameras are everywhere, from grocery stores to the mall. “Where aren’t there security cameras?” she asked. The high number of them on campus doesn’t surprise her either, “considering all the buildings that we have and the size of the campus, and all the blind spots that could potentially be around.”

“I don’t object to them being there,” said Dr. Charles McClenahan, who has taught math at Santa Fe High for 15 years. “I think they’re a good thing.” According to Dr. McClenahan, the cameras have been on campus for well over a decade, if not the whole time he’s been here, and have helped with solving disciplinary violations.

“About ten years ago…it became a lot of fun for somebody to stick a wire in the keyhole so I couldn’t get in the classroom,” he said. “So one time I left and came back, put my key in, and there was a wire in there. Once you stick the key in and the wire gets pushed back, you can’t get it out. So I went and talked to the security people and they pulled up their cameras…and they gave me their description and I said, yes, this is who it is.

“And you know what?” he added. “People sticking the wires in the keyholes stopped.”

Although many accept the presence of security cameras, privacy advocates argue that security measures taken by schools around the country violate students’ privacy rights — more specifically, the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures.

And it’s not just cameras. Much of this debate is centered around physical searches of students. According to FindLaw, an online legal information service, “Students have fewer privacy rights in school than out of school.”

On a local scale, the SFPS Board of Education Policy Manual states, “School property, including lockers, school buses, and a student’s person or property, while under the authority of the public schools are subject to search,” with “reasonable cause to believe that a search is necessary to help maintain school discipline,” more commonly known as “reasonable suspicion” — which is where things often get confusing for educational institutions because there is no exact definition of “reasonable suspicion.”

A famous example is the 1985 New Jersey v. T.L.O. Supreme Court case where after a New Jersey high schooler, T.L.O., was found smoking in the bathroom and denied it, the school principal demanded to see the student’s purse, finding evidence that she was also selling marijuana at school. The state later brought charges against her in juvenile court, but the student argued that her Fourth Amendment rights had been violated and took her case to the New Jersey Supreme Court, which found that the search was unreasonable, making the evidence unusable.

However, when the case was brought to the U.S. Supreme Court, it was ruled that the school had “reason” for conducting the search, stating that administrators do not need a search warrant and/or probable cause prior to a search because students have a “reduced expectation of privacy” when they are in school.

According to Christiansen, Santa Fe High Security doesn’t perform searches or seizures without student or parent consent. “We can never search a student’s car or person without reasonable doubt,” she said. “Now if a student doesn’t want us to search, we can call their parents.”

Christiansen continued, “Security guards cannot actually do the search. We just have to stand by while an administrator does it. And if it’s a huge deal, we’ll just call the police and let them deal with it.”

Elaine said she thinks the school should do more to educate students on the matter. “I don’t really know any of those rights,” she said. “I think they go over it pretty well when it comes down to phone seizures, and searching when it comes down to testing, but if they searched your body, I feel like that would be something completely different.”

Trinity Jensen, another senior, also thinks this education could be beneficial and wishes Santa Fe High had a class on the subject. “[I think] students are pretty sure of what rights they do have, but I feel like we could go further with that, with a class at the beginning of the year telling students what their rights are,” she said.

Both Elaine and Trinity say they feel safe on campus for the most part and believe that the presence of security is beneficial to the school environment. “The role of security should be to stop harmful people from harming the students, obviously, to stop students from hurting other students, [and] to make sure everything is in check — like people aren’t ditching class or trying to leave, especially if they have classes at the end of the day,” Trinity said.

Dr. McClenahan said he also feels safe at school and that security is “absolutely beneficial.”

“Because they are here, there are things I don’t have to worry about,” he said.

“A lot of students think we’re the bad people, but we’re really here to keep you guys safe,” Christiansen said. “There are a lot of under-age kids around here, and they think they know everything, but they’re learning at the same time. So it’s our job … to make sure that they are doing the right thing.”