When students in suburban Atlanta returned to school for in-person classes amid the pandemic, they were required to cover their faces with cloth masks like in many places across the U.S. Yet in this 95,000-student district, officials took mask compliance a step further than most. 

Through a network of security cameras, officials harnessed artificial intelligence to identify students whose masks drooped below their noses. 

“If they say a picture is worth a thousand words, if I send you a piece of video — it’s probably worth a million,” said Paul Hildreth, the district’s emergency operations coordinator. “You really can’t deny, ‘Oh yeah, that’s me, I took my mask off.’”

The school district in Fulton County had installed the surveillance network, by , years before the pandemic shuttered schools nationwide in 2020. Under a constant fear of mass school shootings, districts in recent years have increasingly deployed controversial surveillance networks like cameras with facial recognition and gun detection.

With the pandemic, security vendors switched directions and began marketing their wares as a solution to stop the latest threat. In Fulton County, the district used Avigilon’s “No Face Mask Detection” technology to identify students with their faces exposed. 

During remote learning, the pandemic ushered in a new era of digital student surveillance as schools turned to AI-powered services like remote proctoring and in search of threats and mental health warning signs. Back on campus, districts have rolled out tools like badges that track students’ every move. 

But one of the most significant developments has been in AI-enabled cameras. Twenty years ago, security cameras were present in 19 percent of schools, according to . Today, that . Powering those cameras with artificial intelligence makes automated surveillance possible, enabling things like temperature checks and the collection of other biometric data.

Districts across the country have said they’ve bought AI-powered cameras to fight the pandemic. But  as pandemic-era protocols like mask mandates end, experts said the technology will remain. Some educators have stated plans to leverage pandemic-era surveillance tech for student discipline while others hope AI cameras will help them identify youth carrying guns. 

The cameras have faced sharp resistance from civil rights advocates who questioned their effectiveness and argue they trample students’ privacy rights.

Noa Young, a 16-year-old junior in Fulton County, said she knew that cameras monitored her school but wasn’t aware of their high-tech features like mask detection. She agreed with the district’s now-expired mask mandate but felt that educators should have been more transparent about the technology in place.

“I think it’s helpful for COVID stuff but it seems a little intrusive,” Young said in an interview. “I think it’s strange that we were not aware of that.”

‘Smoke and mirrors’

Outside of Fulton County, educators have used AI cameras to fight COVID on multiple fronts. 

In Rockland Maine’s Regional School Unit 13, officials used federal pandemic relief money to procure a network of cameras for contact tracing. Through advanced surveillance, the cameras by allow the 1,600-student district to identify students who came in close contact with classmates who tested positive for COVID-19. In its , Verkada explains how districts could use federal funds tied to the public health crisis to buy its cameras for contact tracing and crowd control. 

At a district in suburban Houston, officials spent nearly $75,000 on AI-enabled cameras from , a surveillance company owned in part by the Chinese government, and deployed thermal imaging and facial detection to identify students with elevated temperatures and those without masks. 

The cameras can screen as many as 30 people at a time and are therefore “less intrusive” than slower processes, said Ty Morrow, the Brazosport Independent School District’s head of security. The checkpoints have helped the district identify students who later tested positive for COVID-19, Morrow said, although has argued Hikvision’s claim of accurately scanning 30 people at once is not possible. 

“That was just one more tool that we had in the toolbox to show parents that we were doing our due diligence to make sure that we weren’t allowing kids or staff with COVID into the facilities,” he said.  

Yet it’s this mentality that worries consultant Kenneth Trump, the president of Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services. Security hardware for the sake of public perception, the industry expert said, is simply “smoke and mirrors.”

“It’s creating a façade,” he said. “Parents think that all the bells and whistles are going to keep their kids safer and that’s not necessarily the case. With cameras, in the vast majority of schools, nobody is monitoring them.”

‘You don’t have to like something’

When the Fulton County district upgraded its surveillance camera network in 2018, officials were wooed by Avigilon’s AI-powered “Appearance Search,” which allows security officials to sift through a mountain of video footage and identify students based on characteristics like their hairstyle or the color of their shirt. When the pandemic hit, the company’s mask detection became an attractive add-on, Hildreth said.

He said the district didn’t actively advertise the technology to students but they likely became aware of it quickly after students got called out for breaking the rules. He doesn’t know students’ opinions about the cameras — and didn’t seem to care. 

“I wasn’t probably as much interested in their reaction as much as their compliance,” Hildreth said. “You don’t have to like something that’s good for you, but you still need to do it.”

A Fulton County district spokesman said they weren’t aware of any instances where students were disciplined because the cameras caught them without masks. 

After the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, pitched its cameras with AI-powered “gun detection” as a promising school safety strategy. Similar to facial recognition, the gun detection system uses artificial intelligence to spot when a weapon enters a camera’s field of view. By identifying people with guns before shots are fired, the service is “like Minority Report but in real life,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email at the time, referring to the that predicts a dystopian future of mass surveillance. During the pandemic, the company rolled out thermal cameras that a company spokesperson wrote in an email could “accurately pre-screen 2,000 people per hour.”

The spokesperson declined an interview request but said in an email that Athena is “not a surveillance company” and did not want to be portrayed as “spying on” students. 

Among the school security industry’s staunchest critics is Sneha Revanur, a 17-year-old high school student from San Jose, California, who founded to highlight the dangers of artificial intelligence on civil liberties. 

Revanur said she’s concerned by districts’ decisions to implement surveillance cameras as a public health strategy and that the technology in schools could result in harsher discipline for students, particularly youth of color. 

Verkada offers a cautionary tale about the potential harms of pervasive school surveillance and student data collection. Last year, when a hack exposed the live feeds of 150,000 surveillance cameras, including those inside Tesla factories, jails and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The Newtown district, which suffered a mass school shooting in 2012, said compromising information about students. The some educators from contracting with the California-based company. 

After a back-and-forth with the Verkada spokesperson, the company would not grant an interview or respond to a list of written questions. 

Revanur called the Verkada hack at Sandy Hook Elementary a “staggering indictment” of educators’ rush for “dragnet surveillance systems that treat everyone as a constant suspect” at the expense of student privacy. Constant monitoring, she argued, “creates this culture of fear and paranoia that truly isn’t the most proactive response to gun violence and safety concerns.” 

In Fayette County, Georgia, the district spent about $500,000 to purchase 70 Hikvision cameras with thermal imaging to detect students with fevers. But it and disabled them over their efficacy and Hikvision’s ties to the Chinese government. In 2019, the U.S. government , alleging the company was implicated in China’s “campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-technology surveillance” against Muslim ethnic minorities.

 The school district declined to comment. In a statement, a Hikvision spokesperson said the company “takes all reports regarding human rights very seriously” and has engaged governments globally “to clarify misunderstandings about the company.” The company is “committed to upholding the right to privacy,” the spokesperson said. 

Meanwhile, Regional School Unit 13’s decision to use Verkada security cameras as a contact tracing tool could run afoul of in Maine schools. The district didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

Michael Kebede, the ACLU of Maine’s policy counsel, cited recent studies on facial recognition’s flaws in and and called on the district to reconsider its approach. 

“We fundamentally disagree that using a tool of mass surveillance is a way to promote the health and safety of students,” Kobede said in a statement. “It is a civil liberties nightmare for everyone, and it perpetuates the surveillance of already marginalized communities.”

White faces

In Fulton County, school officials wound up disabling the face mask detection feature in cafeterias because it was triggered by people eating lunch. Other times, it identified students who pulled their masks down briefly to take a drink of water. 

In suburban Houston, Morrow ran into similar hurdles. When white students wore light-colored masks, for example, the face detection sounded alarms. And if students rode bikes to school, the cameras flagged their elevated temperatures. 

“We’ve got some false positives but it was not a failure of the technology,” Hildreth said. “We just had to take a look and adapt what we were looking at to match our needs.”

With those lessons learned, Hildreth said he hopes to soon equip Fulton County campuses with AI-enabled cameras that identify students who bring guns to school. He sees a future where algorithms identify armed students “in the same exact manner” as Avigilon’s mask detection. 

In a post-pandemic world, Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the nonprofit , worries the entire school security industry will take a similar approach. In February, educators in Waterbury, Connecticut, a new network of campus surveillance cameras with weapons detection. 

“With the pandemic hopefully waning, we’ll see a lot of security vendors pivoting back to school shooting rhetoric as justification for the camera systems,” he said. Due to the potential for errors, Cahn called the embrace of AI gun detection “really alarming.” 

Disclosure: This story was produced in partnership with . It is part of a reporting series that is supported by the which works to build vibrant and inclusive democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens. All content is editorially independent and overseen by Guardian and 74 editors.

Georgia lawmakers have halted, at least for now, the Buckhead neighborhood’s effort to secede from the rest of Atlanta. On Friday, House Speaker David Ralston joined other Republicans in opposing legislation that would have allowed residents in the affluent community to vote on cityhood this fall. 

Caren Solomon Bharwani has lived her entire life in Buckhead, an exclusive Atlanta enclave known for stately homes set back from dogwood-lined streets and upscale shopping on Peachtree Road.

Her kids have enjoyed Atlanta’s school offerings, including the popular International Baccalaureate program, and she’s formed tight bonds with educators providing services to her two children with disabilities.

That could be upended, however, if a vocal segment of Buckhead’s mostly white and wealthy population achieves its goal to secede from the city. Georgia law doesn’t allow the neighborhood to form its own school district. Secession, therefore, would leave 5,500 students and 800 employees in the neighborhood’s eight schools in limbo; unless legislation passes to keep them in the Atlanta Public Schools, they’d be subsumed by the surrounding Fulton County school system. 

Bharwani said she “desperately” fears losing the support her children receive if the neighborhood secedes.

Proponents of a Buckhead breakaway — including many with school-age children — complain of rising crime, neglected potholes and an encroaching homeless population. But opponents view the effort as and legally shaky. Buckhead, which is 86 percent white, generates an estimated $230 to $300 million in property taxes that is used to fund education. As with similar secession efforts across the country, the proposal has the potential to siphon off revenue from the region’s more affluent families, leaving residents in Atlanta’s majority Black district with fewer resources.

“Residential secession movements, typically driven by wealthier white communities, are almost always bad for education,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank. If Buckhead is allowed to secede, “concentrations of poverty will increase in Atlanta, making students left behind worse off. The tax base necessary to support Atlanta public schools will suffer.”

The move comes as the district continues to grapple with persistent inequities. A from the Latino Association for Parents of Public Schools estimated it would take more than a century for Black students to catch up with their white peers in reading and math.

The issue has divided neighbors and policymakers, and presented newly elected with one of the first major challenges of his tenure. It is already one of the most contentious issues before state lawmakers this year. At least two secession bills await action, and more could be introduced before the session ends.

‘Right to vote’

Bill White, a former Democrat-turned-Trump-fundraiser who chairs the Buckhead City Committee, insists he’s not trying to weaken the Atlanta district’s tax base. 

He promises that final legislation will specify that students can remain in their schools and the Atlanta district will hold on to its share of the property tax revenue Buckhead generates. He advises Atlanta’s district leaders — who — to stick to their mission. 

“Instead of attempting to interfere with Buckhead’s 70,000 citizens’ absolute right to vote on its own destiny, we hope [Atlanta Public Schools] will focus all its attention, resources and capabilities on the singular and much more important goal of providing higher quality education for our beloved children,” he said in a statement.

But many are skeptical of White’s promises to ensure stability for neighborhood students.

Mikayla Arciaga, a former Atlanta Public Schools teacher who lives in Buckhead and ran unsuccessfully for the school board last year, accused proponents of “baffling overconfidence.”

“It might be sorted out,” she said, “but we’re talking about our kids, who have already experienced two years of education disruption.”

White and other proponents argue that becoming a city would allow them to take public safety and other services into their own hands. Once a rural getaway for Atlanta’s old-money families, Buckhead was annexed into Atlanta in 1952. But Buckhead, like the city as a whole, has faced a recent that has put residents on edge.

last summer showed rates of robberies, aggravated assaults and car thefts were higher in Buckhead than citywide. But Atlanta’s mayor recently to open a new neighborhood police precinct and in January, a new police captain for the area said the community was starting to see a decline in .

Some parents support secession despite the uncertainty over Buckhead’s schools. Meredith Bateman, who has two children at Atlanta Classical Academy, a charter school, is among them.

A Buckhead resident since 2002, Bateman said she no longer feels safe in her community and is careful about where she stops to get gas. In 2020, a man pointed a gun at her husband and daughter during a moment of road rage on a residential street. She doesn’t allow her daughter, now 15, to go to Lenox Square — the area’s high-end shopping mall — by herself.

“That’s not normal. She should be getting some independence,” Bateman said. “Gone are the days of saying, ‘I’ll drop you at the mall, and I’ll pick you up later.’”

‘Two years of education disruption’

Opponents of secession say there are too many unanswered questions. Among them: What will happen to the district’s buildings and employees if the students become part of the Fulton schools. Atlanta school board member Michelle Olympiadis said it’s possible Fulton would buy out or lease the buildings. Employees would be displaced and have to reapply for positions.

“What teachers are going to want to stay through that turmoil?” Arciaga asked. 

But she agrees city services could improve. Some parks, she said, haven’t been maintained in years, leaving residents to pick up trash and remove broken tree limbs. 

Another complication is that the proposed city limits drawn up by the Buckhead City Committee don’t match current school attendance zones: Left out are the more diverse neighborhoods on the edges.

“Magically, the areas they’ve not included tend to be the higher minority areas,” said Keisha Burgess Prentiss, who has a fifth grader at Bolton Academy and a younger child entering pre-K this fall.

She moved to the area specifically to enroll her children in the district’s International Baccalaureate and dual language Spanish immersion programs. But the elementary school her older daughter attends is outside the proposed boundaries, while the middle and high school lie within. If Buckhead becomes a city and the schools join the Fulton district, her children would no longer be eligible to attend. 

Leila Laniado, a proponent of secession, is confident her daughter will be able to remain in the Atlanta district. As a Hispanic woman, she rejects the notion that residents want to keep out minorities.

“Every time people bring race into the discussion, it’s done purposely to divide,” she said.

Fulton officials, meanwhile, have mostly stayed quiet as their legal team weighs potential scenarios. One possibility is that the two districts reach an agreement in which students living in Buckhead remain in the Atlanta district, said spokesman Brian Noyes. 

But he added that officials have avoided the debate and don’t want to “spend a lot of energy around what-ifs.”

Not the first attempt

For now, supporters and opponents are fixing their attention on the state legislature. Four Republican lawmakers from outside Buckhead introduced bills in support of secession, but that doesn’t mean state GOP leaders are unified on the issue. Former U.S. Sen. , who is challenging Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in the May primary, is in favor of a referendum on cityhood, while Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan is opposed. House Speaker David Ralston hasn’t taken a stand. 

In a move some predicted would kill the effort, Duncan assigned one of the bills related to secession to an . There hasn’t been any action on the issue since mid-January, but those on either side expect they won’t know the outcome until the session ends March 31.

Duncan argues that rising crime is not unique to Buckhead and stems from racial unrest and the pandemic. Secession, he says, won’t solve the problem and would leave Atlanta with fewer financial resources to prevent crime.

“Criminals will still find their way to Buckhead despite the change in mailing address,” he wrote in an .

There have been in Buckhead, but they didn’t reach the legislature. A 2008 newsletter arguing in favor of a breakaway lamented that the community’s taxpayers were “simply tired of having our votes and money taken for granted by the City of Atlanta.”

Olympiadis, the Atlanta school board member, thinks the current effort has more momentum. If cityhood proponents are successful, she fears, other wealthy parts of the city, such as Midtown, will follow suit.

If the issue gets through the legislature and wins at the polls, Bharwani, an organizer of opposition group Neighbors for United Atlanta, expects the matter to wind up in court, with families hanging in the balance until it’s settled. The cityhood committee can “write in their bill that [Atlanta Public Schools] has to continue educating the kids,” she said, “but there’s no provision in Georgia law that allows for any of this to happen.”