House Bill 1196 is an odd little bill that came about as a hoghouse, ostensibly for the purpose of preventing teachers from becoming embarrassed by “memes.”
Seriously.
Parents or others who photograph or take video in the classroom without a teacher’s permission could face misdemeanor charges under a bill making its way through the Legislature.
The House Education Committee on Wednesday approved a bill that would make it a Class 2 misdemeanor for non-students to use electronic listening or recording devices in classrooms. That means they’d be subject to 30 days in jail, a $500 or both.
And..
Rob Monson, executive director of School Administrators of South Dakota, said he hoghoused Wismer’s bill to give school officials another venue to deter potentially unflattering posts parents or other visitors made of teachers without their consent.
Has anyone seen unflattering teacher memes out there? Anyone?
Sorry. “Unflattering posts?” That’s a red herring. And a ridiculous one at that. But what it seems to do is a bit darker – to criminalize parental attempts to document things without prior knowledge, such as this example:
When a 14-year-old special needs student in Ohio told her father she was being bullied at school, he figured it was something that many teenagers endure.
Then he realized it was his daughter’s teachers doing the bullying.
“We were shocked,’’ he tearfully said. “We couldn’t know. We didn’t know.’’
After being told repeatedly by school administrators that his daughter was lying about being harassed and bullied, he outfitted her with a hidden tape recorder under her clothes. For the next four days, she recorded a series of abusive and cutting remarks from a teacher and a teacher’s aide at Miami Trace Middle School in Washington Courthouse, Ohio.
What’s a more realistic scenario of what House Bill 1196 is actually trying to do? Criminalize recording in schools because someone may be made fun of? Or criminalizing it in an attempt to limit liability?
I could be wrong. Maybe I’m overly cynical. But I’m not buying what ASBSD is selling. And what they’re selling seems like poor, and a very self-interested justification for creating a new crime.
I agree with PP, this seems a bit silly. Cameras just keep people honest, if nothing wrong is going on they should not have anything to fear.
This appears to criminalize first responders showing up with body cameras too…
This bill was DOA before and is DDOA now.
If all parents took it seriously when their kids are the problem this wouldn’t be an issue, but I know sometimes parents won’t admit it if their kid screwed up and needs discipline. I do have concern if teachers fell they are constantly being monitored, because we are all human and minor things can be blown into major things. There are plenty of examples of this on the internet.
However, I do think that when a teacher acts in the way PP described in the post they should be fired, lose their pension, and never teach anyone about anything ever again.
Tough issue.
Read that complete link. Officers have had to adjust and are now in favor of cameras and have been great defense tools for them. Same can be said for teachers. It raises professionalism and weeds the bad out. Nice work on bringing this awful bill to light.
Yes, it’s ironic that many police are in favor of body cameras and some elements of Black Lives Matter/Movement for Black Lives are now opposed to them.
I didn’t realize the BLM is against cameras. I’m sure the left is going to come out against cameras. I’d be fine with cameras in all classrooms actually. Especially after reading that above link and what’s going with professors in classrooms. Never thought about cameras in classrooms but……
Besides not liking this bill, and letting my legislators know, I have a few other problems. Evidently the original bill, before hoghouse, was brought by Wismer and Greenfield. Do they have a say in whether to leave their names on a hoghouse bill as sponsors? What if they don’t agree with the hoghouse? The hoghoused bill has nothing to do with the original bill; what happened to the concerns raised with the first proposed bill?
continuation of above….maybe the legislators should get their act together before the deadline for submitting bills. If they don’t make the deadline, any proposals will wait until the next year. I can’t believe that something like this just popped up all of a sudden; why wasn’t it addressed before the deadline? I would appreciate an answer from any legislator about these questions.
Well said, PP. Parents of students should be able to observe and record classrooms at a moments notice. It’s their kids and tax dollars after all.
You’re dead on. This is about liability and not the feelings of some teachers. All legislators who read this blog (and that’s probably all of them), oppose this bill.
As a former teacher, I would see absolutely no concern to have a camera in my classroom at any time. If it wouldn’t be too much of a distraction to students, I’d gladly welcome any parents that checked into the appropriate office first with a visitor pass as the office should know about all visitors in the building.
I think this bill is trying to prevent teachers from getting “set up” and videos taken out of circumstance. For example, being quoted on something when actually it was reading from an article within a lesson about “fake news”.
Why did this even make it out of committee???