Parents are alleging that a New Hampshire school district with a history of willful disregard for parental authority has been wiretapping students on school buses for four years in violation of state law and its own policies.
The Gilford School District in Gilford, New Hampshire, contracts with a private company to operate its school-bus service with oversight by the superintendent’s office.
Cameras with video and audio-recording ability have been installed in buses at least since 2011, recording every word and action of every student riding the buses.
Chapter 570-A of New Hampshire’s Wiretapping and Eavesdropping statute forbids secret wiretapping but gives a list of exceptions for law enforcement and public safety.
One exception is for school buses. However, to qualify for the exception, the entity in charge of the buses must have “a sign informing the occupants of such recording prominently displayed on the school bus.”
No such signs were posted on the Gilford buses until this week, says Josh Youssef, a local business owner and former Republican candidate for state Senate who is representing the parents.
Youssef said he was first contacted nearly a month ago by parents of students in the Gilford school district.
“I ran for state Senate in 2012 as the Republican nominee, so people know me as an advocate of individual liberties. I was asked If I knew anything about the state wiretapping statute, and it turns out I do,” Youssef told WND. “They told me there is wiretapping going on in the district’s school buses.”
Youssef said he submitted an open-records request to the school district in the middle of last week demanding proof of compliance with the law. The district has 10 days to respond.
“And, remarkably, just yesterday I received a photograph and email from the same parents saying all of a sudden there were signs posted in their child’s bus,” he said.
Youssef said he has photographic evidence, which he provided to WND, showing no signs last Friday and then later photographs this week showing signs.
“There was no school Monday because of snow and just yesterday (Tuesday) the posting of signs emerge, so it would seem to me that the school system reacted to my request and followed up with a posting,” he said.
He said the sudden appearance of the signs would indicate an admission of guilt.
Schools Superintendent Kent Hemingway did not return phone calls from WND Wednesday.
(UPDATE: Hemingway did return WND’s calls Thursday morning and said he was not aware that the school district may have had an issue with signage on the buses until the public records or “right to know” request was filed last week by Youssef.
As soon as he was made aware that there was a possible issue with signs, Hemingway said he contacted the company that runs the school district’s bus service and asked them to make sure all buses were in compliance with the law and the school district’s policy with regard to signs.
“All the buses need to have signs, whether they have cameras with video or not, and to my knowledge they did, but we’ve had a pretty rough winter up here. Some of the buses could have been changed out,” Hemingway told WND. “I contacted our bus service provider as soon as I got the right-to-know request.”
He said there are only about six or seven buses that serve the district.
“We’re just a tiny New Hampshire school district.”)
Youssef said he is pleased that the school system jumped into action after he filed his request but wonders how long the district may have been out of compliance.
“We applaud them for coming into compliance, but how does that speak to all these years when the rights of minors and the rights of their parents have been violated by a school district that has clearly shown a pattern of disregard for parental notification and involvement?” Youssef asked.
This is the same school district that had a policeman arrest one of its own parents, William Baer, when he spoke out at a school board meeting last May against a reading assignment given to his ninth-grade daughter that included a graphic, violent sexual encounter. A judge dismissed the charge of disorderly conduct against Baer in December.
The school district in that case was found to have violated its own policy of sending notification home to parents whenever controversial material is assigned to students.
Violating its own policies?
Again, it appears the school district may have violated not only the law but its own written policy.
The district’s policy handbook, in Section E, describes the requirements for “video and audio recording devices on school buses and video surveillance on school property.”
Under “NOTICE,” the policy states:
“The presence of video and audio recording devices on a school bus shall be announced by signage displayed prominently on the bus and will indicate that the recording equipment is being used to record student behavior and that the recordings may be used in future disciplinary actions in the event of any misconduct.”
The policy also states that students are monitored by video cameras not just on buses but in the school hallways, classrooms, cafeteria, gymnasium, auditorium and outside grounds. But only on buses are the cameras outfitted with audio capability.
Watch 8-second video clip in which a Gilford bus driver confirms to students that they are being audio-recorded.
[jwplayer DOoLvvmC]
Youssef said he hopes the Gilford School District will not get away with violating a state law under which regular citizens have been aggressively prosecuted.
“This is just a continuation of the pattern where they act in reckless disregard of the law,” he said. “And the question I have is, will there be a penalty to be paid by the school district for violating the rights of these children tens of thousands of times, when individual citizens are routinely prosecuted under the same statute and are pursued by the government and if convicted they face years in prison?”
Just ask Adam Mueller, who runs the CopBlock.org news site that tracks incidents of police brutality, how resolute the state of New Hampshire has been in prosecuting alleged violators of its wiretapping law.
Mueller spent more than three months in jail and was on the hook for up to 21 years in prison for three felony counts of violating the wiretapping law in late 2013. He recorded telephone calls with three public officials – a police officer, a school principal and secretary – without notifying them.
The New Hampshire Supreme Court threw out Mueller’s felony convictions, and the state re-charged him under misdemeanor “non-willful” wiretapping.
“That’s how aggressive these people pursue convictions of citizens under this same law,” Youssef said. “They originally charged him with a felony, and when that was thrown out then they charged him with a misdemeanor, even though he’d already served time in jail.”
Numbers are ‘staggering’
Youssef estimates that the Gilford School District transports approximately 400 students a day to and from school.
“That’s 800 trips during 180 school days per year, and if this has been going on for four years, the numbers are absolutely staggering,” he said.
He said there are a lot of lessons to be learned from this incident about the state of American liberties.
School districts across the United States engage in similar surveillance of students not only on buses but in the halls, in the classrooms and in the cafeterias and on the playgrounds of American schools.
“This is yet another example that an overreaching government agency just feels like they can look at and control every aspect of a student’s life including what they said and when they said it,” Youssef said. “This is an example of a police state heading toward its worst end.”
“One issue is the wiretapping itself, and the other issue is that we have a governmental division breaking its own law that it put in place to protect people,” he continued. “The very government that implemented this law, shouldn’t it be bound by it? And I just find it very audacious and arrogant that the school district would violate the rights and liberties of everybody on such a wholesale level. Cast a broad net, haul in all the fish, eat up the ones you want and throw the rest back dead and violated.”
Is anything out of bounds?
John Whitehead, a constitutional attorney and founder of the Rutherford Institute, said the Gilford incident is indicative of a more pervasive problem in America. And the message being sent to children is nothing short of Orwellian.
“Reports that the Gilford School District has been audio recording students on school buses are troubling not only because the district may have violated state law restricting the interception of personal communications, but because it is symptomatic of the pervasiveness of the surveillance state we now live under,” Whitehead told WND. “From NSA monitoring of virtually all electronic communications to school officials recording the banter of children on the way to school, nothing is out of bounds for government scrutiny, and our children are being taught that this is the ‘new norm.'”
Before recording on school buses is implemented in the interest of student safety, it is “imperative that parents have the opportunity to voice their concerns and that students are notified of what their government officials are doing,” said Whitehead, author of “A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State.”
The lack of any comment or apology from the district is also striking, Youssef said.
“If the school district was truly contrite about this, they would have already issued a very public apology indicating how sorry they are for violating thousands of peoples’ rights and would seek the forgiveness of the public and hope the public would trust them again, and they would be willing to accept whatever penalty is coming their way. But there is no indication that they are sorry,” he said. “There is nothing about this on their website.”
“This not a personal attack of any kind,” Youssef added. “This is an attack on a hypocritical governmental subdivision that seeks to strip individuals of their rights and liberties.”
