MCPS caught without surveillance cameras again

Twenty years after Columbine and two years after the Rockville High School rape scandal, Montgomery County Public Schools' leadership has been caught again without adequate security cameras and surveillance at its facilities. Two recent incidents in as many months at Richard Montgomery High School proved that once again. And along with a horrible record of school violence and fighting, teachers and staff sexually assaulting children, massive cybersecurity flaws revealed in a state audit, and a failure to even perform basic background checks on security employees, children attending MCPS schools remain unsafe under the system's current failed leadership.

The RM incidents - rearrangement of cups spelling seniors to instead spell a racial slur in December, and a swastika being painted on the school last month - should have been easily resolved using security camera footage. Police and school officials seem to know the general timeframe in which the incidents occurred. If cameras were in place, it would be a simple matter to look at all movements on the campus between those reference points. The fact that no photos of suspects or vehicles have been released by police by now speaks for itself.

How can this be, in the age of terrorism and mass shootings? The County Council and Board of Education clearly do not have student safety as a top priority, An examination of some of the truly frivolous expenditures by MCPS over the last two years proves that. So, too, did the 2017 County Council security camera procurement scandal, in which taxpayers unwittingly picked up the tab for a 4-camera security system worth less than $1000 for a whopping $22,000, putting the Pentagon's famous toilet seats to shame. Those cameras were for a County government building, not a school, to boot.

We can do better. Leadership, like the bad example and behavior of MCPS-employed adults that filters down to impressionable children in their charge, starts at the top.