American schools are increasingly turning to facial recognition technology and surveillance cameras to keep students “safe.”

Cheyenne Mountain School District in Colorado Springs, Colo., has deployed 400 cameras across its schools to monitor who is on campus or attempting to access it, according to The Denver Post. The system uploads photos of students to match with individuals, or is searchable for clothing or looks.

“There are some interesting cases of how it can be used to quickly find people in an emergency and enhance building security in an emergency,” said Colorado state Sen. Chris Hansen, who is looking to regulate the developing technology. “We need to balance that for potential misuses and overly zealous surveillance. That’s what we’ve been grappling with.”

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Hansen is hoping to create guardrails before a moratorium is lifted in 2025. The Post said schools are deploying the increased surveillance “in a bid to keep students safe” and that the moratorium on such technology “has prevented the majority from doing so”.

“More and more school districts are talking about it,” Hansen told the paper. “With many of these new technologies like AI biometrics, there are great upsides and some significant potential downsides.”

“We don’t think that the potential benefits — and there’s not a whole lot of data to prove those exist — outweigh the harms not only to privacy but also the general safety and comfort and ease that students should get to feel in the place they spend the vast majority of their youth,” Anaya Robinson, a policy strategist for the Colorado ACLU, told the Post.

The federal government is accelerating the pace.

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The Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) School Violence Prevention Program is giving money to school districts to utilize facial recognition and biometric data.

The DOJ gave “over $1 million in funding to five Ohio districts, including Weathersfield Local School District, Lorain Schools, Edison Local School District, Worthington City School District, and Promise Academy,” according to BiometricUpdate.com.

Weathersfield received $38,940 “upgrade outdated cameras to leverage facial recognition” and replace door locks with a biometric system.

Meanwhile, Lynchburg, Va., schools deployed a fingerprint system “to accelerate the lunch process,” whereby students simply scan a fingerprint instead of providing cash or a card.

“The new fingerprint scanning system allows a student to just touch their finger down one time to register. Then, on subsequent visits through the lunch line they just put their finger down and it pulls everything for them behind the scenes,” John Collins, the Lynchburg City Schools director of information technology, told ABC 13.

The same company used in Lynchburg — identiMetrics — was criticized in Caribou, Maine when the ACLU analyzed the company’s contract with Regional School Unit 39, the Bangor Daily News reported.

The ACLU claimed the proposed contract “explicitly contemplates the idea of the company possessing” student personal data “without any explanation of why, how it would store the data, if it could sell this data.”

“Any time [biometric] information is collected, it must have strong security protections,” Samuel Crankshaw, the ACLU of Maine communications director, told the paper. “The risk of identity theft, stalking and other harms increase when companies store data for longer periods of time.”

identiMetrics CEO Raymond J. Fry disputed that, saying, Students’ IDs are stored behind the school [computers’] firewalls and nothing is stored in the cloud. We follow the same laws that protect students’ grades and health information.”