Fairfax County School Board bans all Flock-style cameras on school property

The Fairfax County School Board voted Thursday night to ban Flock-style license plate cameras on school property.

During the board's regular meeting, Vice Chairman and at-large board member Kyle McDaniel introduced a motion to "prohibit the installation, procurement, or leasing of Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) systems on property owned by Fairfax County Public Schools," the board said in a statement.

The motion passed with a unanimous vote.

ALPR cameras are a variety of camera that collect data on anyone who drives past, creating a database of Americans' real-time movements that spans much of the country as the cameras proliferate nationwide.

The most well-known variant of ALPR camera system is made and sold by Flock Safety, an AI camera company that has come under fire in recent weeks over privacy and surveillance concerns.

Fairfax County Public Schools do have standard security cameras, but the cameras are not AI-powered and the video is only stored on school-board-maintained servers for a maximum of 30 days.

There are not currently any ALPR camera systems on Fairfax County Public School grounds, and the motion was introduced proactively to keep it that way.

"FCPS's mission does not include community policing, but interestingly, some police departments across the nation are even sounding the alarm about issues with these systems and cancelling their contracts," McDaniel said in the statement. "I wanted to take a proactive measure here to ensure we do not install these systems."

The motion still allows the "installation, operation, or continued use of speed cameras, or school bus stop-arm cameras."

"Our job, our mission, our focus, our budget dollars are about making sure 177,000 kids get the best education possible," McDaniel said during Thursday's board meeting.

Growing public concern over the cameras also played a role in the motion. The debate over Flock cameras is happening in communities throughout Northern Virginia.

Last week, Arlington County chose not to renew its contract with Flock Safety, and is beginning to take down the cameras in public spaces around Arlington.

Fairfax County has also paused expansion of its existing Flock program while it reviews the technology starting in mid-October.

While local governments are taking action on the publicly-owned and operated Flock cameras, they can't do anything about the cameras that are owned privately by shopping centers, businesses and homeowners associations. In fact, in Fairfax County, leaders said the private sector owns and operates four to five times as many Flock cameras as the police department does.

There is already bipartisan support from Virginia lawmakers to ban Flock cameras statewide, and the issue will be taken up in the 2027 General Assembly Session.