Casey: A modest proposal for school-bathroom surveillance | News

Read article : Casey: A modest proposal for school-bathroom surveillance | News

MEMO

To: Dr. Rita Bishop, Roanoke City Public Schools superintendent.

From: Commonwealth Electronic Zipper LLC.

Subject: Regarding gender identification of students in school restrooms, in light of pending legislation before the Virginia General Assembly.

Dear Dr. Bishop,

No doubt you’ve heard about the lavatory law sponsored by Del. Mark Cole, R-Fredericksburg. It seeks to protect Virginia’s heterosexual students from encountering transgender boys and girls in school restrooms and locker rooms. A violation would result in a $50 fine.

Cole seems quite serious about this issue. Here’s a passage from House Bill 663, one of two measures he’s submitted on the subject:

“Local school boards shall develop and implement policies that require every school restroom, locker room, or shower room that is designated for use by a specific gender to solely be used by individuals whose anatomical sex matches such gender designation.”

Now, you never quite know what brilliant stuff is going to emerge from our erstwhile delegates and senators in Richmond. Remember the vaginal-probe ultrasounds measure they passed in 2012?

For that reason, Roanoke schools should contemplate how this latest proposal could be enforced and plan accordingly. My new company, Commonwealth Electronic Zipper LLC, has some exciting ideas about that.

One obvious — though labor intensive — way to implement such a law would be to hire spotters for every bathroom and locker room in each of Roanoke’s 28 public schools. These employees would personally check the privates of students who enter, to ensure nobody born a boy uses a girls’ restroom and vice versa.

But this could be problematic in several respects.

The first is budgetary. Assuming seven lavatories/locker rooms per school, it would require at least 196 new full-time personnel. At an average cost of $29,127 per spotter (including benefits), that would add about $5.7 million to the school system’s payroll. This would require a 7-cent real-estate tax increase — which city council would never agree to — or laying off 114 teachers.

Another problem is the job description for those newly created positions. It seems tailor-made to attract pedophiles and molesters. This could result in significant future liabilities.

Finally, there’s the potential for boys and girls to be traumatized by adults demanding they drop trou before they’re allowed to use the can. Let’s face it, many students are shy and/or unusually sensitive, particularly adolescents.

Commonwealth Electronic Zipper has come up with a technology-based solution that avoids all these hassles. It prevents perverts from having personal contact with students, which eliminates potential liability. It also spares gender-conforming students from bathroom confrontations and saves taxpayers a boatload.

We would install multiple high-definition video cameras in every school bathroom, locker room and shower, at waist level. Those would feed to a discreet office which would have a bank of surveillance screens monitored by an employee.

That way, a single spotter could unobtrusively inspect users’ anatomies in every gender-specific area of an entire school. On rare occasions when they spied a transgender student trying to pass as an opposite sex, they could dispatch the school nurse to issue the $50 ticket.

Because so many schools have nighttime activities, this would require two new full-time employees at each location. It works out to an annual payroll cost of merely $1.63 million, which equals about 2 cents on the real-estate tax rate — or laying off only 33 teachers.

Of course, our proposal would require capital investment for the video equipment. Initially we’d install four cameras in each girls’ bathroom (one per stall) and eight cameras in each boys restroom (one for each stall and urinal). We would also mount three cameras in each locker room changing area and three in each shower.

The good news is the price of video equipment has plunged in recent years, so the aggregated cost would be reasonable. We estimate it would require about $40,000 per elementary school; $95,000 per middle school; and roughly $170,000 per high school. The total comes to just under $2 million, including installation.

That’s still a lot of money. But we’re sure Del. Cole would agree that no amount of spending is too much if it results in transgender-free lavatories and locker rooms.

There’s one glaring loophole in the measure: If enacted, it would not necessarily catch transgender students who had already undergone sex-reassignment surgery. But Cole has that covered as well. He’s also sponsoring a companion measure, House Bill 781. Here’s a passage from that:

“Local school boards shall develop and implement policies that require every school restroom, locker room, or shower room that is designated for student use and accessible by multiple students at the same time to be designated for and only used by students based on their biological sex (emphasis added).”

This would seem to require DNA testing at each lavatory and locker-room door, which in the long run could be far more costly and intrusive. We’ve begun preparing a separate proposal regarding implementation of that.

Right now you may be thinking, “If either of these cockamamie bills ever passes, Gov. Terry McAuliffe will surely veto it!”

Given the current makeup of the Virginia General Assembly, we here at Commonwealth Electronic Zipper are far less confident of that. In the wake of November’s elections, the legislature has more social conservatives than ever.

There’s no guarantee those lawmakers won’t unite over the cause of stigmatizing transgender kids and override any veto McAuliffe might issue.

For that reason, we urge you to take our proposal seriously, and we eagerly await your response.