A school district in southeastern Iowa has purchased 13 small, clip-on cameras that principals and assistant principals will wear during their interactions with students and parents.

The district is one of the first schools to encourage the use of body cameras among administrators, echoing the growth of support for body cameras on police officers in recent months. While police departments across the nation had entertained the idea of using body cameras in their interactions with citizens for years, the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by police in Ferguson, MO last year spurred new support for on-duty officers to wear body cameras, including President Obama, who in December proposed spending $75 million to buy 50,000 body cameras for law enforcement officers. Companies like Taser International said in November that sales of its cameras and storage subscriptions tripled in a year.

Iowa's Burlington Community School District is not using anything so high-tech—their cameras are $85 video-audio recorders that store footage on SD cards, according to The Des Moines Register. In a phone call with Ars, Jeremy Tabor, the Director of Human Resources for Burlington School District, said people assuming that the school will use these cameras in the same manner as police are wrong. “We don't want to create a system where we're monitoring every activity... we just want to make sure that if something happens,” the school has the most information possible.

Tabor added that there are “no plans in place right now” for teachers to wear body cameras. “There would be no need for that and certainly the cost would be prohibitive,” he said. Instead, the body cams are restricted to use by principals and assistant principals who will be responsible for uploading the footage at the end of each day, if the cameras are used that day.

Tabor would not comment in detail as to how the footage would be stored or used, but he said that Burlington schools already have stationary cameras mounted on school buildings and monitoring cafeterias, hallways, and school buses. “We have a process in place now for how we store this video footage already,” Tabor said, noting that the principal body cam footage would be stored similarly.

On Sunday, Superintendent Pat Coen told The Des Moines Register that the move is meant to improve personal accountability among school administrators. His own experience with body cameras was formed while he was serving in Afghanistan with the Iowa National Guard and soldiers wore cameras on their helmets. "It wasn't so much about catching the other guy, but collecting how we did on the operation and how can we do it better," Coen told the paper.

So far, examples of body camera use in American public schools are few and far between. In February, Houston's Independent School District announced that it would be outfitting its 210 school police officers with body cameras as “an additional tool to ensure safety of our students” according to the school district's Police Chief Robert Mock. Tabor said that Burlington started considering body cameras after an incident in which a principal was falsely accused of kicking a student, but a stationary camera caught the incident, and the footage showed that the principal was actually in the right. Around the same time, the superintendent in Muscatine, Iowa, put a camera in his office and found that people were less likely to make “invalid complaints” in front of a camera.

Still, body cameras catch both video and audio of individual students, which has led to some concern from school safety advocates. School security consultant Ken Trump wrote in a recent blog post that having school authority figures wearing cameras could undermine any trust built between the students and faculty. Students might be more hesitant to report that another student brought a gun to school, or to confide that they are being abused by a parent, if they are concerned “that whatever they say will be recorded word-for-word with their faces center-camera and stored in high definition digital files.”

“Decades of school safety research and experience point to 'relationships' between students and adults as one of, if not the, most critical factors for strengthening school safety,” Trump wrote. “At a time when overloaded educators don’t have enough time as-is to get to know their students, the last thing we need is another obstacle to doing so.”

Coen told The Des Moines Register that the school is in the process of developing an official policy to govern the cameras' use. Tabor clarified to Ars that footage caught on body cameras will be treated like footage from the stationary surveillance cameras around the school. “We will only use the footage if we need to during the course of an investigation,” he said, adding that footage will only be accessible with his or the superintendent's permission.

The Des Moines Register says that for now, the school district's policy is to “take a balanced approach to how to treat student behavior that's caught on tape.”

"We need to make sure we don't make something bigger than it is," Coen told the paper. "We've got to have strong school administrators who are all on the side of kids."

Trump, on the other hand, feels that Burlington schools are getting caught up in the hype around police body cameras and aren't realizing that the work of an administrator and the work of a police officer are fundamentally different. “SROs [School Resource Officers], and certainly principals, are not making traffic stops on isolated city streets and dark back alleys. They are working with children — typically the same student body day-after-day — in a child-oriented setting, i.e., a school,” Trump wrote. “By and large, allegations of administrator misconduct against students are minimal compared to the number of such encounters and number of schools operating on a given day. And when allegations do arise, most investigators can get to the bottom of it very quickly using hallway school security cameras and good ‘ole fashioned interviewing skills.”

Tabor, on the other hand, says Burlington's body cams will only have a limited use case. “Our goal is not to have a surveillance culture, where we're going back and looking for things,” he said. “If we receive a complaint that an incident happened, then we would do something.”