Board hears pitch for districtwide AI camera alerts; parents raise privacy, cost concerns

New Hanover County Schools trustees heard a presentation and public comment Tuesday on a proposed districtwide pilot to add AI-based object-detection to school camera systems, a plan backed by a state budget appropriation but met with strong questions from parents and staff.

The technology vendor Evident demonstrated software that runs inferencing at the camera or on local hardware to detect events such as a possible weapon, smoke or fire, slip-and-fall, perimeter intrusions, crowd panic and prolonged loitering. Evident said alerts would be routed to a mass-notification and incident-management platform called Raptor; the district would use its existing video management system to review footage after an alert.

Why it matters: the state legislature earmarked funding for school safety technology, and New Hanover County Schools would receive that money only if the board accepts a vendor and scope of work. Supporters say automated alerts could reduce response time for medical emergencies or trespassing; opponents say the systems raise long-term privacy, cost and mission concerns and worry about potential later activation of disfavored features.

Sean Hall, a presenter for Evident, said the system is not a facial-recognition product and that the AI models are "static" — trained in a lab and not learning from live deployments. "We're not doing any facial recognition. We're not tracking any information about students," Hall said. He also described the vendor's workflow: the video feed is analyzed, an alert is issued if the rules engine detects a defined event, and the vendor deletes the transient analysis data after processing. Hall added that some temporary buffering of video while inference runs — "seconds to a…