Field Elementary in Louisville's Crescent Hill neighborhood.(Jacob Ryan / LPM )Tiphanee Lee was surprised when administrators at Field Elementary kept calling about her 10-year-old son Semaj acting out.At home and at church, Lee said Semaj is sweet. He’s got doe-like brown eyes and long locks. He loves Chinese food, car rides and throwing coins into the water fountain at the mall.Semaj has severe autism and is non-speaking, so he couldn’t tell her what was going on in his classroom in Jefferson County Public Schools. And there were no cameras to provide any clues. A JCPS spokesperson told KyCIR the district doesn’t have any classroom cameras.So one May morning, Lee wove her own small camera deep into Semaj’s pony tail, hit record and sent him to school.What she captured that day made her sick to her stomach: An instructional assistant, Robert Randsell, can be heard berating her child in a voice brimming with spite.“Get off me now!...Get off me! Get over there…I don’t wanna play with you no more!” the man said.Eventually Semaj cries out. Lee believes the camera captured physical abuse by Ransdell, who she said worked daily with her son. She also believes the instructional assistant’s actions were motivated by racism based on the way the white man spoke to her Black son.Ransdell has worked for the school since 2006. School district records show JCPS reassigned Ransdell away from children while officials investigate. So far no criminal charges have been filed. He did not respond to a request for comment.Now Lee wants all classrooms that serve nonspeaking students like Semaj to have cameras. Lee declined an interview request, but held a press conference last month to share her story.“We are calling for Semaj’s Law: Policy that requires cameras in the classroom that serve nonverbal and vulnerable children,” Lee said. “Our children deserve protection, transparency and accountability at all times.” 10-year-old Semaj Lee(Tiphanee Lee)Her call comes as Kentucky districts across the state are facing allegations of abuse or neglect in special education classrooms. One attorney told KyCIR the number of calls he receives about abuse allegations in day cares and schools has “exploded” in recent years, as parents feel more empowered to speak out when they believe their children are mistreated.According to data from KDE, as overall enrollment falls, Kentucky schools are serving a growing share of students with special needs. More than 630,000 students had documented disabilities in the 2024-2025 school year, 18.7% of all students, up from 16.8% in 2021-2022. JCPS alone serves more than 93,000 students with disabilities.There is no state law that mandates cameras in classrooms, and so Kentucky districts have discretion in deciding whether to use them.The National Autism Association and many parents of nonspeaking students support Lee’s call for cameras in special education classrooms — often called “self-contained” or “MSD” classrooms — where students with moderate to severe disabilities spend all day with the same staff. Research shows children with autism are more likely to be abused or neglected than their neurotypical peers. KyCIR spoke with five Kentucky parents of nonspeaking children: All of them said one of their worst fears is that their child will be mistreated at school and won’t be able to tell them.“It's scary because you know our kids are at higher risk, and also they can't tell us if something happens,” JCPS mom Nikki Short told KyCIR.But some advocates question whether the benefits of a watchful eye outweigh downsides of constant surveillance, and whether funds would be better spent on hiring and training competent staff.Abuse allegations prompt camera laws in other southern statesStarting in 2015, lawmakers in several states, including Texas, Alabama, West Virginia, Georgia and Louisiana passed laws that allow or mandate cameras in self-contained special education classrooms, often in response to high-profile abuse allegations. The National Autism Association has advocated for cameras in classrooms since 2012.In Kentucky, abuse allegations in Greenup County Schools prompted Republican state Rep. Aaron Thompson to file a bill this year requiring cameras in all self-contained special education classrooms.In that case, five parents said a security camera captured nearly 1,200 instances of abuse or neglect in a McKell Elementary special education classroom over a 19-day period. The parents alleged the recording shows staff hitting and pushing children, improperly restraining them, verbally abusing them, taping one child’s mouth shut and kissing another child on the mouth.“Not all these students can speak for themselves,” Thompson said. “If there are suspicions or other things, a parent would have the right to go in and request that [video footage] as part of the educational record.”Greenup County School District Superintendent Steve Hall did not respond to a request for comment on the case.Thompson’s proposal, which has a companion bill in the Senate filed by Carter County Republican Sen. Robin Webb, never got a committee hearing. Thompson said he plans to file the measure again in 2027.Advocates in Tennessee, Indiana, and South Carolina backed similar measures during this years’ legislative sessions. But, like in Kentucky, those proposals never got enough support to become law.Thompson’s measure did not include any funding, and the lawmaker said his preference would be for districts to use existing resources to implement.A fiscal analysis for a similar measure proposed in Indiana this year estimated the cost would fall between $2,100 and $10,000 per classroom for equipment and data storage.Kentucky Department of Education spokesperson Jennifer Brislin told KyCIR that “[w]ithout a dedicated funding source, mandating the installation of cameras would be a significant cost to districts.”“However, student safety is always a top priority for KDE,” Brislin added.Brislin said KDE doesn’t track which districts already use classroom cameras, but KyCIR found several districts that do, including Marion County Schools, which has cameras in four special education classrooms, and Christian County Schools which has cameras in all its special education classrooms and preschool. A spokesperson for Bullitt County Public Schools says the district is piloting six cameras next school year in classrooms across the district for “strictly for instructional purposes, teacher coaching, and professional feedback.”“They are not being implemented for student supervision or security monitoring,” BCPS spokeswoman Stefanie Kleinholter wrote in an email.Asked why JCPS doesn’t have cameras in its more than 268 ECE classrooms, JCPS spokesperson Carolyn Callahan wrote that “No JCPS classrooms have surveillance cameras in them. JCPS treats ECE classrooms like all other [d]istrict classrooms.”Callahan did not respond to a request for comment on the allegations against Ransdell.Better use of resources?Tiphanee Lee isn’t the first Kentucky mom to resort to secret surveillance to find out what was going on in her child’s classroom. In 2023, eastern Kentucky mom Kristen Gleason sent her 9-year-old child with autism to school with a recorder in his backpack after seeing disturbing changes in his behavior, including a new intense fear of school.According to a lawsuit against Raceland-Worthington Independent School District, the recorder captured audible smacks, verbal abuse by the teacher and other staff, and employees recalling a time when a child had eaten his own diaper and feces while left unattended in the seclusion room.Raceland-Worthington Independent Schools Superintendent Larry Coldiron did not respond to a request for comment.Masten Childers, the attorney representing Gleason and three other Raceland-Worthington Middle School families, said although a recording device provided a “fail-safe” against “horrible failures” in that classroom, cameras are not a fix-all.“In my experience, cameras do not stop the abuse from happening, they just record it,” he said.Childers has represented Kentucky families in abuse and neglect claims against school districts and daycares for about 15 years, and said most mistreatment cases come down to a lack of qualified personnel.“If you have the right people in the room, it’s not going to happen,” Childers said.But it’s tough for Kentucky schools to find the right people. Districts are struggling to fill classroom positions, especially in special education.Parents who spoke with KyCIR described a rotating door of instructional assistants and paraprofessionals working with their children.One D.C.-based advocacy group for people with disabilities called TASH has opposed classroom cameras for over a decade. The group argues that outfitting classrooms with cameras could create a false sense of security by forcing abuse into blind spots, that it could encourage schools and parents to place more students into self-contained classrooms who don’t need to be, and that the footage could be used to discipline students or even criminalize them for challenging behavior.TASH executive director Michael Brogioli said he sympathizes with parents calling for cameras, but said that funds would be better spent on personnel and training.“We want to prevent the abuse and neglect from happening in the first place, and I think having well-qualified, well-trained vetted personnel really goes a long way toward that goal,” Brogioli told KyCIR.Rachel Moldoveneau, a Kentucky mother of a 17-year-old nonspeaking child with autism, said she thinks school systems should have both cameras and well-trained staff.“I think that cameras are good, and also we need to have better staff and better training,” she said. “I don't think it has to be one or the other.”For many years Moldoveneau paid $10,000 to $26,000 a year out of pocket to send her child to the Bluegrass Center for Autism, a private nonprofit day school with several locations in Louisville. The Bluegrass Center for Autism has cameras in each classroom, which made Moldoveneau feel the school cared about safety and transparency.Privacy concernsWhile many parents see cameras as their own watchful eyes and ears in the classroom, others worry about the privacy implications and unintended uses of the footage.Cassie Creswell, with the national group Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, says constant surveillance is harmful to kids – they may self-sensor or modify their behavior, which is not conducive to learning. She worries about the security of the storage systems, noting that many school districts have faced data breaches in recent years. She said that many school districts are already giving over student data to corporations without controlling or understanding how it may be used, secured or shared.“The more data you collect, the more data is there to be vulnerable to be misused,” Creswell said.Schools with classroom cameras grapple with complex privacy concerns when parents want to view footage: Who can access the footage, what to do about images of children not related to the requesting parent, whether the footage can be used to evaluate teachers’ performance or discipline students, whether it can be shared with law enforcement, how much of the footage should be shared to show the full context of any allegation.Some parents who spoke with KyCIR said they would like a livestream, as is already available in many early childhood education centers and daycares. Others are uncomfortable with the idea that other parents or anyone else with the link could peep in on their child, and legal experts note that broad access to classroom camera footage would likely run afoul of federal laws that protect student privacy, known as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.Schools are already grappling with these same issues in regards to the security cameras most have in hallways, buses and other non-classroom areas.Some states have specific guidelines about footage access. In Alabama, footage can only be accessed when a specific allegation is made, and the footage must be made available for viewing by the parents of all children involved in the incident, as well as the staff members. Live monitoring is not permitted, and the law prohibits administrators from using the footage for routine teacher evaluations.Thompson’s Kentucky bill does not have parameters for how schools may use the footage, but requires schools to allow parents or guardians to view footage upon request.Jefferson County Teachers Association President Maddie Shepard declined to comment on the proposal to put cameras in classrooms. A spokesperson for the Kentucky Education Association did not respond to a request for comment.Asked to respond to the privacy issues raised by others, Short, the JCPS mom, said the “bigger concern” is protecting children from abuse.“What do we do then to protect our kids?,” she said. “Because this is a problem.” ...read more read less