Worthington City Schools ends contract with Flock Safety

Our Take

Credit where it's due: WBNS 10TV reports that Worthington City Schools pulled the plug on its Flock Safety contract, with Superintendent Trent Bowers saying plainly that the benefits weren't worth the potential loss of public trust. That's a rare thing in this industry — an institution doing the cost-benefit math on surveillance and landing on the side of the community instead of the vendor's sales pitch.

Schools have become one of Flock's favorite growth markets, pitched as a way to protect kids, and that framing makes it almost impossible to question the cameras without sounding like you don't care about safety. But a school district tracking license plates is still a school district building a database of who comes and goes, logged and stored, with the same vague retention policies and third-party data-sharing risks that plague every other ALPR deployment. Parents and staff aren't just "protected" by this tech — they're surveilled by it, whether or not anything ever goes wrong.

What's notable here isn't just the cancellation, it's the reasoning: trust. That's the real currency these systems spend down, deployment by deployment, and it's refreshing to see an administrator name that cost out loud instead of burying it in a press release about "community safety." If your local school board, city council, or police department has quietly signed one of these contracts, check our camera map to see what's already watching your neighborhood, and use our take-action guide to push for the same kind of reconsideration Worthington just modeled.