William Byrd Middle School may soon become the first Roanoke County school with security cameras on school grounds.

The Roanoke County School Board is scheduled to vote tonight on a pilot program to place several cameras at the school's entrance and at selected "dead zones" to monitor the site. If the initiative is successful, the school system may expand it to other schools in Roanoke County, school officials say.

School districts have increasingly turned to surveillance cameras to monitor school grounds ever since the Columbine High School shootings in 1999. A U.S. Department of Education survey released last year found that 47.9 percent of students nationwide ages 12 to 18 reported security cameras in their schools in 2003, up from 38.5 percent in 2001. A 2005 survey by the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services found security cameras in about a third of the state's public schools, including schools in Roanoke and Radford, and Bedford, Franklin, Giles and Pulaski counties.

Roanoke County already has placed cameras on school buses, but the school district is one of the few in the region without cameras in its buildings.

If the board approves the $27,660 program, administrators will provide William Byrd Middle School with 16 or 17 cameras and a surveillance system capable of accommodating more cameras in the future, said Jeff Terry, the schools' manager of information systems.

"There are some dead zones in the school, in the hallways for example, in the stairways," said Board Chairman Mike Stovall. "We felt there was a need in certain areas to put a camera in."

There's also a blind spot near a trailer on the school grounds that is invisible from the road, making it difficult for police to patrol at night, Terry said.

"If you're in the parking lot you can't see the trailer at all in the back of the school," he said. "That's one of the hot spots that principals want to monitor."

If the camera surveillance program expands to other schools in the county, school principals and administrators would have a say in where the cameras go.

"Since this is new to us, this will evolve a little bit," he said. "First the goal will be to get William Byrd Middle up and running and then take it back to the board and show it what we have."

PTA representatives say they support the program so long as it strikes a balance between security concerns and students' privacy.

"In these days and times we really need to increase the security in the schools," said Carlton Mabe, a former member of the William Byrd Middle School PTA who now serves as president of the county council of PTAs.

In the days following the Columbine attacks, in which two students killed 12 students and a teacher before committing suicide, parents walked the halls of Roanoke County schools to reassure students, he recalled. That was when some parents started discussing the possibility of installing security cameras without violating the privacy of the students, he added.

"It doesn't make the students feel like they're under the watchful eye of big brother all the time," Mabe said.

Beth Fobare, the council's immediate past president, said that while cameras would increase school security, the school board should iron out a firm policy before placing them in schools countywide.

"That's something that would have to be discussed long and hard before they implement it systemwide," she said.

Terry said county schools would have to follow state regulations on security cameras, which govern such things as where they can be placed and whether they can record audio.

Staff writer Albert Raboteau contributed to this report.