JONESBOROUGH, Tenn. – Parents and teachers in Tennessee’s Washington County Schools are upset over a pilot evaluation program in which classroom cameras are used to record teachers and students.

Last month, officials in the district installed one camera at each school and another in the central office. School officials, working with a company called thereNow, paid for the cameras with a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but didn’t notify teachers or students of the program, the Johnson City Press reports.

“The largest apprehension was: Once these are on the cameras, how are they going to use them?” union president Leisa Lusk told the news site. “There’s a privacy issue with the students and their parents giving permission for them to be used anywhere but in the classroom.”

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

Washington County parent Tony Padgett agreed.

“I’m not happy about it at all,” he told the Press. “We have to sign a release every year for our kids’ images to be put in a yearbook, but nobody asked if they can videotape my child?”

District officials contend that because the recordings are used strictly for teacher evaluations, only administrators and teachers would view the material. Regardless, once recorded the information is sent to servers in Utah owned by thereNow, outside the district’s control.

Washington County’s Assistant Director of Schools Bill Flanary explained each mobile camera device contains a camera focused on the teacher and another on students, as well as a microphone for audio. The device starts recording when a teacher plugs a “key,” and an evaluator can later access the footage with their “key.”

“They make a video of them doing what they do as professionals, and after it’s over, they can see themselves in action,” Flanary told the Press. “We figured the teacher will watch themselves, and then the principal and teacher would sit down and talk about what they were doing right and how they could improve. The only people … that will ever see the video are the principal and teacher.”

That sounds a lot like the very common practice of professional athletes being recorded in action and critiqued by coaches to help them improve.

MORE NEWS: How to prepare for face-to-face classes

Tennessee State Rep. Matthew Hill, who represents the school district’s residents, recently introduced legislation that would prohibit the state from mandating the video evaluation system. The bill would leave the decision up to local school boards.

“That’s the way it should be,” Hill told the Press. “I talked to some of the school board members about this, and they said they never voted, they said the cameras just showed up one day. I trust the local school board, and if they think that’s something they should do, then they  would be able to vote and approve it.”

Flanary said a total of 20 Tennessee school districts are piloting video teacher evaluation programs, but Washington County’s is now suspended while the state reviews the practice, the news site reports.

While there’s little doubt that the video evaluation system could greatly improve teachers’ ability, parents deserve to know if their children are being recorded, especially if the video footage is leaving the district.

School officials would be wise to communicate with the public and build support for classroom video programs before implementation. School boards should also be given the opportunity to approve or reject such programs, because that’s what they were elected to do.

Other than that, it’s hard to see anything bad about recording teachers in action. Traditional teacher evaluations have long been based largely on principal observations of teachers in the classroom. Cameras would simply allow administrators to do a lot more of that without having to be physically present.

If teachers have nothing to hide, video recordings shouldn’t be a problem for them. If they do, then the videos will help administrators identify and address their issues.