a kiss is just a kiss, except when it's caught on camera

It was very, very difficult to avoid some sort of punny title. The situation is practically begging for cheesy humor:

Restrictions on the use of security videotape have been tightened at a suburban Tacoma high school after images of two girls kissing were shown to the parents of one of the girls, officials say.

Keith Nelson, dean of students at Gig Harbor High School, said he saw the students kissing and holding hands in the school's busy commons, checked a surveillance camera and showed the parents the tape because they had asked him a few weeks earlier to alert them to any conduct by their daughter that was out of the ordinary.

They then transferred their daughter to a school outside the Peninsula School District, which lies northwest of Tacoma.

Both girls said their privacy was invaded and denied doing anything wrong. Neither was identified by name in an article published Thursday by The News Tribune of Tacoma.

The kiss amounted to a quick "peck," said the girl who remains at the school, a 17-year-old senior described as the daughter of a News Tribune employee.

"We weren't doing anything inappropriate, nothing anyone else wouldn't do," she said.

Nelson said students could not have any expectation of privacy in a crowded place and maintained that he would have taken the same action had the students kissing been a boy and a girl.

Quantifiable concerns: five. Count 'em.

1. That the whole thing smacks of Orwellianism.

2. That an administrator and parents consider a peck on the cheek "out of the ordinary."

3. That a quick peck is also a violation of school rules.

4. That the parents legitimized the whole thing by giving their daughter marching orders.

5. Most tellingly, that an administrator would value helicopter parenting above common sense:

"They're paying good money for us to make their kids good citizens," he said. "Whatever that means to the parents, I'll do it."