Kinda sounds like you are, though.
> but in what universe is a handful of cameras (less than 10 per building)
The article notes 6-7 cameras per floor of one particular building. I'm not sure of the size of each floor of that particular building, so 6-7 cameras per floor may cover very little space, or it may cover a lot. That also says nothing about the coverage in other buildings. Larger buildings probably got more cameras.
Either way, often these sorts of things are set up in phases, with higher concentrations of cameras added later, after the system proves itself as useful.
> My high school also had cameras. Isn’t that rather typical?
There's a big difference between your bog-standard security camera that just records footage to a hard drive somewhere, and these cameras, that send live feeds to an AI company, where the video is presumably automatically analyzed and indexed to allow administrators to effortlessly track people's movements. The AI company may (now or in the future) offer real-time alerts of "suspicious activity", which as we all should know by now probably will have a significant false-positive rate. (But cops will treat alerts as gospel without doing any critical thinking.)