Whether it’s a research project on the Civil War or a science experiment on volcano eruptions, individuals in the Colonial School District near Wilmington, Delaware, you glance off just about anything on their school-provided devices.
But in one occasion, an elementary school student searched “how to die”.
In that case, Meghan Feby, an primary school consultant in the city, got a telephone call through a program called , GoGuardian Beacon, whose algorithms flagged the word. The academic software provider GoGuardian’s system allows schools to track and analyze what learners are doing on school-issued devices and emblem any behaviors that raise the risk of self-harm or other threats to students.
According to Feby, the scholar who had searched “how to death” did not want to die and displayed no signs of distress; instead, they were looking for information but not in danger. However, she values the plan.
” I’ve had situations where I’m actually glad that GoGuardian reached out to us and allowed to intervene,” said Feby.
School districts all over the nation have adopted these laptop monitoring systems. With the adolescent mental health problems worsened by the COVID-19 epidemic and school violence affecting more K-12 kids nationwide, instructors are desperate for a solution, experts say.
However, critics are concerned about the lack of accountability from businesses that have the authority to control student behavior and decide when to notify school employees. Additionally, frequent student security raises questions about student data, privateness, and free speech.
While accessible for more than a decade, the programs , saw a boom in use , during the crisis as individuals transitioned to web learning from house, said Jennifer Jones, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute.
” I think because there are all kinds of issues that school districts have to deal with, such as student mental health issues and the dangers of school shootings, I think they simply view these as low, fast ways to address the problem,” Jones said.” I think school districts simply view these issues as low, quick ways to address the problem,” he said.
According to the most recent youth risk behavior , survey , from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly all indicators of poor mental health, suicidal thoughts and suicidal behaviors increased from 2013 to 2023. During the same period, the percentage of high school students who were threatened or injured at school, missed school because of safety concerns or experienced forced sex increased, according to the CDC , report.
And many educators still think about the threat of school shootings. Since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, more than 383, 000 students have experienced gun violence at school, according to , The Washington Post’s count.
About half of the K-12 public schools in the United States have installed the company’s platforms, according to GoGuardian CEO Rich Preece, according to Stateline.
As her school’s designee, Feby gets an alert when a student uses certain search terms or combinations of words on their school-issued laptops. ” It will either come to me as an email, or, if it is very high risk, it comes as a phone call”.
Once she’s notified, Feby , will decide whether to meet with the student or call the child’s home. GoGuardian Beacon contacts another person in the county, including law enforcement, in some school districts, if the system discovers troubling activity after school hours.
Feby said she’s had some false alarms. One student was arrested because of the lyrics to the song she had looked up. Another person looked for information on anime.
About a third of the students in Feby’s school come from a home where English is n’t their first language, so students often use worrisome English terms inadvertently. Kids can also be curious, she said.
Still, having GoGuardian in the classroom is important, Feby said. Before she became a counselor 10 years ago, she was a school teacher. She came to the realization that school safety was more important than ever after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.
Data and privacy
Teddy Hartman, the head of privacy for GoGuardian, taught English literature in East Los Angeles for the first time before moving to the technology company about four years ago.
Hartman was hired by GoGuardian to assist in developing a robust privacy policy, including guardrails for its use of artificial intelligence, he claimed.
” We thought,’ How can we co-create with educators, the best of the data scientists, the best of the technologists, while also remembering that students and our educators are first and foremost?'” Hartman said.
GoGuardian is n’t using any student data outside of the agreements that school districts have allowed, and that data is n’t used to train the company’s AI, Hartman said. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule are both required by companies that regulate what children can do online.
However, privacy experts are still concerned about how much access these types of companies should have to student data.
According to Clarence Okoh, a senior attorney at the Georgetown University Law Center, school districts across the country are placing hundreds of thousands of dollars on contracts with some of the top computer monitoring companies, including GoGuardian, Gaggle, and others.
In 2021, while many schools were just beginning to see the effects of online learning, The 74, a nonprofit news outlet covering education, published an , investigation , into how Gaggle was operating in Minneapolis schools. According to the report, hundreds of documents revealed how students at one school system were subject to ongoing digital surveillance, even at home after the day’s end, according to the outlet.
That level of pervasive surveillance can have far-reaching implications, Okoh said. For one, in jurisdictions where legislators have expanded censorship of “divisive concepts” in schools, including critical race theory and LGBTQ+ themes, the ability for schools to monitor conversations including those terms is concerning, he said.
A , report , by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group based in San Francisco, illustrates what kinds of keyword triggers are blocked or flagged for administrators. In one instance, GoGuardian reported that GoGuardian had flagged a student for reading a Bible verse that contained the word “naked” in its text. In another instance, a Texas House of Representatives site with information regarding” cannabis” bills was flagged.
GoGuardian and Gaggle both also dropped LGBTQ+ terms , from their keyword lists after the foundation’s initial records request, the group said.
However, a lack of transparency makes it difficult to fully understand how these companies monitor students, according to Jones. It’s difficult to get information from private tech companies, and the majority of their data is n’t made public, she said.
Do they work?
The school district purchased a technology service years before the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, according to The Dallas Morning News. According to the paper, the district sent two payments totaling more than$ 9,900 to the Social Sentinel company.
Although the cost varies, some school districts are investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in online monitoring programs. Muscogee County School District in Georgia paid$ 137, 829 in initial costs to install GoGuardian on the district’s Chromebooks,  , according to the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. In Maryland, Montgomery County Public Schools , eliminated GoGuardian from its budget , for the 2024-2025 school year after spending$ 230, 000 annually on it, later , switching to Lightspeed, according to the Wootton Common Sense.
Despite the spending, there’s no way to prove that these technologies work, said Chad Marlow, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union who authored a , report , on education surveillance programs.
In 2019, Bark, a content monitoring platform, claimed to have helped prevent 16 school shootings in a , blog post , describing their Bark for Schools program. The Gaggle company website says it , saved , 5, 790 lives between 2018 and 2023.
These data points are analyzed by the number of warnings that the systems generate that suggest a student may be very close to harming themselves or others. According to the ACLU report, there is little evidence that this kind of school safety technology is effective.
” You cannot use data to say that, if there was n’t an intervention, something would have happened”, Marlow said.
One prime example of the rise in school surveillance across the country, which includes cameras, facial recognition technology, and other, is computer monitoring programs. Marlow argued that increased surveillance does not always prevent bad behavior.
” A lot of schools are saying,’ You know what, we’ve$ 50, 000 to spend, I’m going to spend it on a student surveillance product that does n’t work, instead of a door that locks or a mental health counselor,'” Marlow said.
Some experts are advocating for more mental health resources, including hiring more guidance counselors, and school policies that support mental health, which could prevent violence or suicide, Jones said.  , Community engagement , programs, including volunteer work or community events, also can contribute to emotional and mental well-being.
But that’s in an ideal world, GoGuardian’s Hartman said. Computer monitoring systems are n’t the only way to combat the epidemic of youth violence and mental illness, but they also have a purpose, he said.
” We were founded by engineers”, Hartman said. Is there anything we can do in our world that can be a tool in the toolbox from a perspective of school technology and be useful in that regard? It’s not an end-all, be-all”.
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