Students attending schools in one California district should start watching what they post online as they never know who’s watching.
Glendale Unified School District, located near Burbank, Calif., has hired Geo Listening to analyze the posts of the more than 13,000 students attending the district’s eight middle and high schools, CBS Los Angeles reported. Costing $40,500 a year, the goal of the monitoring is to find out when students are either in trouble or causing it, and give school officials crucial information as quickly as possible.
“The whole purpose is student safety,” Superintendent Richard Sheehan told CBS Los Angeles. “Basically, it just monitors for keywords where if a student is considering harming themselves, harming someone else.”
While schools typically monitor students’ social media if the teens are using school computers, Sheehan said Glendale Unified students will be monitored for activity conducted both on and offcampus.
“…but we do pay attention during school hours,” he said. “We do pay more attention to the school computers.”
The school district originally started monitoring students as a pilot service last year, and Geo Listening — which markets its services to a host of schools — reported several instances of suicidal students, allowing the district to intervene.
“We have provided information to school districts, which has led to numerous successful interventions on behalf of students that intended self-harm, suicide, bullying, truancy, substance abuse, and vandalism,” said Chris Frydrych, CEO of Geo Listening. “We monitor only public posts to social networks.”
Frydrych was quick to add his company does not monitor privileged pages, text messages — including picture messages — emails, phone calls or voicemails.
One parent said she was grateful for the service, and her son, who attends Hoover High School, agreed.
“If there was a red flag, if he’s talking about stress at school or he can’t take it anymore, if I won’t be able to deal with it, I would want somebody to come in,” Felicia Johnson said.
But others believe the $40,500 is a misuse of funds and should be spent elsewhere, like on another teacher, and that the monitoring is a violation of civil liberties.
“The school’s jurisdiction starts and stops at the school property line. Anything beyond that is becoming [a] rights violations,” wrote Herman Nelson, who commented on the monitoring. “I guess the teachers and administers forgot what they learned in US government class.”
This isn’t the first time schools have monitored students’ on- and off-campus activity. The Indiana state legislature pondered a bill last year called the “Restoring School Discipline Act,” which would allow for a student to be suspended or expelled for engaging in any unlawful activity on or off school grounds.
Additionally, a federal appeals court ruled in Kowalski v. Berkeley Public Schools that a school had the right to punish a student for “disruptive speech” no matter where it was spoken.
