Since the pandemic began, Baltimore City Public Schools officials have with GoGuardian, a digital surveillance tool that promises to identify youth at risk of harming themselves or others. When GoGuardian flags students, their online activities are shared automatically with school police, giving cops a conduit into kids’ private lives — including on nights and weekends.

Such partnerships between schools and police appear startlingly widespread across the country with significant implications for youth, according to . Nearly all teachers — 89% — reported that digital student monitoring tools like GoGuardian are used in their schools. And nearly half — 44% — said students have been contacted by the police as a result of student monitoring. 

The pandemic has led to major growth in the number of schools that rely on activity monitoring software to uncover student references to depression and violent impulses. The tools, offered by a handful of tech companies, can sift through students’ social media posts, follow their digital movements in real-time and scan files on school-issued laptops — from classroom assignments to journal entries — in search of warning signs. 

Educators say the tools help them identify youth who are struggling and get them the mental health care they need at a time when youth depression and anxiety are spiraling. But the survey suggests an alternate reality: Instead of getting help, many students are being punished for breaking school rules. And in some cases, survey results suggest, students are being subjected to discrimination. 

The report raises serious questions about whether digital surveillance tools are the best way to identify youth in need of mental health care and whether police officers should be on the front lines in responding to such emergencies. 

“If we’re saying this is to keep students safe, but instead we’re using it punitively and we’re using it to invite law enforcement literally into kids’ homes, is this actually achieving its intended goal?” asked Elizabeth Laird, a survey author and the center’s director of equity in civic technology. “Or are we, in the name of keeping students safe, actually endangering them?”

Among teachers who use monitoring tools at their schools, 78% said the software has been used to flag students for discipline and 59% said kids wound up getting punished as a result. Yet just 45% of teachers said the software is used to identify violent threats and 47% said it is used to identify students at risk of harming themselves. 

The findings are a direct contradiction of the stated goal of student activity monitoring, Laird said. School leaders and company executives have long maintained that the tools are not a disciplinary measure but are designed to identify at-risk students before someone gets hurt.

The Supreme Court’s recent repeal of Roe v. Wade, she said, further muddles police officers’ role in student activity monitoring. As states implement anti-abortion laws, that data from student activity monitoring tools could help the police identify youth seeking reproductive health care. 

“We know that law enforcement gets these alerts,” she said. “If you are in a state where they are looking to investigate these kinds of incidents, you’ve invited them into a student’s house to be able to do that.”

A tale of discrimination

In Baltimore, counselors, principals and school-based police officers receive all alerts generated by GoGuardian during school hours, according to by The Real News Network, a nonprofit media outlet. Outside of school hours, including on weekends and holidays, the responsibility to monitor alerts falls on the police, the outlet reported, and on numerous occasions officers have shown up at students’ homes to conduct wellness checks. On , students have been transported to the hospital for emergency mental health care. 

In a statement to ����Ӱ��, district spokesperson Andre Riley said that GoGuardian helps officials “identify potential risks to the safety of individual students, groups or schools,” and that “proper accountability measures are taken” if students violate the code of conduct or break laws.

“The use of GoGuardian is not simply a prompt for a law enforcement response,” Riley added.

Leading student surveillance companies, including GoGuardian, have maintained that their interactions with police are limited. In April, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey warned in a report that schools’ reliance on the tools could violate students’ civil rights and exacerbate “the school-to-prison pipeline by increasing law enforcement interactions with students.” Warren and Markey focused their report on four companies: GoGuardian, Gaggle, Securly and Bark. 

In , Gaggle executives said the company contacts law enforcement for wellness checks if they are unable to reach school-based emergency contacts and a child appears to be “in immediate danger.” In on the company’s website, school officials in Wichita Falls, Texas, Cincinnati, Ohio, and Miami, Florida, acknowledged contacting police in response to Gaggle alerts.

In some cases, school leaders ask Securly to contact the police directly and request they conduct welfare checks on students, the to lawmakers. Executives at Bark said “there are limited options” beyond police intervention if they identify a student in crisis but they cannot reach a school administrator. 

“While we have witnessed many lives saved by police in these situations, unfortunately many officers have not received training in how to handle such crises,” in its letter. “Irrespective of training there is always a risk that a visit from law enforcement can create other negative outcomes for a student and their family.” 

In its , GoGuardian states the company may disclose student information “if we believe in good faith that doing so is necessary or appropriate to comply with any law enforcement, legal or regulatory process.” 

Meanwhile, survey results suggest that student surveillance tools have a negative disparate impact on Black and Hispanic students, LGBTQ youth and those from low-income households. In a letter on Wednesday to coincide with the survey’s release, a coalition of education and civil rights groups called on the U.S. Department of Education to issue guidance warning schools that their digital surveillance practices could violate federal civil rights laws. Signatories include the American Library Association, the Data Quality Campaign and the American Civil Liberties Union.

“This is becoming a conversation not just about privacy, but about discrimination,” Laird said. “Without a doubt, we see certain groups of students having outsized experiences in being directly targeted.”

In a youth survey, researchers found that student discipline as a result of activity monitoring fell disproportionately along racial lines, with 48% of Black students and 55% of Hispanic students reporting that they or someone they knew got into trouble for something that was flagged by an activity monitoring tool. Just 41% of white students reported having similar experiences. 

Nearly a third of LGBTQ students said they or someone they know experienced nonconsensual disclosure of their sexual orientation or gender identity — often called outing — as a result of activity monitoring. LGBTQ youth were also more likely than straight and cisgender students to report getting into trouble at school and being contacted by the police about having committed a crime. 

Some student surveillance companies, like Gaggle, monitor references to words including “gay” and “lesbian,” a reality company founder and CEO Jeff Patterson has said was created to protect LGBTQ youth, who face a greater risk of dying by suicide. But survey results suggest the heightened surveillance comes with significant harm to youth, and Laird said if monitoring tools are designed with certain students in mind, such as LGBTQ youth, that in itself is a form of discrimination. 

In its letter to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights Wednesday, advocates said the disparities outlined in the survey run counter to federal laws prohibiting race-, sex- and disability-based discrimination. 

“Student activity monitoring is subjecting protected classes of students to increased discipline and interactions with law enforcement, invading their privacy, and creating hostile environments for students to express their true thoughts and authentic identities,” the letter states. 

The Education Department’s civil rights division, they said, should condemn surveillance practices that violate students’ civil rights and launch “enforcement action against violations that result in discrimination.”

Lawmakers consider youth privacy

The report comes at a moment of increasing alarm about student privacy online. In May, the Federal Trade Commission announced plans to crack down on tech companies that sell student data for targeted advertising and that “illegally surveil children when they go online to learn.” 

It also comes at a time of intense concern over students’ emotional and physical well-being. While the pandemic has led to a greater focus on youth mental health, the May mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, has sparked renewed school safety efforts. In June, President Joe Biden signed a law with modest new gun-control provisions and an influx of federal funding for student mental health care and campus security. The funds could lead to more digital student surveillance.

The results of the online survey, which was conducted in May and June, were likely colored by the Uvalde tragedy, researchers acknowledged. A majority of parents and students have a favorable view of student activity monitoring during school hours to protect kids from harming themselves or others, researchers found. But just 48% of parents and 30% of students support around-the-clock surveillance. 

“Schools are under a lot of pressure to find ways to keep students safe and, like in many aspects of our lives, they are considering the role of technology,” Laird said. 

Last week, the Senate designed to improve children’s safety online, including new restrictions on youth-focused targeted advertising. The effort comes a year after a showing that the social media app Instagram had a harmful effect on youth mental well-being, especially teenage girls. One bill, the Kids Online Safety Act, would require tech companies to identify and mitigate any potential harms their products may pose to children, including exposure to content that promotes self-harm, eating disorders and substance abuse.

Yet the legislation has faced criticism from privacy advocates, who argue it would mandate digital monitoring similar to that offered by student surveillance companies. Among critics is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital privacy and free speech. 

“The answer to our lack of privacy isn’t more tracking,” the . The legislation “is a heavy-handed plan to force technology companies to spy on young people and stop them from accessing content that is ‘not in their best interest,’ as defined by the government, and interpreted by tech platforms.” 

Attorney Amelia Vance, the founder and president of Public Interest Privacy Consulting, said she worries the provisions will have a negative impact on at-risk kids, including LGBTQ students. Students from marginalized groups, she said, “will now be more heavily surveilled by basically every site on the internet, and that information will be available to parents” who could discipline teens for researching LGBTQ content. She said the legislation could force tech companies to censor content to avoid potential liability, essentially making them arbiters of community standards. 

“When you have conflicting values in the different jurisdictions that the companies operate in, oftentimes you end up with the most conservative interpretations, which right now is anti-LGBT,” she said.

Under First Amendment “audits,” when individuals go to public spaces, like police stations, city halls and libraries, to seek out First Amendment violations, have been happening for years. But according to the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), these “audits” have become more aggressive since the start of 2021. 

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The First Amendment protects speech, religion, press, assembly and the right to petition the government.

“What are they looking for? Every single one of them is different. Some auditors are looking for fame and fortune on YouTube and other auditors are looking for confrontation,” said Deborah Mikula, executive director of the Michigan Library Association (MLA). “They’re looking to be confronted, either by the staff or by police, and they’re creating those videos to claim a violation of their First Amendment rights.”

It is the latest issue confronting public libraries, where a debate over banning certain books has garnered national attention.

Lance Werner, the executive director of the Kent District Library system in Grand Rapids, said that each of the KDL branches have been visited by auditors, but there haven’t been issues of harassment or hostility. 

“We treat everybody with empathy, kindness, love and respect, even if they’re coming in and filming employees or asking pointed questions,” said Werner. “It’s of no concern to us. We’re transparent and we recognize everybody’s right to be in the library. We would only care if they were interfering with other patrons.”

The public has the right to film inside public buildings, but Michigan does have a Library Privacy Act, which protects a patron’s right to privacy of what they read and check out at the library.

“We’re paying attention to privacy issues of other patrons. That’s a really important part of the conversation for our libraries. Because it’s not just our librarians working at those buildings, but a lot of people are in those buildings, and we want to make sure that their privacy is upheld,” Mikula said. 

The Michigan Library Association, which oversees the state’s 396 library systems, has been working to train librarians on how to de-escalate situations. 

“We’re trying to make sure that our librarians feel comfortable in dealing with First Amendment audits, and that’s really all we can do,” Mikula said.

Libraries have been under an especially watchful eye in recent months as nationwide about book-banning have started to heat up. 

Most of these fights, organized by Republican groups, like the national organization No Left Turn in Education, have been targeting school libraries and aiming to ban books that discuss race, gender and sexuality. 

But Werner said that since the start of last summer, the number of book challenges KDL has received has significantly increased, with informal challenges coming in about weekly. 

There are very few books that would get banned from any of the KDL public libraries, Werner said. For a book to be removed from the library’s collection, it would have to be pornography or child pornography — which is not protected by the Constitution. 

According to the ALA’s preliminary America’s Libraries , more than 330 unique book challenges nationwide were reported in the three-month period between Sept. 1 and Nov. 30, 2021. In that timeframe, there have been more than double the number of reports from 2020 (156 challenges) and it will likely outpace 2019 figures (377 challenges). 

“We want to do the best we can by people and we’re going to protect the Constitution,” said Werner. “We’re going to treat everybody with kindness and society’s going to do what it’s going to do. I just wish everybody would understand that we really don’t have any agenda and we don’t support any agenda. We are politically agnostic.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on and .

AFT President Randi Weingarten said the union’s current effort — to bolster the science of reading, strengthen the school-family connection and give kids “free books to read, love and keep” — pre-dates the backlash, but stands in contrast to it.

“We have [long] been trying to increase the titles that are available for children,” Weingarten told ����Ӱ��. Still, “this [campaign] does counter … all those who are trying to either burn books, or to censor books,” she added. 

The nation’s second-largest teachers union has nurtured a years-long partnership, Weingarten said, with , a marketplace that provides affordable children’s books to educators of high-needs students. The “Reading Opens the World” campaign’s 1 million books will be sourced from their site and distributed at events beginning this holiday season and running through 2022.

“In the aftermath of this [pandemic,]” Weingarten said, “we thought we would step in and do something muscular and fun.”

The $2 million, multi-year campaign kicked off Tuesday in the cafeteria of Malcolm X Elementary School in Washington, D.C., a majority-Black school where a hand-drawn banner reading “My Black is Beautiful” hung above the lectern. After the event, which concluded with read-aloud groups, students were sent home with books by Black authors or that featured Black main characters, including and . 

The AFT’s ambitious effort drops as controversies over what students learn — and read — roil to fever pitch. In late November, the American Library Association said that schools had seen than at any previous point in recent decades.

“What we’re observing, really in the last year, is a real effort to remove books dealing with the LGBTQ person’s experience, or the experiences of persons who are Black, Indigenous or persons of color,” ALA Director Deborah Caldwell-Stone told ����Ӱ��. 

Many of those challenges have come from parents and community members who have received materials from conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education and No Left Turn in Education, Caldwell-Stone said. Social media frequently accelerates complaints, she added, noting that the ALA often sees parents from disparate locations object to the same titles in the days after a video or post goes viral online.

In mid-November, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to look into “criminal activity in our public schools involving the availability of pornography” — as legislators also passed legislation tamping down how teachers can approach conversations related to race and gender in the classroom. Amid the fervor, state GOP Rep. Matt Krause reached out directly to superintendents asking whether books on an list could be found on their shelves.

None of the works that the AFT specified it will give to students are on that list, but many do address race and racial identity.

“The titles that we’re distributing today are ensuring that kids have diversity in the books that they’re reading,” Weingarten said. 

Rep. Krause did not respond to requests for comment on the union’s new initiative.

Numerous studies document persistent racial and gender gaps in representation within the youth literature genre. In 2018, , while Black, Asian, Hispanic and Indigenous people led 10 percent, 7 percent, 5 percent and 1 percent of titles, respectively, according to numbers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center.

Throughout the rest of December, 20 local AFT affiliates from Puerto Rico to Houston to Indiana will hold literacy events similar to Tuesday’s kick-off in the nation’s capital. In the new year, book-laden buses will distribute volumes to students in harder-to-reach areas.

Books will be reflective of those students’ linguistic and racial background, AFT communications director Leslie Getzinger wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��.

In addition to distributing books, the 1.7 million-member union also intends to equip teachers and parents with tips for boosting literacy, including providing instructors with information on the science of reading. The approach, long backed by research, emphasizes phonics and decoding words over text recognition through exposure and context. While more and more teacher training programs have adopted the science of reading, there is still dissension at the district and classroom level over how best to teach reading and confront a national epidemic of illiteracy.

Collaboration between schools and families will also be a lynchpin of the new efforts, the AFT said in a .

The union hopes that its campaign will help students catch up on learning they may have missed during the pandemic. The latest research on academic achievement finds that, overall, students are three months behind in reading, and that students at majority-Black schools may be as many as 12 months behind their peers at majority-white schools.

But in addition to making up for academic losses, some officials involved in the literacy effort know that the possibilities extend far beyond the classroom. In the AFT’s release, Weingarten refers to reading as “key to life, to joy—to our very existence,”

From the Malcolm X Elementary School cafeteria, D.C. union President Jacqueline Pogue-Lyons read the young students a quote from their building’s namesake:

“People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.”