A student works on a computer at an elementary school in Provo, Utah. School districts across the country have implemented computer monitoring platforms that analyze what students do on school-issued devices and flag activities that may indicate a risk of self-harm or threat to others. (George Frey/Getty Images)
Whether it’s a research project about the Civil War or a science experiment about volcanic eruptions, students in the Colonial School District near Wilmington, Delaware, can look up just about anything on their school-issued laptops.
But in one case, an elementary school student searched for “how to die.”
In that case, Meghan Feby, an elementary school counselor in the district, received a call through a platform called GoGuardian Beacon, whose algorithm flagged the phrase. The system sold by educational software company GoGuardian allows schools to monitor and analyze what students do on school-issued devices and flag any activity that indicates a risk of self-harm or threat to others.
The student who had searched for “how to die” did not want to die and showed no signs of distress, Feby said — the student was searching for information but was not in danger. Still, she appreciates the program.
“I’ve been in a number of situations with GoGuardian where I’m very happy that they came to us and that we were able to intervene,” Feby said.
School districts across the country have widely adopted such computer monitoring platforms. As the youth mental health crisis has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and school violence affecting more and more K-12 students across the country, teachers are desperate to a solution, experts say.
But critics worry about the lack of transparency from companies that have the power to monitor students and choose when to alert school staff. The continued surveillance of students also raises concerns about student data, privacy and freedom of expression.
Although the programs had been available for more than a decade, they saw an increase in use during the pandemic as students shifted to online learning from home, said Jennifer Jones, staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute.
“I think because there are all kinds of issues that school districts are dealing with — like student mental health issues and the dangers of school shootings — I think they [school districts] just think of these as cheap, quick ways to address the problem without questioning the implications for free speech and privacy in a more thoughtful way,” Jones said.
Nearly all indicators of poor mental health, suicidal ideation and behavior increased between 2013 and 2023, according to the latest survey of risk behavior among young people from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During the same period, the percentage of high school students who, according to the CDC report, were threatened or injured at school, missed school due to safety concerns, or experienced forced sex increased.
And the threat of school shootings continues to occupy the minds of many educators. According to The Washington Post’s count, more than 383,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999.
GoGuardian CEO Rich Preece told Stateline that about half of public elementary schools in the United States have installed the company’s platforms.
As a designated person from her school, Feby receives a warning when a student uses certain search terms or word combinations on the school-provided laptops. “It comes to me as an email, or, if it’s very high risk, as a phone call.”
Once Feby is notified, she will decide whether to meet with the student or call the child’s home. If the system identifies troubling activity outside of school hours, GoGuardian Beacon will contact another individual in the county, including law enforcement, in some school districts.
Feby said she had a false alarm. One student was flagged for the song lyrics she looked up. Another had searched for something related to anime.
About a third of the students at Feby’s school come from a home where English is not their first language, meaning students often unintentionally use troubling English terms. Children can be curious too, she said.
Still, it is important to have GoGuardian in the classroom, says Feby. Before becoming a counselor ten years ago, she was a teacher. And after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, she realized that school safety was more important than ever.
Data and privacy
Teddy Hartman, head of privacy at GoGuardian, taught English literature at high schools in East Los Angeles and was a school principal before joining the tech company about four years ago.
Hartman was brought to GoGuardian to help create a robust privacy program, he said, including guardrails about the use of artificial intelligence.
“We thought, ‘How can we collaborate with teachers, the best data scientists, and the best technologists, while at the same time remembering that students and our teachers come first?’” Hartman says.
GoGuardian does not use student data outside of the agreements that school districts have allowed, and that data is not used to train the company’s AI, Hartman said. Companies that regulate what children can do online must also comply with federal laws regarding the safety and privacy of minors, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule.
But privacy experts still worry about the extent to which these types of companies should have access to student data.
School districts across the country are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on contracts with some of the leading computer monitoring vendors — including GoGuardian, Gaggle and others — without fully assessing the privacy and civil rights implications, said Clarence Okoh, a senior attorney at the Center . on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University Law Center.
In 2021, while many schools were just beginning to see the effects of online learning, The 74, a nonprofit education news outlet, published an investigation into how Gaggle operated in Minneapolis schools. Hundreds of documents revealed how one school system’s students were subjected to constant digital surveillance long after the school day was over, including at home, the outlet reported.
That level of ubiquitous surveillance could have far-reaching consequences, Okoh said. First, in jurisdictions where lawmakers have expanded censorship of “divisive concepts” in schools, including critical race theory and LGBTQ+ themes, the ability of schools to monitor conversations involving these terms is concerning, he said.
A report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights organization based in San Francisco, illustrates which types of keyword triggers are blocked or flagged for administrators. In one example, GoGuardian flagged a student for visiting the text of a Bible verse that contained the word “naked,” the report said. In another case, a Texas House of Representatives site with information about “cannabis” laws was flagged.
GoGuardian and Gaggle both also removed LGBTQ+ terms from their keyword lists after the foundation’s initial request for data, the group said.
But gaining a full understanding of how these companies monitor students is challenging due to a lack of transparency, Jones said. It is difficult to get information from private technology companies, and most of their data is not made public, she said.
Do they work?
Years before the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, the school district purchased a technology service to monitor what students did on social media, according to The Dallas Morning News. According to the newspaper, the district sent two payments to the company Social Sentinel, totaling more than $9,900.
Although costs vary, some school districts spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on online monitoring programs. According to the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, the Muscogee County School District in Georgia paid $137,829 in initial costs to install GoGuardian on the district’s Chromebooks. In Maryland, Montgomery County Public Schools cut GoGuardian from its budget for the 2024-2025 school year after spending $230,000 on it annually, and later switched to Lightspeed, according to the Wootton Common Sense.
Despite the spending, there’s no way to prove these technologies work, says Chad Marlow, a senior policy adviser at the American Civil Liberties Union who has written 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 detailing their Bark for Schools program. The Gaggle company’s website says it has saved 5,790 lives between 2018 and 2023.
These data points are measured by the number of alerts the systems generate that indicate a student is close to harming themselves or others. But there is little evidence that this type of school safety technology is effective, the ACLU report said.
“You can’t use data to say that something would have happened if no action had been taken,” says Marlow.
Computer monitoring programs are just one example of a general increase in school surveillance across the country, including cameras, facial recognition technology and more. And increased scrutiny won’t necessarily deter harmful behavior, Marlow said.
“A lot of schools say, ‘You know what, we have $50,000 to spend, I’m going to spend it on a student monitoring product that doesn’t work, instead of a door that locks or a mental health counselor,’” Marlow said.
Some experts are calling 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, can also contribute to emotional and mental well-being.
But that’s in an ideal world, GoGuardian’s Hartman said. Computer monitoring platforms are not the only solution to solving the epidemic of mental health and youth violence, but they are intended to help, he said.
“We were founded by engineers,” Hartman said. “So, in our part of this world, is there anything we can do, from a school technology perspective, that can help by being a tool in the toolbox? It is not the end goal.”
This story is republished from Stateline, a sister publication of the Kentucky Lantern and part of the nonprofit States Newsroom network.
