Bryce Vickmark for The New York Times
John G. Palfrey Jr. of
Phillips Academy said he was cautious about Internet tools that allowed
too much surveillance of students.
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: October 28, 2013 175 Comments
SAN FRANCISCO — For years, a school principal’s job was to make sure
students were not creating a ruckus in the hallways or smoking in the
bathroom. Vigilance ended at the schoolhouse gates.
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Graham Hughes for The New York Times
Chris Frydrych founded a company, Geo Listening, that
reviews the public posts of students for school administrators.
Readers’ Comments
"If it doesn't happen on the bus to or from school, or on school grounds, it is none of their business. "JB, Minnesota
Now, as students complain, taunt and sometimes cry out for help on
social media, educators have more opportunities to monitor students
around the clock. And some schools are turning to technology to help
them. Several companies offer services to filter and glean what students
do on school networks; a few now offer automated tools to comb through
off-campus postings for signs of danger. For school officials, this
raises new questions about whether they should — or legally can —
discipline children for their online outbursts.
The problem has taken on new urgency with the case of a 12-year-old Florida girl who committed suicide after classmates relentlessly bullied her online and offline.
Two girls — ages 12 and 14 — who the authorities contend were her chief
tormentors were arrested this month after one posted a Facebook comment
about her death.
Educators find themselves needing to balance students’ free speech
rights against the dangers children can get into at school and sometimes
with the law because of what they say in posts on Facebook, Twitter and
Tumblr. Courts have started to weigh in.
In September, a federal appeals court in Nevada, for instance, sided
with school officials who suspended a high school sophomore for
threatening, through messages on Myspace, to shoot classmates. In 2011,
an Indiana court ruled that school officials had violated the
Constitution when they disciplined students for posting pictures on
Facebook of themselves at a slumber party, posing with rainbow-colored
lollipops shaped like phalluses.
“It is a concern and in some cases, a major problem for school
districts,” said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of the American
Association of School Administrators, which represents public school
superintendents.
Surveillance of students’ online speech, he said, can be cumbersome and
confusing. “Is this something that a student has the right to do, or is
this something that flies against the rules and regulations of a
district?”
Interviews with educators suggest that surveillance of students off
campus is still mostly done the old-fashioned way, by relying on
students to report trouble or following students on social networks.
Tracking students on social media comes with its own risks: One
principal in Missouri resigned last year after accusations that she had
snooped on students using a fake Facebook account. “It was our children
she was monitoring,” said
one Twitter user who identified herself as Judy Rayford, after the news
broke last year, without, she added, “authorization” from children or
parents.
But technology is catching on.
In August, officials in Glendale, a suburb in Southern California, paid
Geo Listening, a technology company, to comb through the social network
posts of children in the district. The company said its service was not
to pry, but to help the district, Glendale Unified, protect its students
after suicides by teenagers in the area.
Students mocked the effort on Twitter, saying officials at G.U.S.D., the
Glendale Unified School District, would not “even understand what I
tweet most of the time, they should hire a high school slang analyst #shoutout2GUSD.”
“We should be monitoring gusd instead,” one Twitter user wrote after an instructor was arrested on charges of sexual abuse; the instructor pleaded not guilty.
Chris Frydrych, the chief executive of Geo Listening, based in Hermosa
Beach, also in Southern California, declined to explain how his
company’s technology worked, except to say that it was “a sprinkling of
technology and a whole lot of human capital.” He said Geo Listening
looked for keywords and sentiments on posts that could be viewed
publicly. It cannot, for instance, read anyone’s Facebook posts that are
designated for “friends” or “friends of friends.”
But with Facebook’s announcement
this month that teenagers will be permitted to post public status
updates and images, Geo Listening and similar services will potentially
have access to more information on that social network.
Glendale has paid Geo Listening $40,500 to monitor the social media
posts. Mr. Frydrych declined to say which other schools his company
works with, except to predict that by the end of the year, his company
would have signed up 3,000 schools.
David Jones of CompuGuardian, based in Salt Lake City, said his product
let school officials monitor whether students were researching topics
like how to build bombs or discussing anorexia. His customers include
five schools, but he, too, is optimistic about market growth.
“It helps you boil down to what students are having what problems,” he said. “And then you can drill down.”
But when does protecting children from each other or from themselves turn into chilling free speech?
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Correction: October 30, 2013
An article on Tuesday about some schools’ efforts to monitor their students’ off-campus Internet postings for signs of trouble described incorrectly the victims of a shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007. The victims included nonstudents; not all of the 32 killed were students.
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