Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids
Fueled by fears of school shootings, the market has grown rapidly for technologies that monitor students through official school emails and chats
For Adam Jasinski, a technology director for a school district outside of St Louis, Missouri, monitoring student emails used to be a time-consuming job. Jasinski used to do keyword searches of the official school email accounts for the districts 2,600 students, looking for words like suicide or marijuana. Then he would have to read through every message that included one of the words. The process would occasionally catch some concerning behavior, but it was cumbersome, Jasinski recalled.
Last year Jasinski heard about a new option: following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the technology company Bark was offering schools free, automated, 24-hour-a-day surveillance of what students were writing in their school emails, shared documents and chat messages, and sending alerts to school officials any time the monitoring technology flagged concerning phrases.
The automated alerts were a game-changer, said Jason Buck, the principal of the Missouri districts middle school. One Friday evening last fall, Buck was watching television at home when Bark alerted him that one of his students had just written an email to another student talking about self-harm. The principal immediately called the first students mother: Is the student with you? he asked. Are they safe?
Generation Columbine: how mass shootings changed America's schools
Read more
Before his school used Bark, the principal said, school officials would not know about cyberbullying or a student talking about hurting themselves unless one of their friends decided to tell an adult about it. Now, he said, Bark has taken that piece out of it. The other student doesnt have to feel like theyre betraying or tattling or anything like that.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/22/school-student-surveillance-bark-gaggle