Aimee Breaux reports: Iowa City Community School District has secured federal funding to monitor students’ social media accounts for possible warning signs that students might harm themselves or peers. A portion of the $187,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice is earmarked to contract a company to scan social media posts of students in the district. The district received the…
Category: Youth & Schools
Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids
Lois Beckett reports: 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 district’s 2,600 students, looking for words like “suicide” or “marijuana”. Then he would have…
WA: Yakima School District drug screening records subject of lawsuit
Janelle Retka reports: The Yakima School District has filed a lawsuit in Yakima County Superior Court seeking permission to withhold confidential employee medical information in a public records request — some of which had already been released. The case, which involves drug screening paperwork for district employees and job applicants, raises questions about the state’s…
School computer monitoring program makes botched debut
Michael S. Lockett reports: The Juneau School District is attempting to provide parents, students and school board members more information about a new computer monitoring program that was installed this school year without prior notification. JSD informed parents via email about Bark — software which monitors for “harmful” content including school shooters, self-harm, pornography and…