'Not unlike protecting children in a playground:' Iowa schools look for evidence of self harm in emails

Day and night, Urbandale schools track what students write in online documents or send from email addresses associated with the school district. 

The district is one of more than a dozen in Iowa that has contracts with a company that flags students' school-related emails and documents, searching for signs students may be in danger. 

"There are times we might get this at 1:00 in the morning and we ensure our building principal calls the student's home and/or calls the police department and request a well-check home visit," said Urbandale Superintendent of Schools Steve Bass.  

The monitoring company Urbandale schools use, Gaggle, serves 14 school districts in Iowa at a rate of $6 per student annually. Gaggle is one of a handful of companies in the business of monitoring emails and, in some cases, tracking students' social media posts. 

The Iowa Department of Education does not track how many school districts have such contracts, but critics of the practice say there is evidence — news articles and statistics cited by companies — suggesting that their popularity is increasing. 

“I don’t think anyone has any comprehensive case of how common this is,” said Faiza Patel, co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty & National Security Program. "I think it is an emerging trend."

In Iowa City, school officials have secured federal funding to implement a program for tracking students' use of district-issued laptops and student social media profiles. 

The district has not decided what this surveillance will look like. Matt Degner, assistant superintendent for Iowa City schools, said that before entering an agreement, the district plans to look at how Urbandale and other comparably sized school districts across the nation monitor students' online presence. 

The focus, as Degner explains it, is to keep kids safe. He described a hypothetical situation in which a student writes in an email that they might harm themselves. 

"I think most parents would want to know," he said.

How surveillance works in Urbandale

Bill McCullough, spokesperson for Gaggle, maintains that hundreds of students are alive today because of Gaggle's interventions. McCollough said schools and police have been able to prevent 167 suicide attempts since July alone. 

McCollough described one recent case in which a mother was on a plane when her child sent an email to her indicating an intention to commit suicide. Before the parent could land and take action, Gaggle had flagged the email.

"Obviously if you are the mother and you are on the plane — I don't know if she had wifi — but I would have been horrified," said McCollough, who declined to identify the school the student attended. "Our team intercepted that message [and] got it to the school district, who sent law enforcement to the house as that child was in the middle of a suicide attempt and was able to stop it."

The company uses an algorithm to review students' school-issued email accounts and associated Google and Microsoft Office activity for a laundry list of concerns.

"We're looking for kids who are in crisis, whether that be cyber-bullying, anxiety and depression, suicide, violence from others, drugs and alcohol, child pornography," said McCullough. 

The algorithm looks not only for certain keywords, he said, but also takes into account a student's tone. When a message or activity is flagged, a team of analysts evaluates the severity of the threat and alerts the school. 

McCollough said Gaggle has identified students in need of drug addiction services as well as those scheduling illegal drug transactions. 

"The kids will use Google documents and Microsoft documents and open them up and share it — and they will openly talk about drug deals, and say 'meet you at 2-o'clock in the boys' bathroom; I have your supply,' or whatever it may be,'" McCollough said. "So we do find drug deals that we've enabled schools to intervene [in] as [they are] happening." 

Gaggle documented about 450 instances where staff immediately alerted schools to severe drug and alcohol-related incidents.

"It's not unlike protecting children in a playground that might have some dangerous things," McCollough said. "This online playground has a lot of kids who cry for help."

The promise and the fears surrounding student surveillance

The U.S. Department of Justice has awarded Iowa City Schools a $187,000 grant to establish a threat assessment team, including $77,000 to hire a company to monitor students' social media.  

The department's Community Oriented Policing Services office points to two reports that recommend social media monitoring: A U.S. Secret Service report detailing how a threat assessment team can help prevent school violence and a report the Federal Commission on School Safety issued after the February 2018 mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school that left 17 dead. 

"The benefits would outweigh any harms," said COPS representative Sheryl Thomas.

The Secret Service report does not explicitly list social media monitoring as a way of identifying at-risk students, though it does refer to examining the social media presence of students who may pose a possible risk to themselves or others. The commission report recommends school districts use "appropriate systems" to monitor social media, and points to examples of schools creating anonymous reporting portals for students. 

Critics of the idea are quick to list potential harms. The Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and public policy institute at New York University, recently released a report recommending that schools exercise caution in monitoring students' social media. 

The Gaggle service for Urbandale schools, by contrast to the one planned for Iowa City, focuses on student emails. The Brennan Center's Patel, however, said researchers found many of the same concerns with both practices. 

The Brennan Center report contends there is little proof that such monitoring is effective at flagging students in need of help and warns that it may stifle freedom of expression. It cautions that in instances where the surveillance leads to punishment, students of color are disproportionately likely to be penalized. 

“There’s a lot of hype in this field that people really need to focus on what these companies are actually able to deliver,” said Patel, who co-authored the paper. 

In describing his interest in social media monitoring to the Iowa City School board, Degner, the assistant superintendent, urged his bosses to have the "courage" to consider online monitoring options, in addition to existing support for students considering self-harm. 

The most recent state-run Iowa Youth Survey, completed in 2018, found that 1 in 10 students reported having planned in the previous 12 months to kill themselves. 

Pat McGovern, coordinator of the survey, serves as a resource to school districts crafting plans to improve the climate in their schools. He said he has seen news reports of social media and online surveillance in other states, but has not heard directly from school districts employing the services.

His advice to school administrators considering these monitoring options is make sure there are programs in place to help students, not merely to detect their need for help.

“It doesn’t do a lot of good to build a system if we are not keeping up with that system," McGovern said. "I’m not saying the school district is or isn’t doing that, but that would be my biggest question.”