California School District Monitoring Students' Social Media Accounts

A school district in Glendale, California has hired a firm to monitor social media posts on websites including Facebook and Twitter for one year.  The goal of this program is to identify potentially suicidal students, cyber bullying, drug use, or truancy.   The school would then be able to seek out the students in question and hopefully resolve their issues.  Although all students fall under the scope of this program, the firm can only look at social media posts that are public – private posts or pages are off-limits.

Although this might seem like a good program, the consequences of student surveillance in this manner are severe.  When I first saw this article, I was immediately reminded of the news story a few years ago involving a school inthe Philadelphia-area that took webcam photos of students with their school-issued laptops, without their knowledge or permission.   Blake Robbins, a student at this school, was sitting in his room eating “Mike and Ike” candies in front of his laptop – a picture was taken of this, without his knowledge, via the webcam on his laptop.  He was later reprimanded by the vice-principal, who saw this picture and mistook the candies for drugs.  Robbins ended up suing the school, and it was later brought to light that the school had been collecting hundreds upon hundreds of webcam photos from all students without their knowledge.  The school ended up paying $610,000 to settle two lawsuits related to the incident.   This school had no concept of boundaries whatsoever, and the results where horrifying – spying on students in their own homes, Big Brother style.

Although the California school district is not spying on student’s webcams, it is definitely pushing boundaries.  Just like in the case of Robbins’ school, there could be false-positives where the school interprets an innocent picture or post out of context.  What if this California school reprimanded a student for posting a picture of eating Mike and Ike’s, because they mistook it for pills?  Perhaps that student would get suspended, or punished, on that basis – we have no idea, and that is exactly the problem.  The school is asserting itself as an authority in this matter, and they are the judge of whatever students post.  If the school can reprimand students for things that happen outside of school, and especially for things that can be taken out of context like a social media post, this is a clear violation of boundaries.

The school should worry about affairs that happen inside of the school – words and pictures that are exchanged on school property are fair game for the school’s jurisdiction.  However, things like social media that students do outside of school should not concern the school at all.  Parents should be responsible to make sure their child is using social media responsibly, not the school. 

I was disturbed when I watched the video that went along with the article in the CNN link above – some of the people in that video seemed to think that the school should indeed be monitoring their students, and one person even went so far as to suggest that parents should consider making sure their children’s social media accounts are public so that they will be fair game for the school to monitor.  This logic is completely counter-intuitive and backwards.  There is no way that a parent would want their child’s social media accounts to be public for the world to see.  Even if the parent thought it was a good idea for the school to be monitoring their child, making the social media account public would open it up for any stranger to see and interpret what their child is doing.  I certainly would not want strangers knowing what my child is up to, especially since some could be watching with malicious intentions, trying to use the social media account as a way of determining what times of day that child is away from safety.  A public social media account also means that everything that child posts is also public for anyone to archive and remain on the internet forever, which is extremely ill-advised because there are plenty of things that children say in middle and high school that seem like a good idea at the time, but that they may regret for a long time to come.

I think in the end, the parents should accept responsibility for their children’s well-being outside of school, NOT the school itself.  Having the school take on this responsibility opens up too many negative possibilities, including students being reprimanded for posts that were taken too far out of context.  In the Blake Robbins’ case, it was clear that the school may have had good intentions, but it was so reckless with regards to privacy that it was downright sickening.  Ultimately, parents need to accept responsibility over their children outside of school, and the school needs to limit its authority to what goes on inside of school, or else we will continue to have cases like with Blake Robbins where schools will immensely overstep their boundaries, all with good intentions, but with extremely negative consequences.