Deputy Greg Everhart of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department checks to make sure doors are locked in May 2014 at a middle school in Littleton, Colorado. (RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post/Getty Images)

More than 1 in 10 schools with a regular police presence removed officers from their roles in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis cop, new federal data on campus crime and safety suggest.

Nearly 44% of public K-12 schools were staffed with school resource officers at least once a week during the 2021-22 school year, according to a national survey released Wednesday by the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics. Between Floyd’s murder in May 2020 and June 2022, more than 50 school districts nationwide ended their school resource officer programs or cut their budgets following widespread Black Lives Matter protests and concerns that campus policing has detrimental effects on students — and Black youth in particular.

The data reflect an 11% decrease in school policing from the 2019-20 school year, when more than 49% of schools had a regular police presence, according to the nationally representative federal survey. That year, schools underwent an increase in campus policing after the 2018 mass school shootings in Parkland, Florida, and Santa Fe, Texas, prompted a surge in new security funding and mandates, a pattern that could repeat itself when future federal numbers capture the nation’s reaction to the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

“This is the George Floyd effect,” said criminal justice researcher Shawn Bushway, who pulled up a calculator during a telephone interview with The 74 and crunched the federal survey data against a tally of districts that removed cops from their buildings, which collectively served more than 1.7 million students.

“It’s not seismic, but I think what’s most interesting about it is that it’s the reversal of a trend in a fairly dramatic way,” said Bushway, a University at Albany in New York professor. “It’s been going up quite a bit and now it’s dropped.”

The new federal data were published the same week as Thursday’s release of a damning U.S. Department of Justice report that cited “critical failures” by police during the May 2022 mass shooting at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School in which 19 students and two teachers were killed. During the shooting, 376 law enforcement officers responded to the scene but waited more than an hour to confront the 18-year-old shooter, a botched reaction that disregarded established police protocols and, investigators said, cost lives.

“Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in an active shooter situation and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a Thursday afternoon press conference in Uvalde.

“Their loved ones deserved better,” he said.

Chris Chapman, the associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said on a press call Tuesday that the survey data didn’t make clear a definitive reason for the decline in school-based officers. Experts said that several other factors, including campus closures during the pandemic, budget constraints and a national police officer shortage, may have also contributed.

New federal survey data show the number of school resource officers regularly stationed on K-12 campuses declined by about five percentage points — or roughly 11% — between the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years. (National Center for Education Statistics)

Either way, the downward trend may be short-lived.

Multiple districts that cut their school resource officer programs after Floyd’s murder, including those in Denver, Colorado, and Arlington, Virginia, reversed course after educators reported an uptick in classroom disorder after COVID-era remote learning. Mass school shootings have long driven efforts to bolster campus policing, a reality that has played out in the last several years as the nation experienced an unprecedented number of such attacks.

Despite officers’ grievously mishandled response in Uvalde, the shooting led to renewed efforts in Texas and elsewhere to strengthen police presence in schools. A similar situation played out after the mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Federal data show national growth in campus policing even after the school resource officer assigned to the Broward County campus failed to confront the gunman, who killed 17 people.

Former Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School School Resource Officer Scot Peterson participates in a media interview after he was acquitted of criminal charges in June 2023. (Getty Images)

The now-former officer, Scot Peterson, was acquitted of criminal negligence and perjury charges but faces a new trial in a civil lawsuit by shooting victims’ families, who allege his failure to intervene during the six-minute attack displayed a “wanton and willful disregard” for students’ and teachers’ safety. Qualified immunity generally protects officers from liability for mistakes made on the job.

After Parkland, a new Florida law required an armed security presence on every K-12 campus. The Uvalde shooting led to similar mandates in Texas and Kentucky. In both states, a police officer labor shortage, which experts said may have contributed to the 2021-22 decline in schools, has hindered officials’ efforts to comply. In Kentucky, more than 40% of schools lack school resource officers, a reality that school officials have blamed on a lack of funding and a depleted applicant pool.

Tyler Whittenberg

“It wouldn’t surprise me if, when that data comes back out, we see that spike go back up,” said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, which offers a training program for campus cops. “It’s not the way I want to gain business, but some of the busiest years we’ve had training wise are 18 months after a school massacre. I can tell you that 2019 was the biggest year in our association’s history by far — and that’s coming right off the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre.”

Advocates for police-free schools recognize the headwinds they face. Tyler Whittenberg, the deputy director of the Advancement Project’s Opportunity to Learn initiative, said that while advocates “are proud of the victories that were won” after George Floyd’s murder, educators who removed police from schools “are fighting really hard to hold onto those gains,” some of which face state efforts to place police in districts that don’t want them.

“We’re not really rushing to a conclusion that this represents an overall reduction in police in schools, especially because for many of our partners on the ground this is not their day-to-day experience,” he said. “They’re having to fight back — especially at the state level — against efforts to increase the number of police in their schools.”

Law enforcement officers stand watch near a memorial dedicated to the 19 children and two adults murdered on May 24, 2022 during the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Safety threats on the decline

In the 1970s, just 1% of schools were staffed by police. Decades of efforts since then to swell their ranks have coincided with a marked improvement in campus safety.

During the 2021-22 school year, 67% of schools reported at least one violent crime on campus, totaling some 857,500 violent incidents. Federal data show the nation’s schools experienced a violent crime rate of 18 incidents per 1,000 students in 2021-22. That’s a steep decline from 1999-00, when schools recorded a violent crime rate of 32 incidents per 1,000, and 2009-10, when the violent crime rate was 25 per 1,000.

Police officers’ contributions to making schools safer over the past two decades, however, remain the subject of ongoing research and heated debate. In a study last year, which was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Bushway and his colleagues found that placing school resource officers on campuses led to a marginal decline in some forms of school violence. And although researchers were unable to analyze officers’ effects on mass school shootings because such tragedies are statistically rare, they were associated with an uptick in reported firearm offenses — suggesting an increased detection of guns. The officers were also associated with a stark uptick in student disciplinary actions, including suspensions and arrests, particularly among Black students and those with disabilities.

“There’s a cost-benefit here and everybody’s calculus on how you weigh these different things is going to be different,” Bushway said. “There’s no pure answer to that question, different people are going to answer that question differently.”

Previous research suggests that suspensions do not lead to improved student behaviors or improve school safety, but have detrimental effects on punished students’ academic performance, attendance and behavior. Their effects on non-misbehaving students remain unclear.

Other researchers have reached a much more critical conclusion about the effects of school-based police on students. In a meta-analysis published in November on the existing literature into school officers’ efficacy, researchers failed to identify evidence that school-based law enforcement promoted safety in schools but reinforced concerns that their presence “criminalizes students and schools.”

“I think the evidence is increasingly supporting the notion that police don’t belong in schools,” report author Ben Fisher, an associate professor of civil society and community studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The 74. Removing officers who have been there for years, he said, may cause problems of its own. “If we’re going to get police out of schools, which I think is the right long-term vision and short-term vision, I think we need to do it thoughtfully with plans in place to make schools welcoming and supportive.”

New federal survey data show that school resource officers in urban districts are less likely to be armed than those in rural and suburban areas. (National Center for Education Statistics) 

The federal survey, which was conducted between Feb. 15 and July 19, 2022, also found large geographical differences in the types of tools that school-based police use on the job. Across the board, officers in urban areas were less likely than their rural and suburban counterparts to carry guns and pepper spray or to be equipped with body-worn cameras.

Beyond data on campus policing, the new federal survey offers a comprehensive look at the state of campus safety and security, reflecting school leaders’ responses to the pandemic and record numbers of mass school shootings. Other findings include:

• In 2021-22, about 49% of schools provided diagnostic mental health assessments to evaluate students for mental health disorders. This is a decline from 2019-20, when 55% conducted assessments. Meanwhile, 38% provided students with treatments for mental health disorders in 2021-22, down from 42% in 2019-20.

• Restorative justice, a conflict resolution technique, was used in 59% of schools in 2021-22, which was similar to 2019-20 but an increase from the 42% that used the approach in 2017-18.
• The latest data indicate a decline in campus drug and alcohol incidents. In 2021-22, 71% of schools reported at least one incident involving the distribution, possession or use of illegal drugs, down from 77% in 2019-20. Meanwhile, 34% reported at least one alcohol-related incident in 2021-22, down from 41% in 2019-20.

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Supporters of Israel exchange insults with supporters of Palestine during a rally on Nov. 16 at New York University. (Andrew Lichtenstein/Getty Images)

Amid reports of heightened antisemitism and Islamophobia in schools and colleges since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, a senior Education Department official said the agency has received a “huge, huge influx” of civil rights complaints that have led to a surge in federal investigations.

Since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists on Israel and the subsequent bombing and invasion of Gaza by the Israeli military, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has opened 29 investigations into schools’ and colleges’ responses to complaints of discrimination based on shared ancestry, which includes antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Of the new investigations, the senior official told The 74, 19 are in response to conduct that unfolded in schools in the last two months alone. Of the incidents since Oct. 7 that are now under investigation, 17 took place on college campuses.

Last fiscal year, by contrast, the office opened 28 shared ancestry investigations over the entire 12-month period. The year before, there were just 15. Such inquiries seek to determine whether schools adequately respond to incidents that create hostile learning environments in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, ethnicity or national origin.

“We are deeply concerned about the incidents that we’ve seen reported in schools all over the country, and about the safety of students, and the protection of non-discrimination rights for students in P-12 schools as well as in institutions of higher education,” Catherine Lhamon, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, said in an interview Wednesday with The 74. “We’re very, very concerned about what we’re seeing in schools.”

Catherine Lhamon, the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, said the agency is “deeply concerned” about antisemitic and islamophobic incidents that have riled campuses nationwide since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Though officials declined to comment on the specifics of active federal investigations, a spike in reported antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents in and outside of schools have convulsed the nation and elevated student safety concerns.

Near Louisiana’s Tulane University, a clash between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protesters turned violent and police are investigating a hit-and-run at Stanford University as a potential hate crime targeting an Arab Muslim student. At Rutgers University, officials suspended its “Students for Justice in Palestine” chapter following claims the group disrupted classes and vandalized campus. At Harvard University, a rabbi said he was instructed by administrators to hide the campus menorah each night of Hanukkah due to vandalism fears. In California, a college professor was charged with involuntary manslaughter and battery after an alleged physical altercation broke out at a demonstration that led to the death of a Jewish protester.

Outside of schools, police said a 6-year-old Chicago boy was stabbed to death and his mother seriously injured by their landlord in an alleged anti-Muslim attack, and in Burlington, Vermont, three college students of Palestinian descent were shot while walking down a sidewalk over Thanksgiving weekend.

The escalating confrontations have embroiled school leaders, who have been criticized for failing to clamp down on hate speech and discrimination. Just days after a tense Dec. 5 House committee hearing in Washington about rising antisemitism on college campuses, Elizabeth Magill resigned as University of Pennsylvania president. She and the presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were accused of being equivocating and evasive after giving carefully worded replies to repeated questions about whether calling for the “genocide of Jews” violated their schools’ code of conduct. Magill responded that it’s “a context-dependent decision,” underscoring school leaders’ obligations to ensure safe learning environments while protecting people’s free speech rights.

Harvard University President Claudine Gay announced her resignation Tuesday after facing similar scrutiny for her testimony at the congressional hearing and unrelated plagiarism allegations.

Of the 29 active federal Title VI investigations opened since Oct. 7, just eight are focused on incidents in K-12 schools — including at three of the nation’s 10 largest districts. Among them are the New York City Department of Education, the Clark County School District in Las Vegas, Hillsborough County Schools in Tampa, Florida, and the Cobb County School District in suburban Atlanta.

A pro-Israel counter protestor wrapped in the flag of Israel is escorted away from a vigil organized by New York University students in support of Palestinians in New York City on October 17. (Alex Kent/Getty Images)

Though the circumstances prompting the investigations remain unknown, many of the institutions included on the Education Department’s list of active investigations have experienced high-profile incidents involving discrimination.

In New York City, a raucous, pro-Palestinian protest broke out at a Queens high school and prompted a lockdown after a teacher posted a picture of herself at a pro-Israel rally on social media. Also turning to social media, one student said the teacher “is going to be executed in the town square,” and another promoted “a riot” against her.

In suburban Atlanta, the Cobb County School District sparked controversy following the Hamas attack when it sent an email to the school community that warned of an “international threat,” noting that “while there is no reason to believe this threat has anything to do with our schools, parents can expect both law enforcement and school staff to take every step to keep your children safe.” Because of the message, several Muslim parents said their children had become the targets of Islamophobic bullying.

In a January fact sheet, the civil rights office highlighted hypothetical instances that put school districts at odds with their Title VI obligations. Among them: A Jewish student is targeted by his peers with swastikas and Nazi salutes but his teacher tells him to “just ignore it” without taking steps to address the harassment. Another example involves school officials failing to remedy a Muslim student’s complaints that she was called a “terrorist” and told “you started 9/11.”

Bucknell University students march in a “Shut it Down for Palestine” demonstration, where participants called for a ceasefire in Gaza and cutting U.S. aid to Israel. (Paul Weaver/Getty Images)

Even before the most recent conflict between Hamas and Israel, law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have reported an uptick in hate crimes over the last several years, including on campuses.

Reported hate crimes surged 7% between 2021 and 2022, according to federal data released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in October, including a 36% increase in anti-Jewish incidents — which accounted for more than half of incidents based on religion. Among all reported hate crimes, 10% occurred at K-12 schools and colleges.

The Education Department last month released its most recent Civil Rights Data Collection, the first since the pandemic. Students reported 42,500 harassment allegations during the 2020-21 school year, including bullying on the basis of sex, race, sexual orientation, disability and religion. Of those, 29% involved harassment or bullying on the basis of race while only a sliver — 3% — involved students saying they were targeted because of their religion.

The current climate has put Jewish college students on edge, according to a recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit focused on eradicating antisemitism. Since the beginning of the academic year, 73% of Jewish college students said they’ve been witness to antisemitism. Prior to this school year, 70% reported experiencing antisemitism throughout their entire college experience. Yet just 30% of Jewish college students said their college administration has taken sufficient steps to address anti-Jewish prejudice.

During a televised interview on MSNBC Friday, Jonathan Greenblatt, the national director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said he thought conditions would improve on college campuses for Jewish students because the Title VI investigations now being launched by the Education Department would force college administrators to take action.

Muslim Americans of all ages have similarly reported an uptick in hateful rhetoric. In a two-week period between Oct. 7 and Oct. 24, reports of bias incidents and requests for help at the Council on American-Islamic Relations surged 182% from the average 16-day period in 2022.

As lawmakers call on school leaders to take a stronger stance against hate speech, they’ve faced pushback from free speech advocates. Earlier this month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul warned university presidents of “aggressive enforcement action” if they failed to discipline students “calling for the genocide of any group of people.” In a statement, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a right-leaning nonprofit focused on students’ free speech rights, said Hochul’s admonition “cannot be squared with the First Amendment.”

“Colleges and universities can and should punish ‘calls for genocide’ when such speech falls into one of the narrowly defined categories of unprotected speech, including true threats, incitement and discriminatory harassment,” the group said in the statement. “But broad, vague bans on ‘calls for genocide,’ absent more, would result in the censorship of protected expression.”

The senior Education Department official said that schools must “navigate carefully” their obligations under Title VI and the First Amendment. Even if a student’s speech is protected, the official said, school leaders still have an obligation to uphold all students’ nondiscrimination rights.

“What concerns me is when a school community throws up its hands and says, ‘This speech is protected and so there’s nothing more for us here,’” said Lhamon, the assistant secretary for civil rights. “That may be true, but that’s only true where a hostile environment isn’t created that the school needs to respond to.”

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Getty Images

Ever since ChatGPT burst onto the scene last year, a heated debate has centered on its potential benefits and pitfalls for students. As educators worry students could use artificial intelligence tools to cheat, a new survey makes clear its impact on young people: They’re getting into trouble.

Half of teachers say they know a student at their school who was disciplined or faced negative consequences for using — or being accused of using — generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT to complete a classroom assignment, according to survey results released Wednesday by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit think tank focused on digital rights and expression. The proportion was even higher, at 58%, for those who teach special education.

Cheating concerns were clear, with survey results showing that teachers have grown suspicious of their students. Nearly two-thirds of teachers said that generative AI has made them “more distrustful” of students and 90% said they suspect kids are using the tools to complete assignments. Yet students themselves who completed the anonymous survey said they rarely use ChatGPT to cheat, but are turning to it for help with personal problems.

“The difference between the hype cycle of what people are talking about with generative AI and what students are actually doing, there seems to be a pretty big difference,” said Elizabeth Laird, the group’s director of equity in civic technology. “And one that, I think, can create an unnecessarily adversarial relationship between teachers and students.”

Indeed, 58% of students, and 72% of those in special education, said they’ve used generative AI during the 2022-23 academic year, just not primarily for the reasons that teachers fear most. Among youth who completed the nationally representative survey, just 23% said they used it for academic purposes and 19% said they’ve used the tools to help them write and submit a paper. Instead, 29% reported having used it to deal with anxiety or mental health issues, 22% for issues with friends and 16% for family conflicts.

Part of the disconnect dividing teachers and students, researchers found, may come down to gray areas. Just 40% of parents said they or their child were given guidance on ways they can use generative AI without running afoul of school rules. Only 24% of teachers say they’ve been trained on how to respond if they suspect a student used generative AI to cheat.

Center for Democracy and Technology

The results on ChatGPT’s educational impacts were included in the Center for Democracy and Technology’s broader annual survey analyzing the privacy and civil rights concerns of teachers, students and parents as tech, including artificial intelligence, becomes increasingly engrained in classroom instruction. Beyond generative AI, researchers observed a sharp uptick in digital privacy concerns among students and parents over last year.

Among parents, 73% said they’re concerned about the privacy and security of student data collected and stored by schools, a considerable increase from the 61% who expressed those reservations last year. A similar if less dramatic trend was apparent among students: 62% had data privacy concerns tied to their schools, compared with 57% just a year earlier.

Center for Democracy and Technology

Those rising levels of anxiety, researchers theorized, are likely the result of the growing frequency of cyberattacks on schools, which have become a primary target for ransomware gangs. High-profile breaches, including in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, have compromised a massive trove of highly sensitive student records. Exposed records, investigative reporting by The 74 has found, include student psychological evaluations, reports detailing campus rape cases, student disciplinary records, closely guarded files on campus security, employees’ financial records and copies of government-issued identification cards.

Survey results found that students in special education, whose records are among the most sensitive that districts maintain, and their parents were significantly more likely than the general education population to report school data privacy and security concerns. As attacks ratchet up, 1 in 5 parents say they’ve been notified that their child’s school experienced a data breach. Such breach notices, Laird said, led to heightened apprehension.

“There’s not a lot of transparency” about school cybersecurity incidents “because there’s not an affirmative reporting requirement for schools,” Laird said. But in instances where parents are notified of breaches, “they are more concerned than other parents about student privacy.”

Parents and students have also grown increasingly wary of another set of education tools that rely on artificial intelligence: digital surveillance technology. Among them are student activity monitoring tools, such as those offered by the for-profit companies Gaggle and GoGuardian, which rely on algorithms in an effort to keep students safe. The surveillance software employs artificial intelligence to sift through students’ online activities and flag school administrators — and sometimes the police — when they discover materials related to sex, drugs, violence or self-harm.

Among parents surveyed this year, 55% said they believe the benefits of activity monitoring outweigh the potential harms, down from 63% last year. Among students, 52% said they’re comfortable with academic activity monitoring, a decline from 63% last year.

Such digital surveillance, researchers found, frequently has disparate impacts on students based on their race, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity, potentially violating longstanding federal civil rights laws.

The tools also extend far beyond the school realm, with 40% of teachers reporting their schools monitor students’ personal devices. More than a third of teachers say they know a student who was contacted by the police because of online monitoring, the survey found, and Black parents were significantly more likely than their white counterparts to fear that information gleaned from online monitoring tools and AI-equipped campus surveillance cameras could fall into the hands of law enforcement.

Center for Democracy and Technology

Meanwhile, as states nationwide pull literature from school library shelves amid a conservative crusade against LGBTQ+ rights, the nonprofit argues that digital tools that filter and block certain online content “can amount to a digital book ban.” Nearly three-quarters of students — and disproportionately LGBTQ+ youth — said that web filtering tools have prevented them from completing school assignments.

The nonprofit highlights how disproportionalities identified in the survey could run counter to federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on race and sex, and those designed to ensure equal access to education for children with disabilities. In a letter sent Wednesday to the White House and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, the Center for Democracy and Technology was joined by a coalition of civil rights groups urging federal officials to take a harder tack on ed tech practices that could threaten students’ civil rights.

“Existing civil rights laws already make schools legally responsible for their own conduct, and that of the companies acting at their direction in preventing discriminatory outcomes on the basis of race, sex and disability,” the coalition wrote. “The department has long been responsible for holding schools accountable to these standards.”

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The report, led by researchers at the University of Chicago and New York University, highlights how the scramble to adopt new technologies in schools has served to create an $85 billion industry with significant data security risks for teachers, parents and students. The issue has become particularly pervasive since the pandemic forced students nationwide into remote, online learning.

Students’ sensitive information is increasingly leaked online following high-profile ransomware attacks and user data monetization is a key business strategy for tech companies, including those that serve the education market, like Google. Yet student privacy is rarely a top consideration when teachers adopt new digital tools, researchers learned in interviews with district technology officials. In fact, schools routinely lack the resources and know-how to assess potential vulnerabilities.

Such a reality could spell trouble: In an analysis of education technologies widely used or endorsed by districts nationwide, researchers discovered privacy risks abound. The analysis relied on Blacklight, a privacy inspector tool created by the nonprofit news website The Markup which scours websites to uncover data-sharing practices. Those include the use of cookies that track user behaviors to deliver personalized advertisements. Analyzed education tools, they found, make “extensive use of tracking technologies” with potential privacy implications.

Most alarming to the researchers were the 7.4% that used “session recorders,” a type of tracker that documents a user’s every move.

“Anyone visiting those sites would have their entire session captured which includes information such as which links they clicked on, what images they hovered over and even data entered into fields but not submitted,” the report notes. “This could include data that users might otherwise consider private such as the autofilling of saved user credentials or social network data.”

LA School Report caught up with report co-author Jake Chanenson, a University of Chicago Ph.D. student, to gain insight into the report’s findings and to understand why he believes that parents and students should be concerned about how ed tech companies collect, store and use their personal data.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did remote learning pique your interest in digital privacy and what are the primary implications that worry you? 

Remote learning can be done well but we all had to get to it very quickly without a plan because we all suddenly got thrown at home because of the global pandemic. Suddenly schools had to scramble and find new solutions to reach their students, to educate their students, without being able to test the field, to think critically about it. They really were, with shoestring and gum, trying to keep their classes together.

Whether you were in school, whether you were at work, whether you were at neither and still just trying to keep in touch with your friends, you were using anything that came your way because that’s what you had to do. I found that really interesting — and a bit concerning. It’s no one’s fault because we don’t understand the ramifications of these technologies and now that we’ve used them a lot of them are here to stay.

I don’t want to sound like some sort of demonizing figure saying that all tech is bad — that is certainly not the case. It’s merely the fact that sometimes these promises are oversold, and now we have this added element of data privacy.

When you interact with any of these platforms, tons and tons of student data — from how you interact with it, how well you do on their assignments, when you do it, if you’re a chronic procrastinator, if you’re always getting your work done, if you seem more interested in your art class than your math class. These are all data points collected by these companies and I wanted to know, ‘What is it they’re collecting? What are they doing with it,’ and, specifically for this study, ‘What are schools thinking about in this space if anything at all?’

This study took a two-pronged approach. You conducted surveys with experts in this space and then used technology to identify information that folks might not be aware of. Let’s discuss the surveys first. How did the school administrators and district technology officials you interviewed view privacy issues? 

Lots of them knew that something wasn’t quite up to snuff in their security and privacy practices.

The best security and privacy practices that I saw in these school districts were entirely because someone, usually in the IT department, had an independent interest in student privacy. They were going above and beyond what their job descriptions required because they cared about the students.

That’s not to imply that school officials don’t care about the kids —they care about them very much — but they’re so busy making sure the lights are on and making sure there are teachers for the classrooms, dealing with discipline issues, dealing with staffing concerns. They’re not necessarily focused on data privacy and security.

Your research takes a unique approach to show the real-world impacts of education technology on student privacy. You identify that some of these tools raise significant privacy implications. How did you go about that?

We looked at the online websites of educational sites and tried to understand, what are the privacy risks here? What we found is that 7.4% of all these websites had a session recorder, which records everything you do when you’re interacting with a web page. How long you hovered over a certain element, how often you scrolled, what you clicked on and what you didn’t click on.

That’s a scary amount of data collection for something that’s normally an education site. On top of that we found a high prevalence of cookies and other types of trackers that were being sent to third-parties, basically advertising networks, that were taking that data to track these students across the web. As a student, even while I’m doing my work, they’re creating an ad profile of me that not only encompasses who I am as a consumer in my spare time, but who I am as a student inside of school for this more comprehensive picture of who I am to sell me ads.

That could be upsetting to somebody who thinks that what I’m doing in school is only the business of me and the teacher, my parents and the principal.

Why would an education technology company use a session recorder? 

We were able to identify that these trackers, like session recorders, were running on these websites, but we don’t have any idea what they’re recording, which is a project that we’re currently working on and trying to understand.

I can’t make any well-grounded assumptions to what this is being used for, whether it be nefarious or benign. It’s not uncommon for a session recorder to be used for diagnostic information for a technology company if they want to understand how their users use a site so they can improve it. That’s a legitimate use of one of these session recorders, but without knowing what data they collect, it could be that they’re collecting data that isn’t strictly relevant to improving the service or are over-collecting data in the guise of improving the service and retaining it for future use.

There are, of course, malicious uses for these session recorders but I won’t speculate on that because I don’t have definitive proof that’s what’s happening.

Why should people care about districts’ technology procurements? School districts are using a huge swath of digital tools, some from Google and some from tiny tech companies. If school leaders aren’t putting privacy at the forefront of deciding which tools to use, what concerning outcomes can come from that? 

There are several concerning outcomes, the first being that the data these companies collect don’t necessarily sit on their servers. They sometimes are sold to third parties. Some companies state third parties ambiguously and others list out who they are selling it to and why.

Just on a normative basis, I think that what you do in the classroom shouldn’t be harvested and sold, especially when many of these companies are raking in somewhere between five- and seven-figure contracts to license this technology. It’s not like they don’t have other sources of income, but the things they can take from students can be incredibly alarming: Information about socioemotional behavior, so if I act out in school, if I am in trouble for something that’s happening at home or I’m bullying another student, that data is collected by a specific service and that data is held somewhere. And of course, when you hold data, it’s a security risk.

There was a big breach in New York City where hundreds of thousands of students had their personal information leaked because a company was holding onto all of this data. It was leaked to hackers who got that data and can do who knows what with it. That’s a huge privacy violation. Some of the things they stole in that particular breach were names, birthdays and standard things you can use to commit identity fraud, which is a problem. But it can also be more sensitive stuff, such as [special education] accommodation lists or if you qualify for free lunch. There’s stuff about disability or your economic status, stuff that is all collected by these ed tech companies and held somewhere.

Learning management systems have incredible amounts of metadata. ‘Are you someone who procrastinates and only finishes an assignment one minute before it’s due? Did you do it early? Are you someone who didn’t do the reading but showed up to class anyway? Are you someone who took 10 times to get this quiz right or did it only take you one time’

These data are recorded and are available for teachers to see, but because teachers can see it, it’s sitting on a server somewhere.

Because they’re being stored somewhere and they are not being deleted regularly and these companies are not following data minimization principles, it’s a potential privacy risk for these students should another breach happen, which we’ve seen happen again and again and again.

Breaches have affected sensitive student information. In her book The Fight for Privacy, Danielle Citron argues for federal rules that would protect intimate privacy as a civil right. Why are such rules needed and how would they work in an educational context? 

There are certain types of information, like nonconsensual disclosures of intimate images, so-called revenge porn. I think you can make a straight analogy for student data. Just as there should be a zone of intimate privacy around your personal intimate life, your sexuality, whatever else, we should have a similar zone around your educational life.

Education is a space where students should be able to learn and make mistakes, and if you cannot make those mistakes without being recorded, then that can have repercussions for you later. If you’re not perfect on your first try and someone gets a hold of that, I could see that affecting your college admissions or that could affect an employment record. If I am someone who wants to hire you and I have a list of every student in a school that turns in their assignments early and all of these people were either habitually late or always procrastinating then obviously I’m going to be more interested in hiring the worker that turned stuff in early. But what that list might not tell you is that it was one data point in eighth grade and that one of those students when they were in high school finally got on top of their executive dysfunction and started turning things in on time.

It’s ultimately nobody’s business how you do in the classroom. You have final grades, but those fine-grained data are nobody else’s business but yours and the teacher’s. You have a safe space to learn and grow and make mistakes in the educational environment and to not be penalized for them outside of that classroom.

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Flowers and toys are placed near the entrance of Robb Elementary School to honor the victims of a mass shooting that resulted in the deaths of 19 students and two educators. (Getty Images)

Despite heightened concerns about campus safety since the pandemic, in many ways America’s public schools are safer today than they were a decade ago, federal campus crime data released Wednesday reveal. Yet in one startling way, they’ve grown exponentially more dangerous: An unprecedented growth in school shootings.

There were a record 188 school shootings resulting in injuries or deaths in the 2021-22 school year, according to the latest available data included in a report released today by the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics. That’s twice as many shootings on campus than the previous record — set just one year earlier.

The annual report, in its 25th iteration, leverages data from across federal agencies, including the Justice Department, to provide the public and policymakers with comprehensive insight into the safety conditions of the country’s school campuses, including cyberbullying and weapons possession. The new data offer fresh fodder in the ongoing political debate about how to thwart gun violence in schools.

In some ways, the policy outcomes from such attacks are apparent in the data itself. As high-profile shootings and other campus safety incidents drive divisive discussions about gun control and policing, they’ve also led to a surge in — and near-universal adoption of — numerous physical security measures. By 2019-20, 97% of public schools controlled access to their campuses, 91% used surveillance cameras and 77% required district employees to wear badges. The number of campuses with security staff ballooned from 43% in 2010 to 65% by 2020.

The spike in parental concerns over school safety seen in the aftermath of high-profile school shootings in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 and last year in Uvalde, Texas, dipped slightly this year, according to a Gallup poll released in late August. Among surveyed parents, 38% reported that they fear for their child’s safety, down from 44% in 2022. Still, the percentage of people who fear for their children’s safety is still among the highest it’s been since Gallup began to poll parents on the topic in 1977. Gallup’s historical high, at 55%, was measured shortly after the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in suburban Denver.

For the purpose of the federal report, “school shootings” include “all incidents in which a gun is brandished or fired or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims” and motive, including planned attacks, accidents and domestic violence. The methodology and collection methods used by the Education Department differ from those of other groups and media outlets that track school shootings. For example, the K-12 School Shooting Database lists 250 school shootings in 2021 and 305 in 2022. Education Week, which only includes incidents where someone is struck by a bullet, counts 35 school shootings in 2021 and 51 in 2022.

The federal report doesn’t include school-shooting data from the 2022-23 academic year.

While the federal data on school gun violence incidents “is of course extremely striking,” it is just “one piece in the puzzle of our understanding of school shootings,” Véronique Irwin, an associate education research analyst with the National Center for Education Statistics, said on a press call Tuesday. “It’s important for us to examine other dimensions as well.”

Despite the recent uptick in campus firearm incidents, the number of violent deaths of students in schools hasn’t followed a similar trendline and remains rare, the new federal report reveals. Nor have “active shootings,” a specific subset of campus gun violence, like the Parkland and Uvalde attacks, where an individual is “actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” Fourteen people were wounded or killed in active school shootings in 2021, the report revealed, compared to a high of 81 in 2018.

Between 2000 and 2021, there were 46 active shooting incidents, resulting in 108 deaths and 168 injuries. Of the 47 people who carried out the active shootings, all but one was male.

Beyond school shootings, the new federal report offers a mixed bag on various campus safety metrics, and at times appears to contradict other reports that have sounded the alarm about an uptick in student misbehavior since the pandemic.

Between the 2009-10 school year and 2019-20, the number of students who reported campus bullying decreased from 23% to 15% and reported gang activities dropped by more than half. School fights, weapons possession and alcohol use also declined. For some metrics, the most recent data are from 2019 and don’t capture the disruptive nature of COVID campus closures. Data captured after the pandemic began should be interpreted with these destabilizing forces in mind.

Educators also experienced improved safety conditions in schools between 2011 and 2021, the report suggests. Six percent of teachers reported that a student had threatened to injure them in 2020-21, a decrease from 10 percent a decade earlier. Similar declines were observed in the number of teachers who fell victim to attacks.

Still, the research revealed that educators have observed an uptick in disrespect from students, verbal abuse and overall classroom disorder.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, and First Lady Jill Biden depart a back-to-school K-12 cybersecurity summit at the White House on Aug. 8. (Getty Images)

Shortly before First Lady Jill Biden took the podium at the White House Tuesday to champion a new federal initiative to combat K-12 school ransomware attacks, the cyber gang Medusa announced its latest victim on the dark web.

Such unrelenting attacks — this time against a Bergen County, New Jersey, district —are what brought the first lady as well as some 200 federal cybersecurity officials, school district leaders and tech company executives together for a first-ever White House summit on strengthening school district defenses.

“It’s going to take all of us,” Biden said.

The breaches have grinded school technology systems nationwide “to a halt,” the first lady said at the East Room gathering, forcing some districts to cancel classes as reams of sensitive student, parent and educator data were stolen and leaked online. In March, a Medusa attack on Minneapolis Public Schools exposed records about child abuse inquiries, student mental health crises and campus physical security details.

“If we want to safeguard our children’s futures, we must protect their personal data,” she said. “Every student deserves the opportunity to see a school counselor when they’re struggling and not worry that these conversations will be shared with the world.”

Among the new strategies announced Tuesday is the creation of a Government Coordinating Council that will provide “formal, ongoing collaboration” between all levels of government and school districts to prepare for and respond to data breaches. Officials with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said the agency would provide individualized assessments and cybersecurity training to 300 K-12 education entities over the next year.

First Lady Jill Biden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona look on as Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas speaks during a back-to-school K-12 cybersecurity summit at the White House on Aug. 8. (Getty Images)

Tuesday’s cybersecurity event didn’t come with the announcement of any new federal regulations but was instead positioned as the first step in a new-found federal urgency around cybersecurity in schools. The Federal Communications Commission in late July proposed a $200 million pilot program to enhance cybersecurity in schools and libraries that still needs to be approved.

“When schools face cyber attacks, the impacts can be huge,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said. “Let’s be clear, we need to be taking these cyber attacks on schools as seriously as we do the physical attacks on critical infrastructure.”

In a new report released by the Education Department and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the agencies recommended that school districts implement multi-factor authentication, enforce minimum password strength standards and ensure software is kept up to date. They should also consider moving on-premises information technology services to cloud-based systems.

“Do not underestimate the ruthlessness of those who wish to do us harm,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said. “They have proven their willingness to steal and leak such private student information as psychiatric hospitalizations, home struggles and suicide attempts. Do not wait until the crisis comes to start preparing.”

School cybersecurity expert Doug Levin, who attended the summit, said it was a positive development to see the federal government, and the Education Department in particular, focus on the effects of ransomware on schools. The Education Department has been “mostly absent from these conversations” in the past, said the national director of The K12 Security Information eXchange.

Meanwhile, several companies, including education technology vendors, unveiled new commitments to help facilitate digital security in schools. Amazon Web Services announced a new $20 million grant program to bolster K-12 school cybersecurity while Cloudflare committed to providing free cybersecurity tools to small districts with 2,500 or fewer students.

Schools are now the single leading target for hackers, outpacing health care, technology, financial services and manufacturing industries, according to a global survey of IT professionals released last month by the British cybersecurity company Sophos.

In the U.S. school district cyber attacks reached a record high of 37 in the month of June alone, according to one tally, but Tuesday’s event centered largely on a crisis that unfolded in Los Angeles nearly a year ago.

Last September, a notorious ransomware group carried out an attack on the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, that resulted in some 500 gigabytes of district data being published to the Russian-speaking group’s dark-web leak site.

A major theme of the White House summit was the politically connected superintendent’s swift outreach to federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Education and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That collaboration, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho and federal education officials said, set into motion a response plan that mitigated the attack, limited the number of files breached and avoided class cancellations.

Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, called it “the Harvard Business School case study on how to get this right.”

Other school districts should respond similarly, said FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate. When school leaders suspect they’ve been the target of an attack, he said, it’s incumbent that they “please call us immediately.” In L.A.’s case, the FBI was able to have a team of agents on the ground in less than 24 hours, he said, enabling them to freeze vulnerable accounts and secure sensitive information that had been sought out by the threat actors.

That coordinated response didn’t prevent some 2,000 current and former students’ highly sensitive psychological evaluations from being leaked on the dark web, an investigation by The 74 revealed. Carvalho initially denied that such records were exposed in the attack, but the district acknowledged they were after the story was published. The district also initially said the attack began and ended on Sept. 3 — the Saturday of Labor Day weekend — but a follow-up investigation determined that an intrusion began as early as July 31, the Los Angeles Times reported.

While Carvalho didn’t comment Tuesday on the leak of sensitive psychological information, he said the number of stolen files “could have been much worse,” adding that the hackers “encrypted and exfiltrated very little thanks to our actions.” Among the actions they didn’t take, the schools chief said, was paying the undisclosed ransom demand because “we don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

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As ransomware and other cyber attacks become an increasingly potent threat to schools nationwide, a proposal by Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel seeks to create the first federal funding stream to help districts fight back.

A three-year pilot program announced by Rosenworcel earlier this month could invest up to $200 million to enhance cybersecurity in schools and libraries, yet the full proposal hasn’t been released publicly and education experts said far more would be needed to make a meaningful difference. And it could be months — if not more than a year — before the help makes its way to schools as education groups demand a more urgent federal response.

As districts become “a prime target for cyberattacks,” the proposed pilot “will give us valuable insight about whether and how the FCC can leverage its resources to help address the cybersecurity threats that schools and libraries face,” Rosenworcel said in a July 12 speech before AASA, The School Superintendents Association and the Association of School Business Officers International.

Education groups and school leaders have been calling for several years on the federal government to help schools bolster their cyber defenses and the pilot deviates from what many had suggested. The FCC had previously considered allowing districts to spend federal E-Rate funding on cybersecurity, a move that more than 1,100 school districts endorsed in a joint letter last year.

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel

Yet officials at the national superintendents’ association worried that using E-Rate funds was a diversion from the program’s mission of helping schools and libraries connect to the internet, said Noelle Ellerson Ng, the group’s associate executive director of advocacy and governance. She said the group supports the pilot because it remains separate from E-rate while still giving districts more money to protect their data.

“All signs point towards we’re going to need a federal response so hopefully we can get some congressional acknowledgement of that during the same three-year timespan to start thinking about what something more sustainable might look like,” Ellerson Ng said. “That way when this three-year pilot is up and we can get some of the evaluated data, we can move forward.”

A recent report by cybersecurity provider Sophos found that K-12 education was the most popular target for ransomware gangs last year, with 8 in 10 districts reporting getting hit with attacks — a marked 43% increase from 2021. The average recovery cost for victim districts, which agreed to pay ransoms in nearly half of incidents, exceeded $1.5 million, excluding financial demands from cyber gangs.

Recent high-profile ransomware incidents include an attack last year on the Los Angeles Unified School District, the country’s second-largest school system, that resulted in the public release of students’ highly sensitive psychological records. An attack on Minneapolis Public Schools this spring led to the public release of a trove of sensitive district documents, including files that outline campus rape cases, child abuse inquiries, student mental health crises and suspension reports.

Last month, New York City Public Schools, the country’s largest district, acknowledged that some 45,000 students’ information had been stolen in a massive cyber attack on the file-sharing software MOVEit. The MOVEit attack has resulted in data breaches at least 375 companies and organizations, including universities in at least a dozen states. The National School Clearinghouse has acknowledged it was caught up in the breach, a development that school cybersecurity experts said could affect many — if not most — students nationally.

“Cybersecurity is definitely something that has just stormed into the forefront” as districts nationwide grow increasingly alarmed by attacks, Rosenworcel said. The federal government hasn’t previously provided money to schools for cybersecurity but the pilot program, she said, offers a first step.

The five-member FCC commission must vote on the proposal before its full details are made public, the agency said, and it must go through a formal public comment and rulemaking process. Education experts predict it could be a year or more before the money is available to districts.

“I’ve told our superintendents that it’s realistic that it could take 10 months — best case scenario — before they’re able to apply,” Ellerson Ng said.

School cybersecurity expert Doug Levin said the communications commission “has been slow-pedaling” on the issue for years and that the $200 million proposal is just “a drop in the bucket” of what districts nationwide would need to counter this online enemy. The pilot could be used to generate lessons learned and to set the stage for more robust federal investments, he said, but only a small number of districts are likely to receive grants under it.

But the threat that districts face from cyber attacks is so great, Levin said, that even a much more significant investment in digital safeguards is unlikely to thwart the problem.

“It’s hard for me to imagine that, even if they were wildly successful and every school district was able to put in place a next-generation firewall, that that’s going to make a meaningful difference in the number of successful attacks against school districts,” he said. “You know, maybe they shouldn’t be collecting all this data that’s so sensitive in the first place.”

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Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report/Getty Images

During a heated Senate confirmation hearing in July 2021, civil rights attorney Catherine Lhamon made clear her goal to confront longstanding, dramatic racial disparities in school discipline at a moment when racial inequities — in policing, education and society more broadly — were at the center of the national discourse.

She’d done it before, to fanfare and criticism. As the head of the Education Department’s civil rights division during the Obama administration, Lhamon wrote a forceful “Dear Colleague” letter in 2014 that put districts nationwide on notice: stark racial gaps in suspension rates could indicate discrimination, and the federal Office for Civil Rights planned to hold them accountable to civil rights laws. The guidance led education leaders nationwide to reform their school discipline policies while conservative pundits and politicians accused the department of using the threat of investigations to force districts into creating “racial quotas” and coercing them to adopt school discipline reforms in place of suspensions and expulsions.

At the hearing to consider her return to her post as the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights and six months after President Joe Biden signed an executive order to advance racial equity across the federal government, Lhamon said it was critical for the Biden administration to reinstate the discipline guidance, which the Trump administration rescinded in 2018 amid fears of mass school shootings.

“I think it’s crucial to reinstate guidance on the topic and I think it’s crucial to be clear with school communities about what the civil rights obligations are and how best to do the work in their classrooms,” Lhamon said during the confirmation hearing, where she was grilled by Republican lawmakers on a range of contentious issues, including efforts to combat campus sexual assault and the inclusion of transgender students in school athletics. Republicans leveraged the issues in a failed bid to block Lhamon’s nomination, and Vice President Kamala Harris cast a tie-breaking vote to confirm Lhamon for a second stint in the department.

Yet more than two years into Biden’s presidency, updated guidance on racial disparities in school discipline are nowhere to be found — and civil rights advocates have begun to wonder whether the department ever plans to release them. Rather than taking heat from Republicans, the inaction has generated outrage from the left.

In a letter sent to the Education Department Wednesday and shared exclusively with The 74, advocates with the Federal School Discipline and Climate Coalition demanded the department “immediately release a revised and updated version” of the guidance and accused officials of failing “to provide adequate accountability, oversight and enforcement of civil rights laws.”

“The persistence of egregious exclusionary and disproportionate discipline throughout the nation must be laid directly at the feet of this administration’s unwillingness to lead in the area of school discipline and civil rights,” according to the coalition, a group of racial justice activists and researchers who’ve been advocating for police-free schools and non-punitive discipline policies since 2011. “In many districts, the lack of leadership and guidance from [the Education Department] has weakened communities’ abilities to advocate for policies that reduce and eliminate exclusionary discipline.”

In an interview with The 74, a senior Education Department official declined to say whether updated guidance is in the works or to provide a timeline. But the department’s Office for Civil Rights, the official said, is currently investigating 343 cases related to racial discrimination in student discipline. The 2014 guidance outlined the department’s interpretation of federal civil rights rules and urged districts to adopt restorative justice and other discipline reforms, but the senior department official said the civil rights office has no difficulty enforcing federal discrimination rules aside from the challenges that come with taking on an “enormous caseload.”

In one case from last year, the Education Department came to a resolution agreement with the Victor Valley Union High School District in California after a federal investigation found the school system disciplined Black students more frequently and harshly than their white classmates. Along with “statistical evidence” of racial disparities in student discipline, investigators observed a pattern where Black and white students were disciplined differently for committing similar infractions. Under the agreement, the district was required to revise its student discipline policies and implement a plan to eliminate disparities.

“We are as always grateful to school communities that effectively instruct all students without discrimination and we look forward to working with those school communities that need further assistance to comply with the law,” Lhamon said in a written statement when asked by The 74 about criticism that the department had failed to act.

Faced with a record number of civil rights complaints, which are set to be outlined in an annual report later this month, the civil rights office recently revised policies to allow a greater use of mediation to resolve cases more quickly.

Even critics of the 2014 “Dear Colleague” letter are left wondering why the department hasn’t released an update to the student discipline guidance — particularly after officials suggested they were forthcoming. In June 2021, the Office for Civil Rights requested public feedback on strategies to implement school discipline in a nondiscriminatory manner. That callout led to more than 3,600 comments from people across the political spectrum.

A year later, in July 2022, the Education Department released guidance that sought to address school discipline disparities between children with disabilities and those who are not enrolled in special education. Reporting at the time suggested that similar guidance, related to racial disparities in discipline, would be released later that summer.

A political liability

That the guidance was never released, observers said, likely comes down to one factor: politics.

“It shouldn’t take this much time, especially if they were going to largely dust off what was published in 2014,” said Michael Petrilli, president of The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, who worked at the Education Department during the George W. Bush administration and has been an outspoken critic of school discipline reform. He said the Biden administration would be rightly concerned over the issue becoming a campaign platform for Republicans, who have already rallied supporters to condemn schools that teach about racism in American history or that allow transgender students to participate in school sports.

“The only thing that makes sense to me is that somebody relatively senior, either at the Department of Education or in the White House, has decided that this is not a good time,” Petrilli said. “Either they decided not to do it, or they’re waiting until the time seems right — and it never seems like a good time with the news in the real world.”

Biden entered office at a moment of heightened attention to persistent racial inequities. After a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd in 2020 and Black Lives Matter protests swept the country, dozens of districts removed school-based police officers from their campuses. But the issue was reminiscent of the politically toxic “defund the police” movement, and several school systems that banished cops from classrooms reversed course just months later.

As pandemic-era remote learning came to an end and students returned to school buildings, educators sounded the alarm about an uptick in student misbehavior and disruptions. In a federal survey released last year, more than 8 in 10 school leaders said the pandemic had a negative effect on students’ behavioral development. More than a third reported an uptick in physical attacks or fights between students, and more than half reported increased classroom disruptions due to student misconduct.

A recent teachers union poll reached similar findings. Nearly 90% of teachers said that “poor student discipline and a lack of support for dealing with disruptive students” is a serious problem, the American Federation of Teachers poll found.

Lawmakers across the country have responded with state legislation that would make it easier for schools to punish students, including a new Kentucky law with bipartisan support that allows schools to “permanently remove” disruptive students. After a 6-year-old boy with a history of disturbing behavior shot his teacher in January at a Virginia elementary school, educators complained that school leaders had become too lenient with students. In response to the drumbeat of school shootings, districts have bolstered school security, including with armed police officers.

“You’re seeing states across the country passing these return-to-zero-tolerance and mass exclusion laws in several states, and I think that could have been avoided had the Biden administration been taking a strong stand throughout and reissuing the guidance,” said Russ Skiba, professor emeritus at Indiana University whose research focuses on school discipline.

Yet it’s this exact movement toward harsher student punishment rules that make discipline reform efforts a politically fraught undertaking, Petrilli said.

“You can imagine somebody with a political perspective saying, ‘You know, is this really a good issue to run on when we’re getting clobbered on the defund the police stuff, on the crime issue?’” Petrilli said. “I would certainly think this would be dangerous for Democrats to be associated with a soft on discipline kind of approach in the same way it is dangerous for them to be associated with a soft on crime approach.”

Meanwhile, racial justice advocate Breon Wells called the administration’s failure to address the issue a political miscalculation and accused Biden of failing to act on the promises of his campaign, which relied heavily on support from Black voters.

“To us what it feels like is that they are choosing the politically comfortable way over the delivering of these promises to people and, more specifically, Black and brown students,” said Wells, a member of the Federal School Discipline and Climate Coalition and the CEO and founder of The Daniel Initiative, a strategic communications firm. “There is no convenient path to rectify the wrongs and the injustices that have prevailed and been baked into a system.”

Persistent disparities

Nationally, stark racial disparities have persisted for years. For about as long, the factors that drive those disparities have been the subject of heated partisan debate.

Black youth represented 15% of students nationwide during the 2017-18 school year but were the subject of 29% of law enforcement referrals, according to the most recent federal data. Black youth also accounted for 38% of students who received one or more out of school suspensions and 33% of those who were expelled.

The 2014 guidance sought to close the gap. In a move that led to controversy, the department warned schools that discipline policies could constitute “unlawful discrimination” under federal civil rights law if they didn’t explicitly mention race but had a “disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of a particular race,” known as disparate impact. Such statistical evidence is a key indicator of potential violations, the letter noted, but civil rights investigators would review “all relevant circumstances” before imposing sanctions.

While the document acknowledged that racial disparities in student discipline rates may be “caused by a range of factors,” it said that the “substantial racial disparities” couldn’t be attributed entirely to “more frequent or more serious misbehavior by students of color.”

A growing body of academic research has dug into the root causes of racial disparities in school discipline, including evidence that educators discipline Black students differently than their white classmates. One report, in the peer-reviewed journal Social Forces, found that nearly half of the racial disparities in school discipline could be attributed to teachers treating Black and white students differently, suggesting that the “difference in punishment may be due to racial bias” among educators. In fact, just 9% of the variations could be attributed to different behaviors between Black and white children, researchers found. Another report, by the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, found that Black and low-income students received longer suspensions than their white and better-off classmates for the same types of infractions.

Meanwhile, a significant body of research suggests that suspensions, expulsions and school-based arrests can be detrimental to student learning, including lowered academic performance and an increased likelihood of dropping out. Yet research on alternatives promoted in the 2014 discipline guidance, including restorative justice, has found that even as suspensions have decreased, they’ve generally failed to close racial disparities.

Petrilli has acknowledged that racial discrimination exists in school discipline but maintains that the harmful effects of suspensions and the influence of discriminatory bias in racial disparities is overblown, arguing that other factors, like poverty and the effects of growing up in a single-parent home, are key contributors. The 2014 guidance, he said, overstated the degree to which bias influenced the disparities. Any updated guidance from the Biden administration, Petrelli said, should remove threats of investigations based on a district’s racially disparate discipline data.

“If, after controlling for differences in socioeconomic status, for example, there’s still large disparities, that is a time that we would dig in and do an investigation,” he said. “That would be a middle ground.”

Yet for members of the Federal School Discipline and Climate Coalition, guidance on racial disparities in school discipline is the lowest denominator in a larger need to overhaul the country’s approach to school safety and student discipline. But the administration has failed to take a strong position, the group argued, on several critical civil rights issues.

In a “Dear Colleague” letter last month, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona urged local policymakers to “move swiftly toward condemning and eliminating” corporal punishment in schools, which remains legal in 19 states. On the same day, it released a “guiding principles” document that districts review their student discipline policies and ensure they “do not unfairly disadvantage a group of students,” including “unclear language that results in disproportionate discipline of certain students.”

But the corporal punishment guidance, the advocates argued, amounted to “cherry picking politically safe issues,” and called Cardona’s letter “halfhearted.” The guiding principles document, the group said, was “woefully inadequate” and appeared to be thrown together last minute.

Coalition convener Christopher Scott said it’s time for the administration and Education Department leaders to stop shying away from tough conversations about race.

“They are failing to protect the civil rights of Black and brown students, youth and children because they don’t want to tackle the issue of race because it is taboo for them and is seen as not being politically efficient or leading to political wins,” said Scott, a senior program manager at the Open Society Policy Center. “It is not about what is going to keep you in office, it is about doing your job and protecting the civil rights of Black and brown students, youth and children. That’s why you exist.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

What began as a modest community on the social media platform quickly grew into the political juggernaut Moms Demand Action, the nation’s largest grassroots gun control group and a primary foe of the National Rifle Association and their allies in Washington, D.C.

After fighting in the political trenches for more than a decade, Watts plans to retire this year after a long-fought win: Last year, President Joe Biden signed into law the first new federal gun rules in nearly three decades.

But the mass shootings haven’t stopped. On Wednesday, students nationwide marched out of their schools to demand additional gun control measures after a shooter killed six people — including three 9-year-olds — March 27 at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville. This week, Tennessee House Republicans moved to expel three Democratic state representatives who led a protest on the House Floor in response to the shooting and in solidarity with the hundreds of demonstrators, many of them young people, who packed the Tennessee Capitol.

The Nashville shooting has become the latest partisan flashpoint at the center of the country’s divisive political discourse. As students in Nashville and nationwide flood the streets to demand additional gun control measures, Republicans have latched onto the tragedy, which was carried out by a 28-year-old transgender shooter, with anti-trans rhetoric.

Nashville students walked out of schools to demand gun safety on April 3. (Getty Images)

In an interview with LA School Report, Watts — who now lives in California and whose children are grown — said the GOP’s response to the Nashville shooting follows a long history of leaning on “straw men” to avoid an honest dialogue about gun violence. She also offered insight into the power of mom-led advocacy and advice for parents advocating for changes in their own communities.

The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

This week it’s students who are walking out of school and hitting the streets protesting after the recent school shooting in Nashville. But we’ve been here before. What, if anything, is different this time? What factors have made this shooting in Nashville so politically galvanizing? 

I think it’s different every time. There’s this idea that somehow there’s going to be a tragedy and everything is going to change overnight. And it didn’t happen after Columbine, it didn’t happen after the Sandy Hook school shooting, it didn’t happen last summer [after mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas]. But that doesn’t mean that things aren’t changing.

The system is not set up in this country for overnight change. The system is set up for people to get involved in democracy and that means that you do what I call the unglamorous heavy lifting of grassroots activism, and that forces incremental change.

Demonstrators protest at the Tennessee Capitol for stricter gun laws in Nashville, Tennessee, on April 3. (Getty Images)

I have seen over the last decade incremental change lead to a revolution. There’s been a seismic shift in American politics. Back in 2012, a quarter of all Democrats in Congress had an A rating from the NRA. Today, not one does. They’re proud of their Fs.

And we had 15 Republicans support the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that passed last summer. So things are changing and I believe that after every national shooting tragedy, when people start to pay attention, you’re seeing change.

The NRA is incredibly weak. They really didn’t have a seat at the table when the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed. The fact that we have a 90% track record of stopping the NRA’s agenda every year, those things are only enabled by all of the change that has happened and added up over the last decade.

When you ask what’s different this time, I think it’s that there are even more people who are filled with rage over this situation, who know we don’t have to live like this. We sure as hell shouldn’t die like this. The more people who use their voices and vote on this issue, the faster we get to a place where our country isn’t run by the gun industry.

President Biden signed the first federal gun control measures in nearly three decades — yet these shootings keep happening. What do you see were the effects of the law that has been signed, and what more needs to be done to solve the problem? 

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was a very important, critical step forward, but it was just one first step on a much longer journey.

We need to have background checks on all gun sales at a federal level, we need a Red Flag law, we need to make sure that domestic abusers can’t get guns, including stalkers. There’s so much that needs to be done, and we’ve done it really at a state-by-state level.

Blue states in this country now have pretty strong gun laws, whereas red states don’t. We’re only as safe as the closest state with the weakest gun laws, so we need much more to happen at a federal level. But in order to do that we have to have a Congress that will make that happen.

The idea that shootings were going to stop after the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed is not realistic, but I want to be clear that it is meaningful. It takes a multifaceted approach to looking at gun violence as a complex issue. It isn’t just mass shootings or school shootings, that’s about 1% of the gun violence in this country. It’s also domestic violence and gun suicide and community gun violence.

You asked what’s happened since the law was passed. The fact that we have stepped up background checks through the FBI through the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, 119 buyers under the age of 21 have been blocked from gun sales because they were deemed too dangerous to have access to guns. Prosecutions have increased for unlicensed gun sellers. There are new gun trafficking penalties that now have been used in at least 30 cases across the country. Millions of new dollars have flowed into mental health services for children in schools and into community violence intervention programs.

President Biden said after the Nashville school shooting that he couldn’t do more on the issue without Congress at this point. What is your response to this admission? 

I think that was a little more nuanced. I think he was basically saying that if we want holistic solutions for gun safety it really does have to be passed by Congress. I also want to be clear that the Biden-Harris administration has done more on this issue than any other administration in our nation’s history.

Right now, the House is controlled by gun lobby lackeys. They’re not only opposed to passing good gun safety laws, they’re actually attacking federal law enforcement and they’re pushing gun extremists’ laws that would put us at risk. Just hours after the shooting in Nashville, a House committee scheduled a vote on legislation that would make it easier to buy really dangerous assault weapons that have arm braces. It’s the same device that the shooter in Tennessee had.

So you know, I want to be clear that we’re making progress. If you’d asked me a year ago that we would have passed the first gun safety bill in 30 years that expanded background checks and funded state Red Flag laws and helps close what we call the boyfriend loophole, I would not have believed you.

So it is possible, and I think it’s inevitable, that our lawmakers at a federal level will eventually take action on this issue because their constituents are demanding it. There was a reason that Mitch McConnell whipped the votes on the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and that’s because he saw polling that showed the Republican Party would be decimated if they did not act after Buffalo and Uvalde. That trend, especially when you see shootings like what just happened in Nashville, will only continue.

We’re seeing more and more gunfire on school grounds in this country and we know why. It’s because there’s unfettered, easy access to guns.

The shooter had access to two AR-style rifles, an AR-style handgun, and a handgun, but a Congresswoman is blaming the trans community for gun violence.

People who are trans are much more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators.

It’s the guns. https://t.co/CH6YNGderH

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) March 27, 2023

The Nashville tragedy was carried out by a person who was reportedly transgender. As such, many Republican lawmakers and pundits have blamed the shooting on the suspect’s gender identity — rather than on guns. In what ways are you working to counter efforts to divert the focus from firearms to other social issues?

We see these same straw men after every single shooting tragedy in this country. Republicans always want to make it about anything but what data shows is causing our uniquely American crisis, which is easy access to guns. You know, other nations have mental illness, they have access to video games, they have divorced parents.

The reason we have a 26-times higher gun homicide rate is that we give people easy access to guns. You know, the vast majority of mass shootings in this country have been by straight white men. And at no point have they said that that is a crisis, that we should really look at straight white men. It’s clear that that is just a way for them to divert attention because what they don’t want to talk about is the fact that too many guns and too few gun laws have given us the highest rate of gun homicides and suicides among all high-income countries.

Gun politics have long been divisive and you’ve found yourself the subject of sharp political critiques and, most alarmingly, death threats. There’s evidence of the country growing increasingly divided, and with that an uptick in political violence. In what ways have you experienced this change firsthand? 

When I started Moms Demand Action, I was sort of living in a bubble. I was a white suburban mom and I got off the sidelines because I was afraid my kids weren’t safe in their schools. Then when you come to this issue, what you realize is that it is much more complex and much more holistic than that.

I was really shocked that we were having rallies and marches in those early days in Indiana and we were surrounded by men who were carrying loaded long guns in public. I was just shocked that that was legal. And in fact, open carry is legal in over 40 states in this country. To me it was a signal that something is very wrong.

The more and more we pushed on gun extremists, the more they pushed back by behaving that way and we saw them starting to open carry in stores which is why we started corporate campaigns to change their gun policies. What we were starting to see were the seeds of gun extremism. They felt like a right not utilized and expressed in public was a right they didn’t have, and the NRA actually pushed back on this idea. In 2014 they came out and called open carry ‘downright weird,’  and said it was not something that you do in normal society. And then just days later, they had to change their position because gun extremists in Texas were burning their NRA membership cards.

Every state has its own version of the NRA but it’s often to the right of the NRA and much more extreme. When I lived in Colorado, they’re called the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners. They believe any gun law whatsoever is an infringement on the Second Amendment. So the NRA tends to be pulled to the right by these extremists. I mean, in 1999, the NRA opposed guns in schools and supported closing the background check loophole. And certainly that’s a far cry from where they are today.

They’ve lost control of their Frankenstein, and gun extremism is now this recruiting tool. It’s an organizing principle, it’s a fundraising tactic all for the right wing. I mean, guns excite the right-wing base about things that have nothing to do with guns. And so it is getting young white men through the door, it is radicalizing them, these groups often play in conspiracy theories. Again, some of those were originated and propagated by the NRA.

The goal is to stoke fear, recruit new members and sell guns. Those fringe gun extremists that our volunteers were facing in those early days started showing up at state houses and anytime a statue was being removed and even threatening lawmakers and police officers and fellow citizens.

We’ve tracked armed demonstrations since 2020 and found that they’re six times more likely to be violent or destructive than demonstrations where people are not armed. It seems pretty intuitive, but the data bears this out.

So to answer your question: Yes, I think gun extremism is on the rise and is a very dangerous threat to democracy.

THIS is last year's Christmas card from Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles, a Republican who represents the district that Covenant School is in in Nashville. #tnleg pic.twitter.com/IpkLzZs5m5

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) March 27, 2023

Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles deleted a recent family Christmas card from social media after you criticized the photo, which featured the lawmaker and his family wielding guns. Republican lawmakers have faced similar criticism in recent years for posting similar family portraits. Why do you think it’s important to highlight these images? Are you concerned that the attention may ultimately play into their hands? 

I think it’s fascinating when these gun extremists back down, like deleting the photo. I think it’s really important to point out that this is the culture that’s killing us.

This idea of unfettered access to guns and treating them like toys, like putting them in the hands of children. Both of my grandfathers were World War II veterans. They were responsible gun owners, they had the highest amount of respect for those guns and in a million years would not have posed with them like they were toys as opposed to tools meant to kill things.

It’s really important that we shine a light. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and that’s certainly the case when it comes to gun extremism because people see this behavior. The vast majority of Americans — regardless of whether they’re gun owners or not, regardless of whether they’re Republicans or Democrats — they support common sense gun laws. And I think that seeing that kind of gun extremism is a turnoff to most Americans and they know that’s not who they want making our policies.

You began your advocacy after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012 with a Facebook group. What is it about grassroots, mom-led advocacy — based on the idea behind Mothers Against Drunk Driving — that makes it a particularly effective gun control advocacy approach? 

Bigger picture, women are the secret sauce to advocacy in this country and frankly, in the world. If you go back to when women were first allowed to be activists in America, which was Prohibition … they [men in power] could never really put that genie back in the bottle. Once women got off the sidelines, they wanted to use their voices on issues that they cared about.

We are often given the task of caring for our families and our communities. All the way from Prohibition up to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, it’s really been women and mothers forcing change in this country and using the power available to them. We are the majority of the voting population, we’re the majority of the population — period.  So when we use our voices and our votes, we can affect change.

I often go back to something that feminist author Soraya Chemaly said. She wrote the book Rage Becomes Her and she featured Moms Demand Action in there and she and I had a conversation about this and she said, ‘You know, 80% of the lawmakers in this country are men and men are inherently afraid of their mothers.’

The lawmakers in this country are either very, very excited to see us show up — hundreds or even thousands of us at a time in our red shirts — or they’re very, very afraid. So that can be a powerful coalition.

Given your success in taking that Facebook group and turning your advocacy into the size of the organization that you did, I’m curious what lessons you learned about American politics and policymaking? What advice do you have for other mothers and other women who are working to inspire change in their own communities? 

I don’t think that men are as afraid to fail in public because that’s sort of seen as brave and courageous, where I think women feel like there’s blowback when they’re not perfect, or if they fail.

If I had waited until I knew everything there was to know about gun violence or organizing, I still wouldn’t have started Moms Demand Action. I think it’s important to birth your ideas into the world. The very worst thing that can happen is that you fail and that you learn from that failure and you try something again.

[In 2014, Moms Demand Action merged with Mayors Against Illegal Guns, an advocacy effort by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to form the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety.]

I had this great reverence for lawmakers before I started Moms Demand Action and I assumed they were very smart and committed and concerned and kind and unfortunately what you learn is that too many of them are not and they really don’t want to listen to what you have to say. But if you are an activist who is all of those things — concerned, committed, compassionate, curious — you would make a great lawmaker. I’m very proud of the fact that hundreds of our volunteers have decided to take a leap from not just shaping policy but to actually making it and running for office and winning.

In this last electoral cycle, in November, 140 of our volunteers ran for office and won at all levels of government. We have volunteers who are now members of Congress. I think that’s a really important lesson, too, which is that women make great lawmakers.

After more than a decade in this work, at the end of this year you plan to retire. What motivated that decision and what’s next for you?

I’ve been a full-time volunteer, it’ll be 11 years at the end of this year, and that’s a long time to do this work. But also, I’ve asked myself that question because I think it’s important for a founder’s role to be finite. I never imagined I would spend the rest of my life doing this work. I’m so honored and so proud to have sort of lit the spark, but it really is up to other new and emerging leaders to keep that going.

Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, right, talks with Ryane Nickens, founder of the traRon Center, in Washington, D.C.

This movement needs to last into perpetuity and so, by stepping back, I think I enable other leaders to step forward. I’ll still be a volunteer for Moms Demand Action, I’ll just be doing it as a California Moms Demand Action volunteer. We have leaders who are ready to step up inside the organization and outside the organization, and I think that’s really exciting.

As for me, for what’s next, I obviously will always care about this issue and it will be very important to me and I will use my voice in different ways. Something I’m really passionate about is empowering women in all different ways, but particularly running for office.

I don’t have an answer for you on specifically what’s next. I will be with Moms Demand Action through the end of the year, I will certainly rest a little bit and I’m going to be teaching at USC starting in January and, other than that, I’ll figure out what’s next when the time comes.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Update: After this story published, the Los Angeles school district acknowledged in a statement that “approximately 2,000” student psychological evaluations — including those of 60 current students — had been uploaded to the dark web.

Detailed and highly sensitive mental health records of hundreds — and likely thousands — of former Los Angeles students were published online after the city’s school district fell victim to a massive ransomware attack last year, an investigation has revealed. 

The student psychological evaluations, published to a “dark web” leak site by the Russian-speaking ransomware gang Vice Society, offer a startling degree of personally identifiable information about students who received special education services, including their detailed medical histories, academic performance and disciplinary records.

But people are likely unaware their sensitive information is readily available online because the Los Angeles Unified School District hasn’t alerted them, a district spokesperson confirmed, and leaders haven’t acknowledged the trove of records even exists. In contrast, the district publicly acknowledged last month that the sensitive information of district contractors had been leaked.

Cybersecurity experts said the revelation that student psychological records were exposed en masse and a lack of transparency by the district highlight a gap in existing federal privacy laws. Rules that pertain to sensitive health records maintained by hospitals and health insurers, which are protected by stringent data breach notification policies, differ from those that apply to education records kept by schools — even when the files themselves are virtually identical. Under existing federal privacy rules, school districts are not required to notify the public when students’ personal information, including medical records, is exposed.

But keeping the extent of data breaches under wraps runs counter to schools’ mission of improving children’s lives and instead places them at heightened risk of harm, said school cybersecurity expert Doug Levin, the national director of the K12 Security Information eXchange.

“It’s deeply disturbing that an organization that you’ve entrusted with such sensitive information is either significantly delaying — or even hiding — the fact that individuals had very sensitive information exposed,” Levin said. “For a school system to wait six months, a year or longer before notifying someone that their information is out on the dark web and being potentially abused is a year that those individuals can’t take steps to protect themselves.”

In a January report, the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned that school districts were being targeted by cyber gangs “with potentially catastrophic impacts on students, their families, teachers and administrators.” Threats became particularly acute during the pandemic as schools grew more reliant on technology.  The number of publicly disclosed cybersecurity incidents affecting schools has grown from 400 in 2018 to more than 1,300 in 2021, according to the federal agency.

When L.A. schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho acknowledged in early October that the cyber gang published some 500 gigabytes of stolen records to the dark web after the district declined to pay an unspecified ransom demand, he sought to downplay its effects on students. An early news report said the leaked files contained some students’ psychological assessments, citing “a law enforcement source familiar with the investigation.” Carvalho called that revelation “absolutely incorrect.”

“We have seen no evidence that psychiatric evaluation information or health records, based on what we’ve seen thus far, has been made available publicly,” said Carvalho, who acknowledged the hackers had “touched” the district’s massive student information system and had exposed a limited collection of students’ records, including their names and addresses.

The 500 gigabytes of stolen records include tens of thousands of individual files, including scanned copies of adults’ Social Security cards, passports, financial records and other personnel files.

The systemic release of students’ psychological assessments stolen from the Los Angeles district and published to the dark web hasn’t been previously reported. Leaked psychological evaluations use a consistent file-naming structure, allowing a reporter to isolate them from other types of district records that appear on the ransomware gang’s leak site, including those related to district contractors and files that are benign and do not contain confidential information. The 74 and LA School Report have independently verified that 500 students’ sensitive psychological assessments are available for download as PDF files on the Vice Society leak site, reaching a federal threshold that would require health care providers to publicly disclose such a data breach if it involved patient health records.

More than 2,200 PDFs — and a large swath of other document types — follow the consistent file-naming structure, suggesting the total number of leaked student psychological files is in the thousands. The records are at least a decade old and while they don’t appear to contain information about current students, they do contain highly personal information about former LAUSD students who are now in their 20s and 30s.

In early October, Carvalho said that people would be contacted if their information got exposed in the data breach, assuring them, “No news is good news.” By that point, Carvalho said, school district and law enforcement analysts had already reviewed about two-thirds of the data leaked on the dark web.

Now, more than four months after the schools chief denied that psychological evaluations were exposed, the nation’s second-largest school district has not changed its position publicly. A district spokesperson said that Carvalho’s statements in October “were based on the information that had been developed at that time” and that the review was still ongoing.

“Los Angeles Unified is in the process of completing its review and analysis of the data posted by the criminals responsible for the cyberattack to the dark web, to identify individuals impacted and to provide any required notifications,” the district said in a statement. “Once Los Angeles Unified has completed its review and analysis of that data, Los Angeles Unified will provide an update,” to affected individuals and the public.

‘Huge emotional strain for the family’

The particular files posted online — students’ psycho-educational case studies — are among the most sensitive records that schools keep about children with disabilities, said Steven Catron, senior staff attorney of the Learning Rights Law Center, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that provides free legal representation to low-income families in special education disputes with their children’s school district.

The evaluations are designed to help schools assess how a student’s disabilities and other factors affect their learning. They include a comprehensive background on the child’s medical history, observations on their home and family life, and assessments of their cognitive, academic and emotional functioning.

One of the reports notes that a student was placed in foster care “due to domestic violence in the home.” The student struggled with “a limited attention span” and often refused to complete his work, the report notes, and “is easily angered when he does not get his way.” Another states a student’s desire to “become a police officer so that he can ‘arrest people because they do drugs.’” A student’s father “works in a plant that makes airplane parts and speaks no English,” one report notes. “His mother is a librarian assistant and speaks a ‘little English.’”

In general, Catron said, such reports can include details about a family’s immigration status, sexual misconduct allegations, unfounded child abuse reports or that a student has “been hitting other children or adults in a school environment.” Yet it’s often difficult for families to get sensitive information removed from the files, he said, even if it isn’t accurate. Now, with breached student records of this nature in the public domain, “who knows what is going to happen.”

“The sheer scope of information, like you’ve seen, it’s darn broad and pretty hurtful for people,” Catron said. “If those records include those types of notes, whether correct or not, it can just cause a huge emotional strain for the family.”

The files themselves note that the assessment reports “may contain sensitive information subject to misinterpretation by untrained individuals” and that the “nonconsensual re-disclosure by unauthorized individuals is prohibited” by state law.

Available files appear to be limited to former Los Angeles students born primarily in the late 1980s and 1990s. The age of the records highlight how potential data breach victims extend far beyond current students when districts suffer hacks, Levin, the cybersecurity expert, said. Students’ sensitive information can be exposed years or even decades after they graduate if districts lack sufficient data security safeguards.  

The timeline could also complicate any potential efforts by the district to find and notify affected individuals who could unknowingly face heightened risks including embarrassment, identity theft and extortion.

“Sometimes school districts will delay notifying until they can identify every last person that they possibly can, but that can be an expensive to impossible endeavor,” Levin said. “For a school district like LAUSD to try to track people who were associated with the district say 10 years ago, that’s a daunting task and clearly is very likely to be imperfect.”

The disclosure gap

Health care providers are held to strict data privacy rules and could face steep fines in the event of a data breach involving sensitive patient records. Agencies and businesses covered by the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act are required to publicly acknowledge health data breaches affecting 500 or more people and notify the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services “without unreasonable delay and in no case later than 60 days following a breach.”

The Broward County, Florida, school district recently got caught in a data breach disclosure debacle after the country’s sixth-largest school system suffered a ransomware attack in 2021 and refused to pay an extortion demand initially set at $40 million. In response, threat actors published to a dark web leak site the personal information of nearly 50,000 district personnel enrolled in its health plan. The Broward district is currently one of four K-12 school systems listed on a data breach portal maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services. The breach portal  — often referred to as the “Wall of Shame” — includes all data breaches affecting 500 or more people that were reported to the federal agency in the last 24 months.

District officials in Florida ultimately waited 154 days — three months longer than federal rules allow — to disclose the breach’s full extent on its website, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. In a statement, a district spokesperson said the school system “worked diligently to investigate the incident.” Once officials realized that records related to the district’s self-insured health plan were breached, notifications to affected personnel and the federal health administration “required the gathering and sorting of significant amounts of data in order to determine the individuals to be notified.”

“That process was complex and took substantial hours,” the spokesperson said. “Under the circumstances, notification was made in an expeditious manner.”

The Broward district is a HIPAA-covered entity because it operates a self-insured health plan. But public schools aren’t generally considered “covered entities” under the health privacy law. And even when they are, students’ education records — including their health information — are exempt. They’re instead covered by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the federal student privacy law known as FERPA. The law prohibits student records from being released publicly but, unlike HIPAA, does not require schools to disclose when such breaches occur.

“The same type of information is treated differently from a compliance standpoint depending on who is holding and maintaining that information,” said student privacy expert Jim Siegl, a senior technologist with the nonprofit Future of Privacy Forum. The federal privacy rules that apply to hospitals and schools “live in separate universes. If it’s maintained by the school, it’s FERPA. If it’s maintained by your doctor, the same information is HIPAA protected.”

A small subset of Los Angeles students’ health records are covered by HIPAA, the LAUSD district spokesperson said, but the psychological assessments are not. A data breach involving student’s records — like the one in Los Angeles — could be considered a FERPA violation, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

“FERPA requires the school to maintain direct control over the records,” Siegl said. “There is a lot that goes into a FERPA violation, but I would say that within the spirit of FERPA, they did not maintain direct control over the records.”

Yet, consequences for violating FERPA are next to nonexistent. Districts can lose federal funds if they have “a policy or practice” of releasing students’ records without parental permission, a high bar that excludes occasional violations. Since the law was enacted in 1974, it’s never been used to strip funding from a district that broke the rules.

‘A psychological torment’

To comply with state privacy rules, the Los Angeles district has been more transparent about the systemic breach of sensitive records about distinct construction contractors. In a data breach notice posted to the California state attorney general’s office website in January, the district said its investigation into the breach had uncovered certified payroll records and other labor compliance documents that included the names, addresses and Social Security numbers of district contractors.

The data breach notice also made clear that cyber criminals had infiltrated the district’s computer network more than a month earlier than initially disclosed. Carvalho said in October that district cybersecurity officials were quick to detect the unauthorized access and, “in a very, very unique way, we stopped the attack midstream.”

The district spokesperson said LAUSD is working to determine whether any of the breached files are considered “medical information” under state law and whether a notification is required. Any data breach alert to the state attorney general’s office would coincide with notifications to affected individuals, the spokesperson said.

Asked about the school district’s notification obligations for the trove of leaked student psychological records and whether it’s investigating the matter, an AG’s office spokesperson said in an email “we can’t comment on, even to confirm or deny, a potential or ongoing investigation,” and didn’t offer any other information. Reached for comment about the data breaches in Los Angeles and Broward County, a federal Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson said its civil rights division “does not typically comment on open or potential investigations,” and declined to say anything further.

The Los Angeles district has for decades struggled with its obligations to provide special education services to children with disabilities. Last year, it reached an agreement to provide compensatory services to children with disabilities after an investigation by the U.S. Education Department’s civil rights office found it had failed to provide them during the pandemic. Parents and advocates said last month many children are still waiting for those services.

Los Angeles parent Ariel Harman-Holmes, whose three children are in special education, said she’s worried the data breach could further divert funds from those much-needed special education services.

“I would rather have those funds go back into the schools and special education rather than spending a ton on litigation or settlements about privacy issues,” said Harman-Holmes, who serves as vice chair of the district’s Community Advisory Committee for Special Education. But she acknowledged it “would be very disturbing” if her own child’s psychological evaluations were leaked online.

“Our middle son is a very private person and this could be a psychological torment to him knowing that personal observations about him were out there,” she said. “That would be very devastating to him.”

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Help us report on the LAUSD ransomeware attack:

Are you a former Los Angeles Unified School District student in special education who may have been a data breach victim? Please click here to share your story with investigative reporter Mark Keierleber.

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This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Mark Barden holds up a picture of his son Daniel, who was killed in the Sandy Hook shooting, during a vigil remembering victims of the 2017 shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas. The vigil was organized by the Newtown Action Alliance and held outside the National Shooting Sports Foundation headquarters in Newtown. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

With an infectious smile, 7-year-old Daniel Barden’s slow, steady drumbeat held together the fledgling family band.

The quartet’s intimate performance had brought life to the Best Western hotel in Monticello, New York, where the Bardens gathered to celebrate a joyous milestone: Daniel’s maternal grandfather was turning 90 years old.

“And I think to myself,” Daniel’s sister, 10-year-old Natalie, sang into the microphone alongside her father Mark on guitar and 12-year-old brother James on bass, “what a wonderful world.”

Less than three months after the performance, the Barden family’s world would go from wonderful to horrific. On Dec. 14, 2012, Daniel was among the 20 children and six adults killed in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the deadliest K-12 school shooting in U.S. history.

The tempo in the Barden household would never be the same. For Mark, a professional guitarist, performing with his three children was “one of the greatest joys I’ve ever had in my life.” But after Daniel’s death, Barden told The 74, he “couldn’t even think about getting near music for a long time.”

Barden, who wasn’t politically engaged prior to the shooting, filled the void with unrelenting advocacy. With Newtown in the national spotlight, he partnered with other bereft parents who questioned how such a heinous crime could unfold in their sleepy suburban town and how they could prevent other children from getting gunned down in their classrooms. The effort quickly grew into the nonprofit Sandy Hook Promise, an advocacy and lobbying group that promotes gun control measures and trains children to recognize warning signs that someone could be headed down a path toward violence. Last year, the group reported $30 million in revenue and $21 million in expenses.

“It felt like I had a mission, I had to do something,” Mark Barden said. “In the very beginning, we didn’t know what to do, we didn’t know how to do this. We wanted to do something but, at the very least, we wanted to make folks aware of what had happened and to see if we could learn more about how to prevent it from happening.”

This month marks 10 years since the shooting that shattered the Bardens and 25 other families. While mass shootings are more common today than ever, the founders of Sandy Hook Promise and other advocacy efforts that grew out of the Newtown shooting have become a formidable force in the politics of school safety and guns in America. Navigating partisan gridlock in Washington, they’ve helped write into law new firearm restrictions and campus security funding.

In February, they secured an unprecedented $73 million court settlement with Remington, the manufacturer of the Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle used in the Newtown massacre, after arguing the company engaged in dangerous marketing practices that targeted younger, at-risk males. The size and scope of the settlement could become a roadmap for litigation after mass shootings.

And, most recently, in a pair of blistering defamation cases that played out in Texas and Connecticut, families were awarded nearly $1.5 billion against notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who made repeated claims that the shooting was nothing but an elaborate hoax. The staggering sum has pushed the right-wing radio host into bankruptcy, but he has announced plans to appeal and has taken steps to shield his assets.

Roses with the faces of the Sandy Hook Elementary students and adults killed are seen on a pole in Newtown, Connecticut, Jan. 3, 2013. The victims were Noah Pozner, Charlotte Bacon, Daniel Barden, Jack Pinto, Jesse Lewis, Grace McDonnell, Dylan Hockley, Jessica Rekos, Ana Marquez-Greene, Madeleine Hsu, Olivia Engel, James Mattioli, Chase Kowalski, Catherine Hubbard, Josephine Gay, Emilie Parker, Caroline Previdi, Avielle Richman, Benjamin Wheeler, Allison Wyatt, Vicki Soto, Mary Sherlach, Dawn Hochsprung, Rachel D’Avino, Lauren Rousseau and Anne Marie Murphy. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images)

Still, they face a harrowing reality. While mass school shootings remain statistically rare and campuses have become safer in recent years, active mass shootings — where gunmen open fire indiscriminately in populated areas and kill four or more people — have become more frequent and grown deadlier in the years since Sandy Hook. After the May mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 fourth-graders and two teachers were killed, a survey showed widespread parental fear. Nearly a third of parents said they were very or extremely worried about a shooting at their children’s school, according to a poll published in October by the Pew Research Center.

“This [Sandy Hook] was unprecedented in this country, a gunman armed with a military assault rifle and high-capacity magazines hunting 6- and 7-year-olds in an elementary school,” Barden said. “Unfortunately, it’s not as much of an anomaly now.”

Advocacy from parents like Barden, a father for whom that fear became reality, is perhaps more potent than ever. Over the course of the last decade, as Sandy Hook Promise found its footing, the National Rifle Association, whose political and financial clout around Second Amendment issues were once considered ironclad, has stumbled through money woes, internal scandals, lawsuits and dwindling membership. Heightened gun laws like universal background checks for firearm purchases, meanwhile, enjoy widespread public support.

Earlier this year, Sandy Hook parents attended a White House celebration after President Joe Biden signed into law the first new federal gun restrictions in nearly three decades. The law, which expands background checks on young adults seeking to buy a gun and encourages states to adopt “red flag” laws to remove weapons from people deemed a threat, offers just a fraction of the policies that Sandy Hook Promise promotes.

Daniel Barden

Yet for Barden, his decision to thrust himself full time into the gun control policy arena was about far more than universal background checks, assault weapons bans and mandatory waiting periods. It was about his son.

“We wanted people to know who our Daniel was,” Mark Barden said. His wife, Jackie, who teaches in a small school district in neighboring New York, serves on the board of Sandy Hook Promise.

On the last day of his life, Daniel expressed for the first time an interest in learning the piano. Before the school bus arrived outside their home on that pre-Christmas morning, Barden taught his son his first song.

“It was Jingle Bells and he played it beautifully. I’m telling you, he was going to be good.”

Mourners visit a streetside memorial Dec. 20, 2012, for victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. (John Moore/Getty Images)

‘Secondhand smoke moment’

In the days, weeks and months after their children were killed, a group of grieving Sandy Hook parents refused to stay silent. They held meetings at the library and in people’s living rooms to unpack the tragedy and find a way to move forward. That year, more than two dozen groups formed, including nonprofits to bolster campus security measures and to help victims’ families pay for medical bills, mental health care and funerals. They also dove head first into one of the country’s fiercest political wars: Guns.

A month after the shooting, 11 families of victims met privately in Washington, D.C., with then-Vice President Biden to promote new firearm laws. Sandy Hook Promise sought to ban assault rifles and limit the size of magazines after the Newtown gunman managed to unload 154 rounds of ammunition in less than four minutes from an AR-15-style rifle. The gunman carried 10 30-round magazines. It was during a brief pause in gunfire to reload that several children were given a chance to flee.

Barden said it was the unprecedented nature of their tragedy that catalyzed a class of new gun-safety advocates, including those without direct ties to Newtown. Shannon Watts, a stay-at-home mom from Indiana, formed Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, which began as a Facebook group, after watching news about the Newtown shooting on television. Moms Demand merged with Mayors Against Gun Violence and is now part of Everytown for Gun Safety, the country’s largest lobbying group for gun control. The group is heavily funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who founded Mayors Against Gun Violence in 2006 and chairs Everytown.

Mark Barden joins President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden for a press conference in 2013 at the White House after the Senate failed to pass legislation to expand background checks for gun sales. Also pictured are Gabby Giffords, Jimmy Greene, Nicole Hockley, Jeremy Richman, Neil Haslin, Jackie Barden, Natalie Barden and James Barden. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

To learn the ropes in Washington, Sandy Hook Promise consulted with Matt Bennett, a veteran in the gun policy debate who is now the co-founder and executive vice president of public affairs at Third Way, a center-left think tank. He delivered a bitter pill: Despite Democratic control of the White House, gun-control proponents lacked the numbers in Congress.

“We learned a lot about the gun lobby and we learned about this polarizing component where anyone advocating for gun safety policy was going to go up against it,” Barden said. “Politicians were willing to go against the will of their constituents to appease the gun lobby, and as crazy as that sounds, that’s the reality.”

Bennett said he advised the parents to set both long-term goals, like a ban on assault weapons, while advocating for policies that were more likely to pass in the short term, including reforms to the background check system. It’s through reachable goals and a willingness to compromise to gain support from Republican lawmakers, Bennett said, that Sandy Hook Promise has made itself more successful than other gun control efforts.

“Even in the depths of their most profound grief, they were able to be strategic and go after things that seemed achievable and important,” Bennett said.

Beyond being able to use their unique position to negotiate a tricky middle ground with Congress, they still found themselves facing down some of the country’s most unhinged extremists.

“On one hand, they were being put into this incredible national spotlight and on the other being harassed by these lunatics that are the followers of Alex Jones,” he said. “There were parents of murdered children saying, ‘I’m terrified, I’m getting phone calls every night from these people threatening me.’”

Despite those early meetings in Washington, ​​the group’s first victory occurred closer to home: the Connecticut legislature. Less than three months after the shooting, they partnered with then-Gov. Dannel Malloy to pass a state assault weapons ban.

Po Murray, the co-founder and chairwoman of the Newtown Action Alliance, speaks at an event at the U.S. Capitol in 2016 to demand an assault weapons ban. (Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for MoveOn.org)

Other members of the Newtown community took different approaches to advocacy. Stay-at-home mom Po Murray, who lived next door to the 20-year-old gunman, set out to form a coalition to “speak unapologetically” in support of new federal gun laws.

She became co-founder and chairwoman of the Newtown Action Alliance, a volunteer-run nonprofit that organizes rallies to raise awareness about gun violence. Each year, her group holds a vigil in Washington, D.C., that brings together gun violence survivors and victims’ families from across the country to mourn those who’ve been killed. The 10th National Vigil for All Victims of Gun Violence will be held Dec. 7 at the National Cathedral and St. Mark’s Episcopal Church.

After years of lobbying in Washington, the bipartisan gun-control legislation signed this year by Biden — with the support of 14 House Republicans and 15 Republican senators — marked a turning point for the movement.

DATA ANALYSIS

Mass Shootings Since Newtown

The map includes shootings where gunmen opened fire indiscriminately in populated areas and killed four or more people. Click the map to view it larger. (Source: The Violence Project, Gun Violence Archive; map: Eamonn Fitzmaurice)

The long-sought federal legislation followed not only the Uvalde mass shooting, but one in Buffalo, New York, just two weeks earlier that left 10 dead in a supermarket. Between the Sandy Hook massacre and the law’s passage, there were 52 active mass shootings with four or more fatalities in the U.S., according to an analysis of data compiled by The Violence Project and the Gun Violence Archive. The shootings, which resulted in at least 490 deaths and 1,293 injuries, include the 2016 shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that killed 49 people; the 2017 shooting at a Las Vegas music festival that killed 60 people and the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 people — 14 of them students — on Valentine’s Day 2018.

“We’re reaching that secondhand smoke moment, and I’ve said this for many, many years: Once people feel that they could lose their lives or their children could lose their lives, then they will get on the right side of history and start voting on this issue,” Murray said. “And I think people are starting to vote on this issue.”

‘A tremendous void’

On the morning of the shooting, Michele Gay, a teacher turned stay-at-home mom, followed emergency vehicles to the elementary school campus where her 7-year-old daughter Josephine was killed.

After teaching in and around Baltimore, she observed a more relaxed view on campus security in Connecticut. After Josephine’s death, she said, she regretted the missed opportunities to advocate for more robust measures.

“I remember sitting in the parking lot with this sense of knowing that I would somehow be involved in making sure that our schools were safe going forward,” she said.

Bob and Michele Gay at their home in suburban Boston Dec. 3, 2013. The family was in the process of moving to Massachusetts when their daughter Josephine was killed in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. They recreated Josephine’s room in their new home. (Essdras M Suarez/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Gay had stopped teaching to care for Josephine, who had autism. When tragedy struck, the family had a buyer lined up for their Newtown home and were in the process of relocating to suburban Boston in pursuit of schools with first-rate special education programs. The family ended up making the move north without its youngest member, but Gay’s full-time advocacy for Josephine never stopped.

In honoring her daughter’s memory, she became the co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Safe and Sound Schools, which steers clear of the gun control debate and instead pushes for heightened emergency planning, campus security and crisis response. In 2020, the group reported $578,000 in revenue and $528,450 in expenditures.

“When she was killed, it left a tremendous void in my life, just ‘What do I do now?” Gay said, who recalled returning from the elementary school that day to a kitchen equipped for Josephine’s special diet. “The refrigerator was stocked with all of her gluten-free, casein-free, soy-free, fun-free foods. That was our life and I realized, looking back now, how this has become my way to continue to advocate for her.”

Josephine Gay

Rather than hitting the pavement in Washington, Gay said her years in the classroom led her to an approach that centers around education. Safe and Sound Schools, which relies on funding from school security vendors and speaking fees, provides school safety and security guides to parents and educators, while Gay and other network members frequently present at conferences for school-based police and other stakeholders.

And while she’s managed to sidestep the controversies surrounding U.S. gun laws, her group has instead found itself in the debate over the degree that fortified campuses and school-based police play in keeping kids safe. Security consultant Kenneth Trump, president of Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services, said that while parents and other advocates offer an emotional draw that can encourage conversations about school safety, they lack the training and experience to offer concrete advice.

He questioned whether Safe and Sound Schools’ reliance on donations from security companies had compromised the advice it offers educators.

“There becomes a financial piece to this and it becomes convoluted,” said Trump, whose company also provides consulting services to schools on security issues. “If you’re underwritten by the vendors, well, what do you owe them?”

Michele Gay, co-founder and executive director of Safe and Sound Schools, presents at a 2018 conference for school nurses, counselors and psychologists in Reading, Pennsylvania. (Lauren A. Little/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images)

Gay said her group relies on expert advisers, including Frank DeAngelis, the retired principal of Columbine High School, and Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers. But she also goes by her own instincts.

“Emergency management just felt natural, almost like you do some version of emergency management everyday as a teacher or an administrator,” Gay said. “A lot of it has just intuitively made sense to me.”

‘The North Star’

Before Gay, Barden and other Sandy Hook parents had their lives forever changed, Newtown police missed warning signs that a gunman would soon kill their children. Four years before the massacre, cops were warned about the perpetrator’s access to weapons and his desire for blood.

Online, the gunman researched mass shooters who came before him. A woman who engaged with the shooter online more than two years before Sandy Hook told FBI investigators he had a list of prior attacks and was “meticulously documenting the details of hundreds of spree killings and mass murders.”

Missed warning signs have become common before mass school shootings, including in Uvalde, where the gunman’s obsession with violence became so well known at school that other students had given him the nickname “school shooter.” Just days before the attack, the 18-year-old suspect posted on social media his desire to do something that would “put him all over the news.”

Though there is no single profile of a mass shooter, virtually all of them displayed warning signs before carrying out their violence, according to a 2019 Secret Service report. Such patterns, according to the Secret Service, include a history of substance abuse, troubles at home, including abuse, divorced parents and an obsession with firearms. In a study of averted school shootings, the Secret Service found that two-thirds were prevented when a classmate recognized concerning behaviors and reported them to adults.

Efforts to identify warning signs have become a key part of a growing effort in schools nationally, called threat assessment, to identify children with a penchant for violence before they carry out an attack. The approach, pioneered by the Secret Service, generally brings together school administrators, mental health officials and police officers to flag potential warning signs and intervene.

Beyond advocating for new firearm rules, training students and educators to recognize these signs has become a staple of Sandy Hook Promise’s work. After researching ways to prevent future violence, Mark Barden said the consistent presence of such warning signs “was like the North Star for us.”

Mark Barden comforts his wife Jackie at their Newtown home in May 2013. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

“We wanted to have more of an immediate impact than just grinding the gears and making the sausage in Washington,” Barden said. More than 14 million students and educators have since participated in the group’s “Say Something” training program. A similar program, “Start With Hello,” empowers youth to fight social isolation and reach out to peers who may be lonely. “We’re building this culture in schools where students are more aware of one another, are likely to step in and give someone assistance or connect them to help if they need it.”

In the wake of the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Sandy Hook Promise helped write the STOP School Violence Act, which grew from $75 million that year to $300 million after the Uvalde tragedy. Along with providing schools money for school security, the federal law gives grants for programs — like those offered by the nonprofit — that teach students to identify signs of violence and to intervene. It also incentivized the creation of threat assessment teams. The group reports just 6% of its revenue is from government grants, according to its most recent annual report.

“We have made a commitment to give our programs away to schools at no cost to the schools,” Barden said. “However, it comes at a great cost to us” that the legislation helps offset.

Trump, the school security consultant, said the law — which Sandy Hook Promise helped write and is now its primary source of funding — “raises a lot of ethical questions and questions around conflicts of interest.”

Meanwhile, civil rights groups have warned that school threat assessment teams, by attempting to identify would-be shooters before they act, could discriminate against at-risk youth and push them into the school-to-prison pipeline. Their arguments resemble those from an unlikely ally: the National Rifle Association.

In a public service announcement, Sandy Hook Promise depicted a school shooter whose warning signs, including an interest in guns, went under the radar until it was too late. In a 2016 blog post, the NRA said the advertisement “reveals the organization as simply another anti-gun group that wants to marginalize firearm ownership” by portraying a young person interested in guns as a would-be mass killer. Singling out an interest in guns, the group wrote, “is the very definition of demonizing gun owners,” who include hunters and participants in scholastic shooting teams.

“For (Sandy Hook Promise) to suggest that schools somehow underreact to any expressed interest in firearms is laughably absurd,” the post states. “The problem is exactly the opposite, as students have been routinely disciplined (and sometimes arrested) in schools throughout the country for harmless actions that merely suggest the idea of a firearm.”

Mark Barden embraces his daughter Natalie as they perform during a March for Our Lives rally Aug. 12, 2018, in Newtown, Connecticut. Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images)

Finding a voice

During the Barden family band’s 2012 birthday performance, 10-year-old Natalie confidently conveyed the lyrics made famous by Louis Armstrong.

“I see skies of blue, and clouds of white,” she sang in time to Daniel’s soft drumbeat. “The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night.”

After the massacre at the school she also attended — and as television crews swarmed the family home — the fifth grader remained silent. At such a young age, Natalie said, she struggled to grasp what happened to Daniel and why someone would carry out such an atrocious act. It wasn’t until high school that she became more vocal.

Then the shooting occurred at Marjory Stoneman in 2018, when Natalie was 16. After Sandy Hook, it was the parents who led the charge, but now it was teenagers like her taking center stage.

“We all saw the Parkland kids speaking out,” Natalie said. “That was a big inspiration to me. A lot of kids in Newtown, because time had passed and we were older, I feel like it made sense for us to join that movement.”

Now, as she advocates for new firearm laws alongside her father, she incorporates music into her messaging, singing songs — like Humble and Kind by Tim McGraw — that remind her of Daniel, who would have been a 17-year-old junior had he survived.

“I would get so nervous speaking, but then it felt like I could almost say more by just singing someone else’s words,” she said. “I’ve really, really enjoyed that part of using music to convey my emotions.”

Just recently — this time without Daniel there to celebrate — the Bardens gathered in their backyard to mark a milestone many families never got to see: Martin Giblin, Daniel’s grandfather, turned 100.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice / LA School Report / iStock / U.S. Army Materiel Command

After the police in more than a dozen South Carolina communities fielded calls last week alerting them to active school shootings, officers rushed to campuses where students and educators hid in fear for their lives.

Ever since the mass school shooting in May at a Uvalde, Texas elementary school, families nationwide have been on high alert about the very real concern of such attacks decimating communities. But as South Carolina parents converged on their children’s schools and educators released students early, police statewide reached the same conclusion: This time, there was no real threat.

Instead, officials said the calls appeared to be part of a nationwide “swatting” hoax that’s played out at hundreds of K-12 schools in more than a dozen states since classes resumed this fall. Weeks earlier, dozens of schools in Minnesota, Virginia and Ohio became targets. Now, as the police connect the dots and report commonalities, experts with years of experience chasing down swatting perpetrators believe that many — if not most — of the recent incidents targeting U.S. schools are connected. After all, similar swatting sprees have been coordinated in shady internet outposts for years.

“If they’re hitting 12 or 15 schools in a particular jurisdiction or a particular state all at once, that is absolutely a coordinated attack,” said James Turgal, a former executive assistant director for the FBI Information and Technology Branch. Turgal is a 21-year veteran of the FBI, which is actively investigating the latest swatting attacks on schools.

Given its size, he suspects the most recent surge at schools is likely being coordinated by a group of people including foreign actors and swat-for-hire cybercriminals who carry out hoax emergency calls for money. He does not necessarily believe it’s a government-level attempt to sow chaos on American soil and that U.S. teens may still be pulling the strings.

“Swatting is not something a nation state is going to get involved in,” said Turgal, now the vice president of cyber risk and strategy at Optiv Security. “These are smaller organizations that are trying to sell their services, not what I would call really sophisticated.”

With the recent wave of swatting incidents targeting schools, news outlets have identified several commonalities across communities and states, including callers with thick accents, state-by-state clusters of hoax calls and similar false crime scene details,

Such hallmarks are consistent in at least a half dozen states, according to an analysis by Wired magazine, which noted that multiple local police officials had reportedly traced the calls back to Africa.

In Minnesota, 17 false calls were placed by someone with a distinct accent using the same voice over IP technology, Drew Evans, superintendent of the state bureau of criminal apprehension, told Wired.

“There’s a lot of different technology that could make it appear to be a single person,” Evans said. “But all the indications we have are that it’s either one person or a single entity.”

Conceptually, swatting is straightforward and in many ways follows the bomb-threat playbook that’s pushed schools into lockdowns and panic for generations. Often using technology to mask their true identities and locations, threat actors call the police to report an emergency like an active shooting or a hostage situation with the goal of forcing tactical SWAT teams to descend on a target and cause panic. In several cases, these malicious false alarms have ended in death.

Fame, notoriety and callous oneupmanship has long motivated swatting attacks, which have their origins in the video gaming community. The slew of media coverage on the Uvlade attack and other school shootings in recent months is likely a motivating factor, Turgal said.

In previous swatting cases — including those targeting schools, celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Justin Bieber and video game rivals — many of the perpetrators turned out to be kids. Other swatting attacks have been politically motivated, ranging from those on extremist Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green to outspoken gun control advocate David Hogg, who survived the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

In the last eight years, Los Angeles Police Detective Edward Dorroh has worked on hundreds of swatting incidents — including two that ended fatally. Of those, roughly 90% were carried out by children and teens, he told The 74. Dorroh, who is currently assigned to the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, is assisting in police investigations on the latest swatting incidents targeting schools. For that reason, Dorroh said he couldn’t comment on current cases, but discussed his deep experience with these shadowy crimes and how police confront them.

Among the gaming community which latched onto the practice, Dorrah said the act is considered even more rewarding if they can get a heavily armed, tactical police response on camera as gamers livestream their gameplay on platforms like Twitch — a particular swatting attack “in the category of ‘for the LOLs,’ for the entertainment,” Dorroh said.

“They’re looking for influence,” he said. “They brag about it and they build up a reputation and then what happens is people start to hire them out to do swattings. That’s where a lot of your school stuff comes in.”

Such paid swat-for-hire schemes, he said, aren’t relegated to the dark web; they’re openly promoted on Discord, the instant messaging platform popular among gamers and young people generally, with more than 150 million monthly active users.

In a statement, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division said that while the recent emergency calls “are believed to be a hoax,” it has encouraged local law enforcement agencies “to take any and all threats seriously” while they partner with state and federal law enforcement agencies to investigate.

The FBI has acknowledged in a statement to The 74 and other media outlets that they’re probing the surge in incidents, but they’ve provided little specific information.

“The FBI takes swatting very seriously because it puts innocent people at risk,” the bureau said in the statement. “While we have no information to indicate a specific and credible threat, we will continue to work with our local, state, and federal law enforcement partners to gather, share, and act upon threat information as it comes to our attention.”

Swat for profit

Law enforcement officials have been grappling with swatting attacks against schools for years. In 2015, state cybersecurity officials in New Jersey sounded the alarm on swatting attacks against schools, shopping malls and private homes designed to capture national media attention, wage revenge on video game rivals or to make a profit.

“Incidents of swatting across the country are commonly linked, and investigations often lead to groups of malicious actors outside the U.S.,” the New Jersey Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Cell noted in a bulletin. “These foreign actors are often contacted and paid to conduct the swatting act by a student of the targeted school.”

Amy Klinger, the co-founder and programs director of The Educator’s School Safety Network, has been tracking school threats and violence incidents for years to provide educators real-time information on emerging trends. Beginning in late August, data indicated the start of an unprecedented school swatting spike. Leaders at every school in the U.S., she said, should assume “at least in the short term” that their campus is likely to become the target of a false active-shooter report and they must be prepared for the call.

“It is not necessarily within the control of the schools to prevent these events, because clearly they’re happening,” Klinger said.” But I do think it is within the control of the school to anticipate ‘What would we do if that happened to us?’ Being proactive is the responsibility of the school, especially knowing that these are happening at such a high level of frequency.”

Even though the school shooting threats are false, it’s important that educators and police remain diligent in responding to active-shooter calls without overreacting, said Kenneth Trump, president of the Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services. While “knee-jerk reactions” like swift school closures can embolden threat actors to carry out additional attacks, he said, failure to react could get someone killed. When school officials receive an emergency call, he said they should “assess and then react, not react and then assess.”

“It’s not a prank, it’s not a joke, it’s a cruel hoax and it’s really causing a lot of anxiety in communities, even more so post-Uvalde,” said Trump, offering a stern message to whomever is targeting schools nationwide. “When law enforcement catches up with you, which they will, you’re facing some very serious consequences — stuff that’s going to stay with you for the rest of your life.”

Swatting presents real-world dangers

Dorroh, the LAPD detective, knows firsthand the fear that comes with reports of an active school shooting. Just last month, a school in suburban Los Angeles where his wife is a teacher was forced into lockdown when someone swatted a nearby high school. He said that knowledge of the national trend allowed him to offer a measured emotional response.

Aside from psychological harm, there haven’t been any reports of widespread injuries stemming from the school swatting surge. Last month in Georgia, a police officer and another driver were hospitalized from a car accident as the cops raced to the scene of a school that was targeted in a swatting attack.

But several swatting incidents outside of schools have led to deaths, highlighting the dangers the hoax presents to educators and students. Of two high-profile swatting cases where people died, Dorroh helped investigate both.

Last year, 20-year-old Shane Sonderman of rural Tennessee was sentenced to five years in prison after he helped carry out a swatting attack on a 60-year-old computer programmer who refused to give up the coveted Twitter handle “@Tennessee.” When police officers surrounded his house, the father of three and grandfather of six suffered a fatal heart attack. Sonderman, who began swatting as a teenager, used Discord to collaborate with others, including a minor in the United Kingdom, to wage the attack. Dorroh said that for Sonderman, swatting was his only social outlet.

Another swatting attack, carried out by Tyler Barriss of Los Angeles, led to the fatal police shooting of an unsuspecting man in Wichita, Kansas. Dorroh said his first run-in with Barriss was during an earlier investigation into hoax bomb threats targeting schools — phone calls that were never recorded. In that earlier case, police were able to pin him down after he made a hoax call to a television station.

Then, in 2017, Barriss called police and told them he was at a house in Wichita, where he shot his father and was holding his family hostage. Except it wasn’t his house — it was the home of an unsuspecting 28-year-old man who police said became confused when they arrived. Amid the commotion, an officer shot and killed him.

Barriss had carried out the attack on behalf of two video gamers who were in a feud after a “Call of Duty” match ended in one’s defeat. One gamer used Twitter to recruit Barriss to carry out the attack on a second gamer — who provided Barriss with the Kansas address. All three were charged criminally, and in 2019 Barriss was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

“I was charging people, depending on how much of a stranger they were to me, anywhere from $20 to $50 per swat,” Barriss said in a recent episode of the Netflix documentary series Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies and the Internet. “But, quite frankly, I enjoyed the thrill of swatting, I just enjoyed doing it, having it appear on the news and bragging about it on Twitter.”

Between 2015 and 2017, Barriss had been connected to false calls in Ohio, Nevada, Illinois, Indiana, Virginia, Texas, Arizona, Massachusetts, Missouri, Maine, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Indiana, Michigan, Florida, Connecticut and New York.

“When we had the fatal swatting in Wichita, they thought [Barriss] might be a suspect so when we heard the audio recording it was like ‘Ya, that’s him,’ right off the bat,” Dorroh said. “It was just the matter of finding him and getting him into custody.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

The ransomware gang Vice Society posted student data to its dark-web “leak site” after LAUSD leaders refused to pay a ransom. (Screenshot)

The Vice Society ransomware gang reportedly published over the weekend a trove of sensitive student records from the Los Angeles school district. The data was posted to the gang’s dark-web “leak site,” after education leaders refused to pay — and at first even acknowledge — a ransom.

Yet in a press conference Monday, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho sought to downplay the damage done, particularly as it relates to records about children. An initial news report on the data dump said that student psychiatric evaluation records had been published online, citing a confidential law enforcement source. That reporting, Carvalho said, is “absolutely incorrect.”

“We have seen no evidence that psychiatric evaluation information or health records, based on what we’ve seen thus far, has been made available publicly,” said Carvalho, who acknowledged the hackers had “touched” the district’s massive student information system. The “vast majority” of exposed student data, including names, academic information and personal addresses, was from a period between 2013 and 2016. “That is the extent of the student information data that we have seen.”

Roughly 500 gigabytes of district data was made public on Sunday by the Russian-speaking ransomware gang, which took credit for stealing the district records in a massive data breach last month. The full scope of the information released is unclear, yet after reviewing about two-thirds of the data, Carvalho said that “so far, based on what we’ve seen, critical health information or social security numbers for students,” is not included.

Carvalho confirmed in a tweet on Sunday that LAUSD’s data had been published on the dark web, but did not verify the type of data that was leaked. On Monday, he said that information from private-sector contractors, particularly those in construction, appeared most impacted. Breached records include contracts, financial information and personally identifiable data, Carvalho said.

Cybersecurity experts have warned that the release of district data could come with significant risks for current and former students. Children’s social security numbers are particularly valuable to identity thieves because they can be used for years without raising alarm.

James Turgal, a former executive assistant director for the FBI Information and Technology Branch, said it’s particularly important for officials to protect the sensitive data of children, who may “find out they own a condo in Bora Bora under their name 15 years from now” because their information was exploited.

Turgal, now the vice president of cyber risk and strategy at Optiv Security, praised the district’s decision to withhold payment.

• Related: LA schools and the mystery of the missing ransom note
  

“There’s no upside to ever paying a ransom,” said Turgal, “More likely than not, even if LAUSD would have paid the ransom, [Vice Society] still would have disclosed the information” on their leak site.

Carvalho made it clear in several statements the district had no intentions of paying up, possibly prompting the criminals to publish the stolen data earlier than planned. Vice Society, which took credit for a massive data breach that caused widespread disruptions at America’s second largest school district, had initially announced plans to publish the data on Monday.

“What I can tell you is that the demand — any demand — would be absurd,” Carvalho told the Los Angeles Times. “But this level of demand was, quite frankly, insulting. And we’re not about to enter into negotiations with that type of entity.”

In a statement, the district acknowledged that paying a ransom wouldn’t ensure the recovery of data and asserted that “public dollars are better spent on our students rather than capitulating to a nefarious and illicit crime syndicate. We continue to make progress toward full operational stability for several core information technology services.”

The district announced on Sunday a new hotline available to concerned parents and students seeking information about the breach. A district spokesperson declined to comment further. The district has also not revealed details of Vice Society’s demand.

Thank you to our students, families and employees for doing their part in the ongoing recovery from this cyberattack. pic.twitter.com/K8VhiFmSbL

— Alberto M. Carvalho (@LAUSDSup) October 2, 2022

In an email to The 74, Vice Society said they published the district data because “they didn’t pay,” and acknowledged the “ransom demand was big” without providing a specific figure. Asked what makes school districts attractive victims for such attacks, the group offered a brief explanation: “Maybe news? Don’t know … We just attack it =).”

Over the weekend, they told cybersecurity journalist Jeremy Kirk that they demanded a ransom weeks earlier than district officials have publicly acknowledged. Asked about the size of the ransom, the group replied, “let’s say that it was big =).”

Since the breach was disclosed, district officials have been working with federal authorities at the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which the ransomware group says has “wasted our time,” telling TechCrunch in an email that federal authorities were “wrong” to advise the district against paying.

“We always delete documents and help to restore network [sic], we don’t talk about companies that paid us,” the group told the news outlet. “Now LAUSD has lost 500GB of files.”

The 74 has not reviewed the data published to the Vice Society leak site. Doug Levin, the national director of The K12 Security Information eXchange, said Monday he was unable to independently verify information posted to the leak site, suggesting that it may have been the victim of a hack. But once the data was published online, he said, it’s impossible to rein it back in.

“You have to assume that it has been compromised by nefarious actors who have copied it down and the damage, therefore, is done,” Levin said.

For example, while Vice Society likely posted most of the data it exfiltrated onto its leak site, they may have held onto the most sensitive data like social security numbers to sell on a dark web marketplace, often for identity theft.

Now that sensitive data has been disclosed, the district must formally notify victims that their information was compromised and provide advice on how to best protect themselves, Levin said. The district may find themselves on the hook for as much as $100 in medium-term recovery costs, Levin noted, to improve their cybersecurity infrastructure and work to prevent another attack in the future.

He said it’s important that affected educators, parents and students adopt strong security safeguards. The district announced plans to provide credit monitoring services to victims, but Levin said that victims should consider freezing their credit.

“The school district itself is likely going to be facing a crisis of confidence in its school community about its ability to keep data and their IT systems safe and secure,” Levin said. “Ultimately, they’re going to have to be able to answer the question of why they can be trusted to safeguard that personal information going forward.”

CEO and Executive Director of The Trevor Project Amit Paley addresses attendees during the Stonewall 50th Commemoration rally in 2019 in New York City. (Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)

Updated 3:15 p.m. ET

Hours after the publication of this article Friday, The Trevor Project announced in a tweet it would return a $25,000 donation from the student surveillance company Gaggle, acknowledging widespread concerns about the monitoring tool’s “role in negatively impacting LGBTQ students.”

“Our philosophy is that having a seat at the table enables us to positively influence how companies engage with LGBTQ young people, and we initially agreed to work with Gaggle because we saw an opportunity to have a meaningful impact to better protect LGBTQ students,” the nonprofit said in the statement. “We hear and understand the concerns, and we hope to work alongside schools and institutions to ensure they are appropriately supporting LGBTQ youth and their mental health.” 

pic.twitter.com/8cAifEnTvp

— The Trevor Project (@TrevorProject) September 30, 2022

The move came after widespread condemnation on social media, with multiple supporters threatening to pull their donations to The Trevor Project moving forward. 

In a Friday statement, Gaggle spokesperson Paget Hetherington said the company wanted The Trevor Project’s “guidance on how to do what we do better.” The company also removed a webpage where it previously touted the partnership.

“We’re disappointed that The Trevor Project has decided to pause our collaboration,” she said. “However, we are grateful for the opportunity we have had to learn and work with them and will continue with our mission of protecting all students regardless of how they identify.”

Original report below: 

Amid warnings from lawmakers and civil rights groups that digital surveillance tools could discriminate against at-risk students, a leading nonprofit devoted to the mental well-being of LGBTQ youth has formed a financial partnership with a tech company that subjects them to persistent online monitoring.

Beginning in May, The Trevor Project, a high-profile nonprofit focused on suicide prevention among LGBTQ youth, began to list Gaggle as a “corporate partner” on its website, disclosing that the controversial surveillance company had given them between $25,000 and $50,000 in support. Meanwhile Gaggle, which uses artificial intelligence and human content moderators to sift through billions of student chat messages and homework assignments each year in search of students who may harm themselves or others, published a webpage noting the two were collaborating to “improve mental health outcomes for LGBTQ young people.”

Though the precise contours of the partnership remain unclear, a Trevor Project spokesperson said it aims to have a positive influence on the way Gaggle navigates privacy concerns involving LGBTQ youth while a Gaggle representative said the company sees the relationship as a learning opportunity.

Both groups maintain that the partnership was forged in the interests of LGBTQ students, but student privacy advocates argue the relationship could undermine The Trevor Project’s work while allowing Gaggle to use the donation to counter criticism about its potential harms to LGBTQ students. The collaboration comes at a particularly perilous time for many students as a rash of states implement new anti-LGBTQ laws that could erode their privacy and expose them to legal jeopardy.

Teeth Logsdon-Wallace, a 14-year-old student from Minneapolis with first-hand experience of Gaggle’s surveillance dragnet, said the deal could eliminate any motivation for Gaggle to change its business practices.

“It really does feel like a ‘We paid you, now say we’re fine,’ kind of thing,” said Logsdon-Wallace, who is transgender. Without any real incentives to implement reforms, he said that Gaggle’s “seal of approval” from The Trevor Project could offer the privately held company reputational cover amid growing concerns that such surveillance tech is disproportionately harmful to LGBTQ youth.

“People who want to defend Gaggle can just point to their little Trevor Project thing and say, ‘See, they have the support of “The Gays” so it’s fine actually,’ and all it does is make it easier to deflect and defend actual issues with Gaggle.”

Student surveillance company Gaggle is listed among “Corporate Partners” on The Trevor Project’s website (screenshot)

Following an investigation by The 74 into Gaggle’s monitoring practices, the company faced swiftblowback for its effects on LGBTQ youth. Gaggle’s algorithm relies on keyword matching to compare students’ online communications against a dictionary of thousands of words the company believes could indicate potential trouble, including references to violence, drugs and sex. Among the keywords is “gay” and “lesbian,” verbiage the company maintains is necessary because LGBTQ youth are more likely than their straight and cisgender peers to consider suicide.

But privacy and civil rights advocates have accused the company of discrimination by subjecting LGBTQ youth to heightened surveillance — a concern that has taken on new meaning this year as states like Florida adopt laws that ban classroom discussions about sexuality and require educators to out LGBTQ youth to their parents.

A recent report by the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology found that while Gaggle and similar student monitoring tools are designed to keep students safe, teachers reported that they were more often used to discipline them. LGBTQ youth were disproportionately affected.

In a statement, a Trevor Project spokesperson said it’s important that digital monitoring tools keep students safe without invading their privacy and that the collaboration was built on Gaggle’s “desire to identify and address privacy and safety concerns that their product could cause for LGBTQ students.”

“It’s true that LGBTQ youth are among the most vulnerable to the misuse of this kind of safety monitoring — many worry that these tools could out them to teachers or parents against their will,” the statement continued. “It is because of that very real concern that we have worked in a limited capacity with digital safety companies — to play an educational role and have a seat at the table so they can consider these potential risks while they design their products and develop policies.”

But it remains unclear what policy changes have occurred at Gaggle as a result of the deal. Without offering any specifics, Gaggle spokesperson Paget Hetherington said in a statement the company is “honored to be able to align with The Trevor Project to better serve LGBTQ youth,” and that the company is “always looking for ways to learn and to improve upon what we do to better support students and keep them safe.”

‘Faceless bureaucracy’ 

At its core, the partnership between Gaggle and The Trevor Project makes sense because both work to prevent youth suicides, said Amelia Vance, the founder and president of Public Interest Privacy Consulting. But their approaches to solving the problem, she said, are fundamentally different.

By combing through digital materials on students’ school-issued Microsoft and Google accounts, Gaggle seeks to alert educators — and in some cases the police — of students’ online behaviors that suggest they might harm themselves or others.

“It really is about collecting details that kids may not be voluntarily sharing — information that they may be looking up to learn, to explore their identities, to otherwise help them in their day-to-day lives,” Vance said. At The Trevor Project, “you have proactive outreach from youth who know that they need help or they need a community.”

Katy Perry poses for a photograph during a fundraising event for The Trevor Project in 2012. (Mark Davis/Getty Images for Trevor Project)

The West Hollywood-based Trevor Project, which relies heavily on celebrity endorsements and funding from major corporate sponsors including Macy’s and AT&T, was founded in 1998 and reported $29.6 million in contributions in 2020. Gaggle, founded in 1999, does not publicly report its finances. The Dallas-based company says it monitors the digital communications of more than 5 million students across more than 1,500 school districts nationally.

The Trevor Project has also turned to artificial intelligence to train volunteer crisis counselors and assess the risk levels of people who reach out to the nonprofit’s suicide prevention hotline for help. If counselors with The Trevor Project believe a student is at imminent suicide risk, policies direct them to call the police. But it’s ultimately up to youth to decide which information they share with adults.

It’s important for LGBTQ students to have trusting adults with whom they can confide their experiences, Vance said, rather than a system where “some faceless bureaucracy is finding out and informing your parents” about information they intended to keep private.

A recent national survey by The Trevor Project offers troubling data about the realities of the youth suicide crisis. Nearly half of LGBTQ youth said they seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year and 14% said they made a suicide attempt.

This isn’t the first time The Trevor Project has faced scrutiny in recent months for its ties to companies that could have detrimental effects on LGBTQ youth. In July, a HuffPost investigation revealed that CEO and Executive Director Amit Paley previously served as a consultant to Purdue Pharma and helped create a strategic plan to boost opioid sales amid an addiction epidemic — one that’s associated with a threefold increase in suicide attempts among LGBTQ youth.

The group knows firsthand how data can be weaponized. Just last month, trolls on far-right online messaging boards that target the transgender community launched a campaign to clog up The Trevor Project’s suicide prevention hotline.

Persistent student surveillance could exacerbate the challenges that LGBTQ youth face by subjecting them to disproportionate discipline and erroneously flagging their online communications as threats, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey warned in an April report.

Nearly a third of LGBTQ students say they or someone they know has experienced the nonconsensual disclosure of their sexual orientation or gender identity — typically called “outing” — due to student activity monitoring, according to a recent report by the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. They were also more likely than their straight and cisgender peers to report getting into trouble at school and being contacted by the police about having committed a crime.

A recent survey by the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology found that student monitoring tools have disproportionate negative effects on LGBTQ youth. (Center for Democracy and Technology)

In response to the survey results, a coalition of civil rights groups called on the U.S. Education Department to condemn the use of activity monitoring tools that violate students’ civil liberties and to state its intent “to take enforcement action against violations that result in discrimination.” The letter argues that using the tools to out LGBTQ students or to subject them to disproportionate discipline and criminal investigations could violate Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools.

Among the letter signatories is the nonprofit LGBT Tech, which has warned about the harms of digital surveillance on LGBTQ people. Christopher Wood, the group’s co-founder and executive director, said The Trevor Project’s partnership with Gaggle could be positive if it’s used to ensure that LGBTQ youth who are struggling have access to help. But once Gaggle gives student information to school administrators, the company can no longer control how those records are used, he said.

Gaggle says on its website that the student surveillance company “is proud to collaborate with The Trevor Project and improve mental health outcomes for LGBTQ young people.” (Screenshot)

“If that information is provided to someone who is not accepting, who has very different views and who willfully brings their political, personal or religious views into the school system, and they are not supportive of LGBTQ youth, then what they’ve done is harm the student,” Wood said.

Yet as schools increasingly turned to student activity monitoring software during the pandemic, The Trevor Project portrayed their growth as an inevitable result of districts seeking “to avoid liability issues.”

“It is our stance that since these tools are not going anywhere, we think it’s important to do our part to offer our expertise around LGBTQ experiences,” the spokesperson said.

Minneapolis student Teeth Logsdon-Wallace poses with his dog Gilly. (Photo courtesy Alexis Logsdon)

The power of trust

In interviews, students flagged by Gaggle said their trust in adults suffered as a result. Among them is Logsdon-Wallace, the 14-year-old transgender student. Before the Minneapolis school district stopped using Gaggle this summer and state lawmakers put strict limits on digital surveillance in schools, the tool alerted district security when he used a classroom assignment to reflect on a previous suicide attempt and how music therapy helped him cope. That same assignment, which included references to his gender identity, was flagged to his parents.

And while his parents are affirming, he has friends who live in less supportive environments.

“I have friends who are queer and/or trans who are out at school but not to their parents,” he said. “If they want to be open with teachers, Gaggle can create a bad or even dangerous situation for these kids if their parents were contacted about what they were saying.”

In The Trevor Project’s recent survey, nearly three-quarters of LGBTQ youth reported that they have endured discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender identity, just 37% said their homes are affirming and 55% said the same about their schools.

Given that reality, just 43% of LGBTQ youth reported sharing information about their sexual orientation with teachers or guidance counselors.

While Gaggle has maintained that keywords like “gay” and “lesbian” can also prevent bullying, Logsdon-Wallace said their approach is out of touch with how students generally interact. At school, he said he’s been called just about every “slur for a queer or a trans person that isn’t from like 80 years ago.” While slurs are common, terms like “lesbian” are not.

“As an actual teenager going to an actual public school, those words are not being used to bully people,” he said. “They’re just not.”

As the shady ransomware gang Vice Society took credit for a hack that sent Los Angeles school officials scrambling last week, cybersecurity experts noticed something peculiar. 

Vice Society, an “intrusion, exfiltration and extortion” group that experts believe is based in Russia, has become notorious for waging cyber warfare against K-12 schools, leveraging the theft of sensitive data to demand a ransom. Schools nationwide have shelled out millions of dollars to prevent hackers from publishing private records on dark-web outposts.  

So what’s a ransomware attack without a demand for money?

“We have not received a ransom demand, nor have we sought a direct communication with the entity,” Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said at a Friday news conference, nearly a week after the breach was detected.

On Tuesday, the L.A. school board unanimously approved an emergency declaration allowing Carvalho, who took the helm at the nation’s second-largest school district in February, to expedite contracts for cybersecurity for a year without competitive bidding.

The new superintendent’s statements are “not consistent” with Vice Society’s extortion playbook, said Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of Milwaukee-based Hold Security, a computer security firm that warned the district in 2021 about a cyber vulnerability. 

Holden said he fears “a missing link” between the district and the threat actors, who are “definitely known to send out a ransom note because that’s how they get paid.” Vice Society has made clear that money is the primary motive for the cyber attack on L.A. schools, which the group says it carried out but has not provided evidence to substantiate its claims.

Holden is not the only one trying to read between the lines.

“One big question everybody has is, ‘Did they pay, are they going to pay the extortion demand?’” said Doug Levin, national director of The K12 Security Information eXchange.

Levin and other cybersecurity experts have a few theories. 

For one, it could be the case of carefully worded messaging. While Carvalho noted that the district has not “sought a direct communication with the entity,” the superintendent’s comments don’t “seem to rule out that someone on their behalf may be in touch with Vice Society,” Levin said, adding that “nothing in their response or in what Vice Society has said or done rules out paying extortion and much is consistent with it.”

In previous attacks, districts have declined to recognize ransom demands unless they come through official channels, he added, and it’s possible that “a pop-up on a computer screen is not a valid way of communication to a district and therefore it does not count as being received.” 

It’s possible, Holden said, that a ransom note failed to reach an audience. When organizations learn they’ve been compromised, they sometimes react by defending themselves overzealously and the ransom note winds up getting blocked, he said. 

“The organizations typically tend to lose these notes, block them or don’t report them,” he said. If someone reports a phishing attempt to IT, email administrators tend to purge the message and future communications. “So they basically didn’t block the phishing email, but potentially they blocked the ransomware note.”

But there could be another explanation for the missing ransom — one of success. When district officials moved quickly to take their computer systems offline after detecting the breach, they could have effectively eliminated the threat before the demand was made. 

“If there’s enough notoriety about it and they didn’t get far enough to actually encrypt enough or exfiltrate enough data, I’ve seen the threat actors abandon it,” cyber crime expert James Turgal told The 74. “When law enforcement gets involved, that’s when those guys start getting really nervous.”

In his press conference, Superintendent Carvalho never called out the hacking group by name but noted that federal law enforcement officials working on the criminal investigation have “intimate knowledge” of the bad actors. 

While some cyber criminals steer clear of attacks on schools and hospitals, Vice Society — whose dark web “leak site” is styled after the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City — has no such code, Holden said.

“These guys don’t have this stop and that’s extremely disturbing because this may indicate that they won’t stop for anything,” he said.  

Reporters have received brief responses from an email address that federal law enforcement officials say is controlled by the cyber gang. In their replies, the group took credit for the attack and claimed to steal some 500GB of files from compromised district servers. In an email to The Associated Press, the group offered a simple explanation: “We are not political organization, so everything is just for money and pleasure =).” 

The 74 contacted Vice Society to request information about its ransom demand and the records it stole. In a brief response, the group said it would provide “all answers after they appear on our website,” suggesting that the L.A. data would be leaked if negotiations fail. 

Even without a ransom, recovering from the attack will likely cost the districts millions of dollars, experts said. As such attacks on schools have become more frequent, districts face steep cyber liability insurance premium hikes of as much as 300 percent. In 2021, a total of 67 ransomware attacks against U.S. schools and colleges cost an estimated $3.5 billion in downtime and recovery costs. In May, Lincoln College in Illinois announced it would permanently close after becoming the target of a cyber attack. 

‘Surveillance and grooming of our own systems’

Los Angeles Unified School District, which serves more than 500,000 students, joins the ranks of districts nationwide on the receiving end of ransomware attacks in recent years, falling victim on the Saturday night of the four-day holiday weekend. The LAUSD breach appears to be part of a growing trend of back-to-school hacks, which take advantage of a chaotic moment when district cybersecurity officials are particularly busy. 

“If you were looking to extort a school district and increase the leverage on them to meet an extortion demand or a ransom demand, this time of the school year would be among the best to do it,” Levin said. “We have seen, over the last several years, that ransomware actors have taken advantage of that fact at the beginning of the school year to extort districts out of millions of dollars of money in demands.”

As hackers were carrying out the attack, district technology officials detected “unusual live data movement,” and made the unprecedented decision to shut down the district’s computer system — a move “that itself caused a number of challenges,” Carvalho said, but prevented “other more essential elements.” 

While a district facilities system was a primary target in the hack, Carvalho acknowledged that hackers had “touched” the online student management system. The facilities system includes information on contracts and non-sensitive records, he said, and it remains unclear whether the threat actors were able to acquire sensitive student information. 

“It is quite possible, even likely, that for a period of time in advance of the actual attack, there was a degree of surveillance and grooming of our own systems,” Carvalho said, suggesting threat actors rummaged through district data prior to launching the ransomware scheme. L.A. Unified was currently in the process of rolling out passwords with multi-factor authentication, but Carvalho acknowledged the security measure had not been finalized before the breach. 

The criminal investigation into the attack involves officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. In a joint Cybersecurity Advisory, federal officials warned that Vice Society actors were “disproportionately targeting the education sector with ransomware attacks” that have led to “delayed exams, canceled school days and unauthorized access to and theft of personal information.” Schools may be “particularly lucrative targets,” the advisory said, because they retain a large amount of sensitive student information. 

Turgal, the vice president of cyber risk and strategy at Optiv Security, offered a harsh critique of L.A. Unified’s response, noting that officials had been previously warned about vulnerabilities.

“They’re doing the right things,” but a speedy response to eliminate threats from servers is critical, said Turgal, a former executive assistant director for the FBI Information and Technology Branch. “Their response was very measured, but it was very slow.”

The district declined to comment.

While schools reopened after the Labor Day weekend as scheduled, the breach came with substantial disruptions and confusion for the 540,000 students and 70,000 district employees who were required to reset their passwords and were unable to access online platforms. 

“From my students, I could tell they were frustrated,” said Nancy Soni, an 11th grade English teacher in East Los Angeles. “A lot of them didn’t really understand what it meant to be hacked.”

‘A wake-up call’

Outside Los Angeles, ransomware attacks have delivered a serious blow to districts nationwide, crippling their finances with extortion demands and recovery costs. 

In Baltimore, a 2020 ransomware attack saddled the county school district with some $10 million in recovery costs. Costs are similar in Buffalo, New York, where the district was struck by an attack last year but declined to pay the ransom. When education leaders in Broward County, Florida, declined to pay a $40 million ransom demand after district accounting and financial records were stolen, hackers posted some 26,000 files on the dark web. 

In fact, this isn’t Carvalho’s first experience dealing with a data breach. In 2020, while he was superintendent in Miami, Florida, the district fell victim to a cyber attack on the first day of virtual classes. A 16-year-old district student who took credit for the attack was sentenced to a year of probation. 

Back in L.A., district leaders were warned on multiple occasions in the last several years that their cybersecurity safeguards weren’t up to snuff and that data had been compromised. 

In January, 2021, the district inspector general released the findings of an information security audit that identified lapses that required an “immediate remedy” including “significant risks around passwords and credentials” and the lack of incident response planning and preparation. 

Having been presented with “a laundry list of things that should have been done,” it’s critical to understand how the district responded to the audit, said Turgal of Optiv Security. 

Carvalho also expressed concern about how the report’s recommendations were handled, saying his “first order of business” is to “actually understand that report and ask the tough questions about why were a number, if not the majority of these measures, not acted upon.” 

A month later, in February, 2021, cybersecurity experts with Hold Security used an intermediary to inform L.A. district leaders of more bad news. The computer for a school psychologist who was working from home had become compromised, Holden said, likely after she was duped by a phishing email. 

District officials worked quickly to patch the hole and there’s no evidence to suggest it contributed to the recent ransomware attack, but Holden said it should have served as “a wakeup call’ and suggests that LAUSD probably hadn’t “put enough safeguards in place to prevent something like this.” 

The incident also highlights the reality that cybersecurity attacks on school districts can net highly sensitive data about children, Holden said. 

“Imagine what kind of sensitive information, especially about minors, this person might have within her computer or within her access,” he said. Compromised data from a school psychologist is “the worst-case scenario of what the bad guys could steal, something that would be directly harmful to kids.” 

Soni, the English teacher, said that hackers’ potential access to sensitive information is concerning. As an educator in the district, she said she has access to a significant amount of information about students, including their addresses, phone numbers and whether they’re in special education.

“There’s a lot on there, and to have everybody’s personal history be jeopardized, that is scary,” she said. “One of my concerns is having the wrong people have access to information about me, and information about my students.” 

LA School Report freelancer Destiny Torres contributed to this report.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Since the pandemic began, Baltimore City Public Schools officials have tracked students’ online lives with GoGuardian, a digital surveillance tool that promises to identify youth at risk of harming themselves or others. When GoGuardian flags students, their online activities are shared automatically with school police, giving cops a conduit into kids’ private lives — including on nights and weekends.

Such partnerships between schools and police appear startlingly widespread across the country with significant implications for youth, according to the results of a national survey released earlier this month by the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. Nearly all teachers — 89% — reported that digital student monitoring tools like GoGuardian are used in their schools. And nearly half — 44% — said students have been contacted by the police as a result of student monitoring.

The pandemic has led to major growth in the number of schools that rely on activity monitoring software to uncover student references to depression and violent impulses. The tools, offered by a handful of tech companies, can sift through students’ social media posts, follow their digital movements in real-time and scan files on school-issued laptops — from classroom assignments to journal entries — in search of warning signs.

Educators say the tools help them identify youth who are struggling and get them the mental health care they need at a time when youth depression and anxiety are spiraling. But the survey suggests an alternate reality: Instead of getting help, many students are being punished for breaking school rules. And in some cases, survey results suggest, students are being subjected to discrimination.

The report raises serious questions about whether digital surveillance tools are the best way to identify youth in need of mental health care and whether police officers should be on the front lines in responding to such emergencies.

“If we’re saying this is to keep students safe, but instead we’re using it punitively and we’re using it to invite law enforcement literally into kids’ homes, is this actually achieving its intended goal?” asked Elizabeth Laird, a survey author and the center’s director of equity in civic technology. “Or are we, in the name of keeping students safe, actually endangering them?”

Among teachers who use monitoring tools at their schools, 78% said the software has been used to flag students for discipline and 59% said kids wound up getting punished as a result. Yet just 45% of teachers said the software is used to identify violent threats and 47% said it is used to identify students at risk of harming themselves.

Center for Democracy and Technology

The findings are a direct contradiction of the stated goal of student activity monitoring, Laird said. School leaders and company executives have long maintained that the tools are not a disciplinary measure but are designed to identify at-risk students before someone gets hurt.

The Supreme Court’s recent repeal of Roe v. Wade, she said, further muddles police officers’ role in student activity monitoring. As states implement anti-abortion laws, civil rights groups have warned that data from student activity monitoring tools could help the police identify youth seeking reproductive health care.

“We know that law enforcement gets these alerts,” she said. “If you are in a state where they are looking to investigate these kinds of incidents, you’ve invited them into a student’s house to be able to do that.”

A tale of discrimination

In Baltimore, counselors, principals and school-based police officers receive all alerts generated by GoGuardian during school hours, according to an October 2021 investigative report by The Real News Network, a nonprofit media outlet. Outside of school hours, including on weekends and holidays, the responsibility to monitor alerts falls on the police, the outlet reported, and on numerous occasions officers have shown up at students’ homes to conduct wellness checks. On multiple occasions, students have been transported to the hospital for emergency mental health care.

In a statement to The 74, district spokesperson Andre Riley said that GoGuardian helps officials “identify potential risks to the safety of individual students, groups or schools,” and that “proper accountability measures are taken” if students violate the code of conduct or break laws.

“The use of GoGuardian is not simply a prompt for a law enforcement response,” Riley added.

Leading student surveillance companies, including GoGuardian, have maintained that their interactions with police are limited. In April, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey warned in a report that schools’ reliance on the tools could violate students’ civil rights and exacerbate “the school-to-prison pipeline by increasing law enforcement interactions with students.” Warren and Markey focused their report on four companies: GoGuardian, Gaggle, Securly and Bark.

In a letter to Warren and Markey, Gaggle executives said the company contacts law enforcement for wellness checks if they are unable to reach school-based emergency contacts and a child appears to be “in immediate danger.” In blog posts on the company’s website, school officials in Wichita Falls, Texas, Cincinnati, Ohio, and Miami, Florida, acknowledged contacting police in response to Gaggle alerts.

In some cases, school leaders ask Securly to contact the police directly and request they conduct welfare checks on students, the company wrote in its letter to lawmakers. Executives at Bark said “there are limited options” beyond police intervention if they identify a student in crisis but they cannot reach a school administrator.

“While we have witnessed many lives saved by police in these situations, unfortunately many officers have not received training in how to handle such crises,” the company acknowledged in its letter. “Irrespective of training there is always a risk that a visit from law enforcement can create other negative outcomes for a student and their family.”

In its privacy policy, GoGuardian states the company may disclose student information “if we believe in good faith that doing so is necessary or appropriate to comply with any law enforcement, legal or regulatory process.”

Center for Democracy and Technology

Meanwhile, survey results suggest that student surveillance tools have a negative disparate impact on Black and Hispanic students, LGBTQ youth and those from low-income households. In a letter on Wednesday to coincide with the survey’s release, a coalition of education and civil rights groups called on the U.S. Department of Education to issue guidance warning schools that their digital surveillance practices could violate federal civil rights laws. Signatories include the American Library Association, the Data Quality Campaign and the American Civil Liberties Union.

“This is becoming a conversation not just about privacy, but about discrimination,” Laird said. “Without a doubt, we see certain groups of students having outsized experiences in being directly targeted.”

In a youth survey, researchers found that student discipline as a result of activity monitoring fell disproportionately along racial lines, with 48% of Black students and 55% of Hispanic students reporting that they or someone they knew got into trouble for something that was flagged by an activity monitoring tool. Just 41% of white students reported having similar experiences.

Nearly a third of LGBTQ students said they or someone they know experienced nonconsensual disclosure of their sexual orientation or gender identity — often called outing — as a result of activity monitoring. LGBTQ youth were also more likely than straight and cisgender students to report getting into trouble at school and being contacted by the police about having committed a crime.

Some student surveillance companies, like Gaggle, monitor references to words including “gay” and “lesbian,” a reality company founder and CEO Jeff Patterson has said was created to protect LGBTQ youth, who face a greater risk of dying by suicide. But survey results suggest the heightened surveillance comes with significant harm to youth, and Laird said if monitoring tools are designed with certain students in mind, such as LGBTQ youth, that in itself is a form of discrimination.

Center for Democracy and Technology

In its letter to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights Wednesday, advocates said the disparities outlined in the survey run counter to federal laws prohibiting race-, sex- and disability-based discrimination.

“Student activity monitoring is subjecting protected classes of students to increased discipline and interactions with law enforcement, invading their privacy, and creating hostile environments for students to express their true thoughts and authentic identities,” the letter states.

The Education Department’s civil rights division, they said, should condemn surveillance practices that violate students’ civil rights and launch “enforcement action against violations that result in discrimination.”

Lawmakers consider youth privacy

The report comes at a moment of increasing alarm about student privacy online. In May, the Federal Trade Commission announced plans to crack down on tech companies that sell student data for targeted advertising and that “illegally surveil children when they go online to learn.”

It also comes at a time of intense concern over students’ emotional and physical well-being. While the pandemic has led to a greater focus on youth mental health, the May mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, has sparked renewed school safety efforts. In June, President Joe Biden signed a law with modest new gun-control provisions and an influx of federal funding for student mental health care and campus security. The funds could lead to more digital student surveillance.

The results of the online survey, which was conducted in May and June, were likely colored by the Uvalde tragedy, researchers acknowledged. A majority of parents and students have a favorable view of student activity monitoring during school hours to protect kids from harming themselves or others, researchers found. But just 48% of parents and 30% of students support around-the-clock surveillance.

“Schools are under a lot of pressure to find ways to keep students safe and, like in many aspects of our lives, they are considering the role of technology,” Laird said.

Last week, the Senate approved two bipartisan bills designed to improve children’s safety online, including new restrictions on youth-focused targeted advertising. The effort comes a year after a whistleblower disclosed research showing that the social media app Instagram had a harmful effect on youth mental well-being, especially teenage girls. One bill, the Kids Online Safety Act, would require tech companies to identify and mitigate any potential harms their products may pose to children, including exposure to content that promotes self-harm, eating disorders and substance abuse.

Yet the legislation has faced criticism from privacy advocates, who argue it would mandate digital monitoring similar to that offered by student surveillance companies. Among critics is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital privacy and free speech.

“The answer to our lack of privacy isn’t more tracking,” the group argued in a report. The legislation “is a heavy-handed plan to force technology companies to spy on young people and stop them from accessing content that is ‘not in their best interest,’ as defined by the government, and interpreted by tech platforms.”

Attorney Amelia Vance, the founder and president of Public Interest Privacy Consulting, said she worries the provisions will have a negative impact on at-risk kids, including LGBTQ students. Students from marginalized groups, she said, “will now be more heavily surveilled by basically every site on the internet, and that information will be available to parents” who could discipline teens for researching LGBTQ content. She said the legislation could force tech companies to censor content to avoid potential liability, essentially making them arbiters of community standards.

“When you have conflicting values in the different jurisdictions that the companies operate in, oftentimes you end up with the most conservative interpretations, which right now is anti-LGBT,” she said.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

The Future of Privacy Forum, which created the self-regulatory effort nearly a decade ago to promote ethical student data practices by education technology companies, announced on Monday it had stripped Illuminate of its pledge signatory designation and referred the company to the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general in New York and California, where the biggest breaches occurred, to “consider further appropriate action,” including sanctions.

“Publicly available information appears to confirm that Illuminate Education did not encrypt all student information while” it was being stored or transferred from one system to another, forum CEO Jules Polonetsky said in a statement. He said the decision to de-list Illuminate came after a review including “direct outreach” to the company, which “would not state” that such privacy practices had been in place.

“Such a failure to encrypt would violate several pledge provisions,” Polonetsky said, including a commitment to “maintain a comprehensive security program” to protect students’ sensitive information and to “comply with applicable laws,” including an “explicit data encryption requirement” in New York.

Encryption is the cybersecurity practice of scrambling readable data into an unusable format to prevent bad actors from understanding it without a key. Illuminate reportedly used Amazon Web Services to store student data on accounts that were easy to identify.

Through the voluntary pledge, hundreds of education technology companies have agreed to a slate of safety measures to protect students’ online privacy. Though the privacy forum maintains that the pledge is legally binding and can be enforced by federal and state regulators, the move against Illuminate marks a dramatic shift in enforcement. The extent of the Illuminate breach remains unclear, but a tally by education news outlet THE Journal encompasses districts in six states affecting an estimated 3 million students.

Illuminate Education CEO Christine Willig (Illuminate Education)

Illuminate Education spokesperson Jane Snyder said the company is disappointed in the privacy forum’s decision, but it “will not detract from our commitment to safeguard the privacy of all student data in our care.” The privately held company founded in 2009 claims some 5,000 schools serving 17 million students use its tools.

“We will continue to monitor and enhance the security of our systems, and we will continue to work with students and school districts to resolve any concerns related to this matter while prioritizing the privacy and protection of the data we maintain,” Snyder said in a statement.

In a recent article in The 74, student privacy experts criticized the Big Tech-funded privacy forum for failing to sanction companies that break the agreement terms.

The action taken against Illuminate comes just three months after the Federal Trade Commission announced efforts to ramp up enforcement of federal student privacy protections, including against companies that sell student data for targeted advertising and that lack reasonable systems “to maintain the confidentiality, security and integrity of children’s personal information.”

The privacy forum maintains that the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general can hold companies accountable to their pledge commitments via consumer protection rules that prohibit unfair and deceptive business practices, but such action has never been taken. Education companies have long used the pledge as a marketing tool and the privacy forum has touted it as an assurance to schools as they shop for new technology.

Signs of a data breach at California-based Illuminate first emerged in January when several of its popular digital tools, including programs used in New York City to track students’ grades and attendance, went dark. City officials announced in March that the personal data of some 820,000 current and former students had been compromised. Outside New York City, home to America’s largest school district, state officials said the breach affected an additional 174,000 students across the state. Student information in Los Angeles, the country’s second-largest school district, was also breached.

Compromised data includes information about students’ eligibility for special education services and free or reduced-price lunch, their names, demographic information, immigration status and disciplinary records.

New York City officials have accused Illuminate of misrepresenting its security safeguards and instructed educators to stop using its tools. New York State Education Department officials are investigating whether the company’s security practices run afoul of state law, which requires education vendors to maintain “reasonable” data security safeguards and to notify schools about data breaches “in the most expedient way possible and without unreasonable delay.”

School districts in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Oklahoma and Washington have since disclosed to some 3 million current and former students that their personal information was compromised in the breach. Illuminate Education has never said how many people were affected by the lapse while at the same time maintaining that it has “no evidence that any information was subject to actual or attempted misuse.”

CEO of the Future of Privacy Forum Jules Polonetsky (Future of Privacy Forum)

“FPF believes that the privacy and security of students’ information is essential,” Polonetsky said in the statement, declining to comment further. “To help ed tech companies better protect student data, we will be providing training for Pledge signatories, with a specific focus on data governance and security.”

For years, critics have accused the pledge of providing educators and parents with a false affirmation about the safety of education technology while being a tech-funded effort to thwart meaningful government regulation.

The privacy forum’s decision to yank Illuminate doesn’t suggest stronger pledge enforcement going forward, said Doug Levin, the national director of The K12 Security Information eXchange. Rather, he accused the privacy forum of acting more in response to media coverage than a desire to hold companies to their promises.

“The only time that the Future of Privacy Forum has considered de-listing an organization is when the practices of a company have come under the attention of national media,” he said, adding that the press is an insufficient tool to hold tech companies accountable. “I think this is a case where [the privacy forum] was looking at collateral reputational damage and damage to the pledge and they had to act to protect their own self-interests and the interests of other pledge members. I do not read it as a signal that enforcement of the pledge will be enhanced going forward.”

Meanwhile, Levin sees Illuminate’s unwillingness to discuss its security practices with the privacy forum as another reason to believe the company acted negligently.

Illuminate is “clearly in legal jeopardy and I think they are concerned about making statements that could be used in a legal context to hold them accountable,” Levin said.

Still, the privacy forum’s decision to remove Illuminate raises the stakes from its previous enforcement efforts, most notably against the College Board, a nonprofit that administers the widely used SAT college admissions exam. In 2018, the privacy forum placed the nonprofit’s status as a pledge signatory “under review” after an investigation found it was selling student data to third parties. The College Board was reinstated as an active pledge signatory a year later. It remains in good standing, despite a 2020 investigation by Consumer Reports that uncovered it was sending student data to major digital advertising platforms.

While some have argued that the College Board should have been removed from the pledge, the privacy forum has previously resisted efforts to de-list signatories. When the group learns about complaints against pledge signatories, it typically works with companies to resolve issues and ensure compliance, according to a recent blog post.

Removing companies from the pledge, the post argued “could result in fewer privacy protections for users, as a former signatory would not be bound by the Pledge’s promises for future activities.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provide financial support to the Future of Privacy Forum and LA School Report’s parent company The 74.

Maclayn talks about his mental health journey during an interview in Montana for the documentary Hiding in Plain Sight: Youth Mental Illness. (Photo courtesy Erik Ewers)

When brothers Erik Ewers and Christopher Loren Ewers set out to film a documentary about the mental health struggles of American youth, they knew they were tackling a pervasive problem unspoken about for far too long. What they didn’t realize were the lessons they’d come to uncover about themselves.

Hiding in Plain Sight: Youth Mental Illness, a two-part documentary that premieres Monday on PBS, presents the raw accounts of nearly two dozen young people from diverse backgrounds who open up about their excruciating life experiences. Through varied stories that touch on issues like abuse, addiction and discrimination, the Ewers hope their film will give their audience an understanding that they came to themselves: Everybody, no matter their backgrounds, is affected by America’s mental health crisis in one way or another.

The film, executive produced by renowned documentarian Ken Burns, was screened at the White House Thursday, with First Lady Jill Biden saying, “We have so much work to do to help our children heal,” and thanking the filmmakers for shining a light on mental health.

“It’s impossible not to be moved by the pain that these young people and their families share,” she said. “But there was so much hope there, too. Because they had all found a way from that darkness towards the light.”

The documentary can be seen at 9 p.m. ET on Monday and Tuesday and will be available on PBS stations nationally, PBS.com and the PBS Video app. It is part of a larger public media initiative, called Well Beings, to raise awareness about mental health issues.

“The goal of the film, we hope, is that people will find relatability in their own lives through these kids’ stories,” Christopher, who co-directed the documentary with his brother, told The 74. “I felt connected in ways that I can’t even describe to each and every person’s story. Some of them nearly destroyed me as we were filming their interviews because they hit so close to home.”

The young people featured in it range in age from 11 to 27, including a teenager who lost the fight against addiction at the age of 15, a young Native American woman who felt so isolated that she contemplated suicide and a high school freshman who experienced a series of assaults that led to troubling hallucinations. Among them is Billie, a 15-year-old from a rural farming community who endured intense bullying for being transgender. For 14-year-old Xavier, trauma stemmed from an abusive father.

“Cigarette smoke is a very triggering thing from my past since I associate that with getting beat by wooden sticks,” said Xavier, who recalled getting beaten “for seemingly no reason.”

Xavier, who uses skateboarding as a coping mechanism, is filmed for a scene in Hiding in Plain Sight: Youth Mental Illness. (Photo courtesy Kara Mickley/PBS)

Roughly half of mental illnesses begin by the age of 14 and 75% occur by age 24, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

“The things my ancestors went through, it’s shown through alcohol abuse, addictions, non-stable families, toxic relationships,” explains Alexis, a 21-year-old who grew up on a Native American reservation. “That’s the burden that indigenous youth deal with everyday, you’re just born into it.”

New Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data offer bleak insight into the extent of the problem and how the pandemic has made the crisis even worse for millions of teens, especially LGBTQ youth and girls. In a recent CDC survey, more than a third of high school students reported experiencing poor mental health during the pandemic, nearly 20% reported that they seriously considered dying by suicide and a staggering 9% had actually tried. Even before the pandemic, suicide was a leading cause of death among teens as rates of youth anxiety and depression surged. In 2009, a quarter of high school students reported feeling persistent sadness or hopelessness. By 2019, that rate jumped to nearly 37%.

Though the project has been years in the making, the film acknowledges how the pandemic has made the crises far more urgent. The Ewers are longtime collaborators with Ken Burns and the trio will continue working together over the next 10 years to create a series of films examining the mental health crisis in America.

Over the course of four hours, this first film takes viewers on a journey that for many began with traumatic experiences that led to debilitating mental health struggles, but ended with a message of hope. Despite roadblocks including homelessness, arrests, addictions, eating disorders and suicide attempts, many of the young subjects were able to go on and live happy lives thanks to mental health care and the coping skills they developed.

Erik and Christopher Loren Ewers (KenBurns.com)

Yet recovery is a lifelong process. It’s a lesson that Erik learned firsthand over the course of filming the documentary, he said. Throughout his entire life, he struggled to understand his emotional issues. Although his parents took him to a psychiatrist while he was in elementary school, it wasn’t until he started filming the documentary that he began to truly address his challenges. The youth in his film, he said, “gave me an education about myself.”

“If the film has the power to do that for me, I can only hope that it will have that power for other people as well,” he said.

Christopher said the youth interviews hit home for his family, too, as his daughter struggled with mental health challenges of her own. Listening to each of the stories, he said, “gave us the courage and the commitment to see through the proper care for our daughter.”

As the filmmakers weave the young peoples’ individual stories into a cohesive narrative, the result can only be described as a gut punch. With the goal of presenting an unvarnished look into the pervasiveness of youth mental health crises, the documentary is difficult to watch at times. But sugarcoating the issue would be a disservice to those who are struggling, Erik said.

“Imagine a kid out there who is literally watching it and we watered it down, which of course, we had not,” he said. “But if they did, they’d be saying ‘Wow, I’m a lot worse than I thought,’ or say ‘This is bullshit.’”

The stigma still associated with mental health issues prevents many young people from sharing their experiences, yet the Ewers brothers said their subjects were motivated to open up on film — and wound up feeling better as a result. They were tired of keeping their suffering bottled up inside and hoped that greater awareness could save lives.

Alexis, who was raised on a Native American reservation, shares her experiences with mental health hurdles. (PBS)

Alexis, who grew up on the reservation, said that nearly all indigenous youth are the victims of trauma and abuse to some degree. Yet also embedded in her DNA, she said, is resilience.

“I know for a fact that my ancestors and my elders, they’re rooting for me and they want me to do good,” she said. “I’ll share my story over and over again. I’ll go through those emotions like a million times if it helps one person.”

If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

Megan Waskiewicz used to sit at the top of the bleachers, rest her back against the wall and hide her face behind the glow of a laptop monitor. While watching one of her five children play basketball on the court below, she knew she had to be careful.

The mother from Pittsburgh didn’t want other parents in the crowd to know she was also looking at child porn.

Waskiewicz worked as a content moderator for Gaggle, a surveillance company that monitors the online behaviors of some 5 million students across the U.S. on their school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts. Through an algorithm designed to flag references to sex, drugs, and violence and a team of content moderators like Waskiewicz, the company sifts through billions of students’ emails, chat messages and homework assignments each year. Their work is supposed to ferret out evidence of potential self-harm, threats or bullying, incidents that would prompt Gaggle to notify school leaders and, in some cases, the police.

As a result, kids’ deepest secrets — like nude selfies and suicide notes — regularly flashed onto Waskiewicz’s screen. Though she felt “a little bit like a voyeur,” she believed Gaggle helped protect kids. But mostly, the low pay, the fight for decent hours, inconsistent instructions and stiff performance quotas left her feeling burned out. Gaggle’s moderators face pressure to review 300 incidents per hour and Waskiewicz knew she could get fired on a moment’s notice if she failed to distinguish mundane chatter from potential safety threats in a matter of seconds. She lasted about a year.

“In all honesty I was sort of half-assing it,” Waskiewicz admitted in an interview with The 74. “It wasn’t enough money and you’re really stuck there staring at the computer reading and just click, click, click, click.”

Content moderators like Waskiewicz, hundreds of whom are paid just $10 an hour on month-to-month contracts, are on the front lines of a company that claims it saved the lives of 1,400 students last school year and argues that the growing mental health crisis makes its presence in students’ private affairs essential. Gaggle founder and CEO Jeff Patterson has warned about “a tsunami of youth suicide headed our way” and said that schools have “a moral obligation to protect the kids on their digital playground.”

Eight former content moderators at Gaggle shared their experiences for this story. While several believed their efforts in some cases did shield kids from serious harm, they also surfaced significant questions about the company’s efficacy, its employment practices and its effect on students’ civil rights.

Among the moderators who worked on a contractual basis, none had prior experience in school safety, security or mental health. Instead, their employment histories included retail work and customer service, but they were drawn to Gaggle while searching for remote jobs that promised flexible hours.

They described an impersonal and cursory hiring process that appeared automated. Former moderators reported submitting applications online and never having interviews with Gaggle managers — either in-person, on the phone or over Zoom — before landing jobs.

Once hired, moderators reported insufficient safeguards to protect students’ sensitive data, a work culture that prioritized speed over quality, scheduling issues that sent them scrambling to get hours and frequent exposure to explicit content that left some traumatized. Contractors lacked benefits including mental health care and one former moderator said he quit after repeated exposure to explicit material that so disturbed him he couldn’t sleep and without “any money to show for what I was putting up with.”

Gaggle content moderators encompass as many as 600 contractors at any given time and just two dozen work as employees who have access to benefits and on-the-job training that lasts several weeks. Gaggle executives have sought to downplay contractors’ role with the company, arguing they use “common sense” to distinguish false flags generated by the algorithm from potential threats and do “not require substantial training.”

While the experiences reported by Gaggle’s moderator team resemble those of social media platforms like Meta-owned Facebook, Patterson said his company relies on “U.S.-based, U.S.-cultured reviewers as opposed to outsourcing that work to India or Mexico or the Philippines,” as the social media giant does. He rebuffed former moderators who said they lacked sufficient time to consider the severity of a particular item.

“Some people are not fast decision-makers. They need to take more time to process things and maybe they’re not right for that job,” he told The 74. “For some people, it’s no problem at all. For others, their brains don’t process that quickly.”

Executives also sought to minimize the contractors’ access to students’ personal information; a spokeswoman said they only see “small snippets of text” and lacked access to what’s known as students’ “personally identifiable information.” Yet former contractors described reading lengthy chat logs, seeing nude photographs and, in some cases, coming upon students’ names. Several former moderators said they struggled to determine whether something should be escalated as harmful due to “gray areas,” such as whether a Victoria’s Secret lingerie ad would be considered acceptable or not.

“Those people are really just the very, very first pass,” Gaggle spokeswoman Paget Hetherington said. “It doesn’t really need training, it’s just like if there’s any possible doubt with that particular word or phrase it gets passed on.”

Molly McElligott, a former content moderator and customer service representative, said management was laser focused on performance metrics, appearing more interested in business growth and profit than protecting kids.

“I went into the experience extremely excited to help children in need,” McElligott wrote in an email. Unlike the contractors, McElligott was an employee at Gaggle, where she worked for five months in 2021 before taking a position at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in New York. “I realized that was not the primary focus of the company.”

Gaggle is part of a burgeoning campus security industry that’s seen significant business growth in the wake of mass school shootings as leaders scramble to prevent future attacks. Patterson, who founded the company in 1999 by offering student email accounts that could be monitored for pornography and cursing, said its focus now is mitigating the pandemic-driven youth mental health crisis.

Patterson said the team talks about “lives saved” and child safety incidents at every meeting, and they are open about sharing the company’s financial outlook so that employees “can have confidence in the security of their jobs.”

Content moderators work at a Facebook office in Austin, Texas. Unlike the social media giant, Gaggle’s content moderators work remotely. (Ilana Panich-Linsman / Getty Images)

‘We are just expendable’

Under the pressure of new federal scrutiny along with three other companies that monitor students online, Gaggle executives recently told lawmakers it relies on a “highly trained content review team” to analyze student materials and flag safety threats. Yet former contractors, who make up the bulk of Gaggle’s content review team, described their training as “a joke,” consisting of a slideshow and an online quiz, that left them ill-equipped to complete a job with such serious consequences for students and schools.

As an employee on the company’s safety team, McElligott said she underwent two weeks of training but the disorganized instruction meant her and other moderators were “more confused than when we started.”

Former content moderators have also flocked to employment websites like Indeed.com to warn job seekers about their experiences with the company, often sharing reviews that resembled the former moderators’ feedback to The 74.

“If you want to be not cared about, not valued and be completely stressed/traumatized on a daily basis this is totally the job for you,” one anonymous reviewer wrote on Indeed. “Warning, you will see awful awful things. No they don’t provide therapy or any kind of support either.

“That isn’t even the worst part,” the reviewer continued. “The worst part is that the company does not care that you hold them on your backs. Without safety reps they wouldn’t be able to function, but we are just expendable.”

As the first layer of Gaggle’s human review team, contractors analyze materials flagged by the algorithm and decide whether to escalate students’ communications for additional consideration. Designated employees on Gaggle’s Safety Team are in charge of calling or emailing school officials to notify them of troubling material identified in students’ files, Patterson said.

Gaggle’s staunchest critics have questioned the tool’s efficacy and describe it as a student privacy nightmare. In March, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey urged greater federal oversight of Gaggle and similar companies to protect students’ civil rights and privacy. In a report, the senators said the tools could surveil students inappropriately, compound racial disparities in school discipline and waste tax dollars.

The information shared by the former Gaggle moderators with The 74 “struck me as the worst-case scenario,” said attorney Amelia Vance, the co-founder and president of Public Interest Privacy Consulting. Content moderators’ limited training and vetting, as well as their lack of backgrounds in youth mental health, she said, “is not acceptable.”

In its recent letter to lawmakers, Gaggle described a two-tiered review procedure but didn’t disclose that low-wage contractors were the first line of defense. CEO Patterson told The 74 they “didn’t have nearly enough time” to respond to lawmakers’ questions about their business practices and didn’t want to divulge proprietary information. Gaggle uses a third party to conduct criminal background checks on contractors, Patterson said, but he acknowledged they aren’t interviewed before getting placed on the job.

“There’s a lot of contractors. We can’t do a physical interview of everyone and I don’t know if that’s appropriate,” he said. “It might actually introduce another set of biases in terms of who we hire or who we don’t hire.”

‘Other eyes were seeing it’

In a previous investigation, The 74 analyzed a cache of public records to expose how Gaggle’s algorithm and content moderators subject students to relentless digital surveillance long after classes end for the day, extending schools’ authority far beyond their traditional powers to regulate speech and behavior, including at home. Gaggle’s algorithm relies largely on keyword matching and gives content moderators a broad snapshot of students’ online activities including diary entries, classroom assignments and casual conversations between students and their friends.

After the pandemic shuttered schools and shuffled students into remote learning, Gaggle oversaw a surge in students’ online materials and of school districts interested in their services. Gaggle reported a 20% bump in business as educators scrambled to keep a watchful eye on students whose chatter with peers moved from school hallways to instant messaging platforms like Google Hangouts. One year into the pandemic, Gaggle reported a 35% increase in references to suicide and self-harm, accounting for more than 40% of all flagged incidents.

Waskiewicz, who began working for Gaggle in January 2020, said that remote learning spurred an immediate shift in students’ online behaviors. Under lockdown, students without computers at home began using school devices for personal conversations. Sifting through the everyday exchanges between students and their friends, Waskiewicz said, became a time suck and left her questioning her own principles.

“I felt kind of bad because the kids didn’t have the ability to have stuff of their own and I wondered if they realized that it was public,” she said. “I just wonder if they realized that other eyes were seeing it other than them and their little friends.”

Student activity monitoring software like Gaggle has become ubiquitous in U.S. schools, and 81% of teachers work in schools that use tools to track students’ computer activity, according to a recent survey by the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. A majority of teachers said the benefits of using such tools, which can block obscene material and monitor students’ screens in real time, outweigh potential risks.

Likewise, students generally recognize that their online activities on school-issued devices are being observed, the survey found, and alter their behaviors as a result. More than half of student respondents said they don’t share their true thoughts or ideas online as a result of school surveillance and 80% said they were more careful about what they search online.

A majority of parents reported that the benefits of keeping tabs on their children’s activity exceeded the risks. Yet they may not have a full grasp on how programs like Gaggle work, including the heavy reliance on untrained contractors and weak privacy controls revealed by The 74’s reporting, said Elizabeth Laird, the group’s director of equity in civic technology.

“I don’t know that the way this information is being handled actually would meet parents’ expectations,” Laird said.

Another former contractor, who reached out to The 74 to share his experiences with the company anonymously, became a Gaggle moderator at the height of the pandemic. As COVID-19 cases grew, he said he felt unsafe continuing his previous job as a caregiver for people with disabilities so he applied to Gaggle because it offered remote work.

About a week after he submitted an application, Gaggle gave him a key to kids’ private lives — including, most alarming to him, their nude selfies. Exposure to such content was traumatizing, the former moderator said, and while the job took a toll on his mental well-being, it didn’t come with health insurance.

“I went to a mental hospital in high school due to some hereditary mental health issues and seeing some of these kids going through similar things really broke my heart,” said the former contractor, who shared his experiences on the condition of anonymity, saying he feared possible retaliation by the company. “It broke my heart that they had to go through these revelations about themselves in a context where they can’t even go to school and get out of the house a little bit. They have to do everything from home — and they’re being constantly monitored.”

In this screenshot, Gaggle explains its terms and conditions for contract content moderators. The screenshot, which was provided to The 74 by a former contractor who asked to remain anonymous, has been redacted.

Gaggle employees are offered benefits, including health insurance, and can attend group therapy sessions twice per month, Hetherington said. Patterson acknowledged the job can take a toll on staff moderators, but sought to downplay its effects on contractors and said they’re warned about exposure to disturbing content during the application process. He said using contractors allows Gaggle to offer the service at a price school districts can afford.

“Quite honestly, we’re dealing with school districts with very limited budgets,” Patterson said. “There have to be some tradeoffs.”

The anonymous contractor said he wasn’t as concerned about his own well-being as he was about the welfare of the students under the company’s watch. The company lacked adequate safeguards to protect students’ sensitive information from leaking outside the digital environment that Gaggle built for moderators to review such materials. Contract moderators work remotely with limited supervision or oversight, and he became especially concerned about how the company handled students’ nude images, which are reported to school districts and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Nudity and sexual content accounted for about 17% of emergency phone calls and email alerts to school officials last school year, according to Gaggle.

Contractors, he said, could easily save the images for themselves or share them on the dark web.

Patterson acknowledged the possibility but said he wasn’t aware of any data breaches.

“We do things in the interface to try to disable the ability to save those things,” Patterson said, but “you know, human beings who want to get around things can.”

‘Made me feel like the day was worth it’

Vara Heyman was looking for a career change. After working jobs in retail and customer service, she made the pivot to content moderation and a contract position with Gaggle was her first foot in the door. She was left feeling baffled by the impersonal hiring process, especially given the high stakes for students.

Waskiewicz had a similar experience. In fact, she said the only time she ever interacted with a Gaggle supervisor was when she was instructed to provide her bank account information for direct deposit. The interaction left her questioning whether the company that contracts with more than 1,500 school districts was legitimate or a scam.

“It was a little weird when they were asking for the banking information, like ‘Wait a minute is this real or what?’” Waskiewicz said. “I Googled them and I think they’re pretty big.”

Heyman said that sense of disconnect continued after being hired, with communications between contractors and their supervisors limited to a Slack channel.

Despite the challenges, several former moderators believe their efforts kept kids safe from harm. McElligott, the former Gaggle safety team employee, recalled an occasion when she found a student’s suicide note.

“Knowing I was able to help with that made me feel like the day was worth it,” she said. “Hearing from the school employees that we were able to alert about self-harm or suicidal tendencies from a student they would never expect to be suffering was also very rewarding. It meant that extra attention should or could be given to the student in a time of need.”

Susan Enfield, the superintendent of Highline Public Schools in suburban Seattle, said her district’s contract with Gaggle has saved lives. Earlier this year, for example, the company detected a student’s suicide note early in the morning, allowing school officials to spring into action. The district uses Gaggle to keep kids safe, she said, but acknowledged it can be a disciplinary tool if students violate the district’s code of conduct.

“No tool is perfect, every organization has room to improve, I’m sure you could find plenty of my former employees here in Highline that would give you an earful about working here as well,” said Enfield, one of 23 current or former superintendents from across the country who Gaggle cited as references in its letter to Congress.

“There’s always going to be pros and cons to any organization, any service,” Enfield told The 74, “but our experience has been overwhelmingly positive.”

True safety threats were infrequent, former moderators said, and most of the content was mundane, in part because the company’s artificial intelligence lacked sophistication. They said the algorithm routinely flagged students’ papers on the novels To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher and the Rye. They also reported being inundated with spam emailed to students, acting as human spam filters for a task that’s long been automated in other contexts.

Conor Scott, who worked as a contract moderator while in college, said that “99% of the time” Gaggle’s algorithm flagged pedestrian materials including pictures of sunsets and student’s essays about World War II. Valid safety concerns, including references to violence and self-harm, were rare, Scott said. But he still believed the service had value and felt he was doing “the right thing.”

McElligott said that managers’ personal opinions added another layer of complexity. Though moderators were “held to strict rules of right and wrong decisions,” she said they were ultimately “being judged against our managers’ opinions of what is concerning and what is not.”

“I was told once that I was being overdramatic when it came to a potential inappropriate relationship between a child and adult,” she said. “There was also an item that made me think of potential trafficking or child sexual abuse, as there were clear sexual plans to meet up — and when I alerted it, I was told it was not as serious as I thought.”

Patterson acknowledged that gray areas exist and that human discretion is a factor in deciding what materials are ultimately elevated to school leaders. But such materials, he said, are not the most urgent safety issues. He said their algorithm errs on the side of caution and flags harmless content because district leaders are “so concerned about students.”

The former moderator who spoke anonymously said he grew alarmed by the sheer volume of mundane student materials that were captured by Gaggle’s surveillance dragnet, and pressure to work quickly didn’t offer enough time to evaluate long chat logs between students having “heartfelt and sensitive” conversations. On the other hand, run-of-the-mill chatter offered him a little wiggle room.

“When I would see stuff like that I was like ‘Oh, thank God, I can just get this out of the way and heighten how many items per hour I’m getting,’” he said. “It’s like ‘I hope I get more of those because then I can maybe spend a little more time actually paying attention to the ones that need it.’”

Ultimately, he said he was unprepared for such extensive access to students’ private lives. Because Gaggle’s algorithm flags keywords like “gay” and “lesbian,” for example, it alerted him to students exploring their sexuality online. Hetherington, the Gaggle spokeswoman, said such keywords are included in its dictionary to “ensure that these vulnerable students are not being harassed or suffering additional hardships,” but critics have accused the company of subjecting LGBTQ students to disproportionate surveillance.

“I thought it would just be stopping school shootings or reducing cyberbullying but no, I read the chat logs of kids coming out to their friends,” the former moderator said. “I felt tremendous power was being put in my hands” to distinguish students’ benign conversations from real danger, “and I was given that power immediately for $10 an hour.”

Minneapolis student Teeth Logsdon-Wallace, who posed for this photo with his dog Gilly, used a classroom assignment to discuss a previous suicide attempt and explained how his mental health had since improved. He became upset after Gaggle flagged his assignment. (Photo courtesy Alexis Logsdon)

A privacy issue

For years, student privacy advocates and civil rights groups have warned about the potential harms of Gaggle and similar surveillance companies. Fourteen-year-old Teeth Logsdon-Wallace, a Minneapolis high school student, fell under Gaggle’s watchful eye during the pandemic. Last September, he used a class assignment to write about a previous suicide attempt and explained how music helped him cope after being hospitalized. Gaggle flagged the assignment to a school counselor, a move the teen called a privacy violation.

He said it’s “just really freaky” that moderators can review students’ sensitive materials in public places like at basketball games, but ultimately felt bad for the contractors on Gaggle’s content review team.

“Not only is it violating the privacy rights of students, which is bad for our mental health, it’s traumatizing these moderators, which is bad for their mental health,” he said. Relying on low-wage workers with high turnover, limited training and without backgrounds in mental health, he said, can have consequences for students.

“Bad labor conditions don’t just affect the workers,” he said. “It affects the people they say they are helping.”

Gaggle cannot prohibit contractors from reviewing students’ private communications in public settings, Heather Durkac, the senior vice president of operations, said in a statement.

“However, the contractors know the nature of the content they will be reviewing,” Durkac said. “It is their responsibility and part of their presumed good and reasonable work ethic to not be conducting these content reviews in a public place.”

Gaggle’s former contractors also weighed students’ privacy rights. Heyman said she “went back and forth” on those implications for several days before applying to the job. She ultimately decided that Gaggle was acceptable since it is limited to school-issued technology.

“If you don’t want your stuff looked at, you can use Hotmail, you can use Gmail, you can use Yahoo, you can use whatever else is out there,” she said. “As long as they’re being told and their parents are being told that their stuff is going to be monitored, I feel like that is OK.”

Logsdon-Wallace and his mother said they didn’t know Gaggle existed until his classroom assignment got flagged to a school counselor.

Meanwhile, the anonymous contractor said that chat conversations between students that got picked up by Gaggle’s algorithm helped him understand the effects that surveillance can have on young people.

“Sometimes a kid would use a curse word and another kid would be like, ‘Dude, shut up, you know they’re watching these things,’” he said. “These kids know that they’re being looked in on,” even if they don’t realize their observer is a contractor working from the couch in his living room. “And to be the one that is doing that — that is basically fulfilling what these kids are paranoid about — it just felt awful.”

If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

Disclosure: Campbell Brown is the head of news partnerships at Facebook. Brown co-founded LA School Report’s parent company, The 74, and sits on its board of directors.

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Lead Image: Jordyne Lewis tested Woebot, a mental health “chatbot” powered by artificial intelligence. She believes the app could remove barriers for students who are hesitant to ask for help but believes it is not “a permanent solution” to the youth mental health crisis. (Andy McMillan / The Guardian)

Fifteen-year-old Jordyne Lewis was stressed out.

The high school sophomore from Harrisburg, North Carolina, was overwhelmed with schoolwork, never mind the uncertainty of living in a pandemic that’s dragged on for two long years. Despite the challenges, she never turned to her school counselor or sought out a therapist.

Instead, she shared her feelings with a robot. Woebot to be precise.

Lewis has struggled to cope with the changes and anxieties of pandemic life and for this extroverted teenager, loneliness and social isolation were among the biggest hardships. But Lewis didn’t feel comfortable going to a therapist.

“It takes a lot for me to open up,” she said. But did Woebot do the trick?

Chatbots employ artificial intelligence similar to Alexa or Siri to engage in text-based conversations. Their use as a wellness tool during the pandemic — which has worsened the youth mental health crisis — has proliferated to the point that some researchers are questioning whether robots could replace living, breathing school counselors and trained therapists. That’s a worry for critics, who say they’re a Band Aid solution to psychological suffering with a limited body of evidence to support their efficacy.

“Six years ago, this whole space wasn’t as fashionable, it was viewed as almost kooky to be doing stuff in this space,” said John Torous, the director of the digital psychiatry division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. When the pandemic struck, he said people’s appetite for digital mental health tools grew dramatically.

Throughout the crisis, experts have been sounding the alarm about a surge in depression and anxiety. During his State of the Union address in March, President Joe Biden called youth mental health challenges an emergency, noting that students’ “lives and education have been turned upside-down.”

Digital wellness tools like mental health chatbots have stepped in with a promise to fill the gaps in America’s overburdened and under-resourced mental health care system. As many as two-thirds of U.S. children experience trauma, yet many communities lack mental health providers who specialize in treating them. National estimates suggest there are fewer than 10 child psychiatrists per 100,000 youth, less than a quarter of the staffing level recommended by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

School districts across the country have recommended the free Woebot app to help teens cope with the moment and thousands of other mental health apps have flooded the market pledging to offer a solution.

“The pandemic hit and this technology basically skyrocketed. Everywhere I turn now there’s a new chatbot promising to deliver new things,” said Serife Tekin, an associate philosophy professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio whose research has challenged the ethics of AI-powered chatbots in mental health care. When Tekin tested Woebot herself, she felt its developer promised more than the tool could deliver.

Body language and tone are important to traditional therapy, Tekin said, but Woebot doesn’t recognize such nonverbal communication.

“It’s not at all like how psychotherapy works,” Tekin said.

Sidestepping stigma

Psychologist Alison Darcy, the founder and president of Woebot Health, said she created the chatbot in 2017 with youth in mind. Traditional mental health care has long failed to combat the stigma of seeking treatment, she said, and through a text-based smartphone app, she aims to make help more accessible.

“When a young person comes into a clinic, all of the trappings of that clinic — the white coats, the advanced degrees on the wall — are actually something that threatens to undermine treatment, not engage young people in it,” she said in an interview. Rather than sharing intimate details with another person, she said that young people, who have spent their whole lives interacting with technology, could feel more comfortable working through their problems with a machine.

Alison Darcy (Photo courtesy Chris Cardoza, dozavisuals.com)

Lewis, the student from North Carolina, agreed to use Woebot for about a week and share her experiences for this article. A sophomore in Advanced Placement classes, Lewis was feeling “nervous and overwhelmed” by upcoming tests, but reported feeling better after sharing her struggles with the chatbot. Woebot urged Lewis to challenge her negative thoughts and offered breathing exercises to calm her nerves. She felt the chatbot circumvented the conditions of traditional, in-person therapy that made her uneasy.

“It’s a robot,” she said. “It’s objective. It can’t judge me.”

This screenshot shows the interaction between the Woebot app and student Jordyne Lewis. (Photo courtesy Jordyne Lewis)

Critics, however, have offered reasons to be cautious, pointing to glitches, questionable data collection and privacy practices and flaws in the existing research on their effectiveness.

Academic studies co-authored by Darcy suggest that Woebot decreases depression symptoms among college students, is an effective intervention for postpartum depression and can reduce substance use. Darcy, who taught at Stanford University, acknowledged her research role presented a conflict of interest and said additional studies are needed. After all, she has big plans for the chatbot’s future.

Jeffrey Strawn

The company is currently seeking approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to leverage its chatbot to treat adolescent depression. Darcy described the free Woebot app as a “lightweight wellness tool.” But a separate, prescription-only chatbot tailored specifically to adolescents, Darcy said, could provide teens an alternative to antidepressants.

Not all practitioners are against automating therapy. In Ohio, researchers at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati teamed up with chatbot developer Wysa to create a “COVID Anxiety” chatbot built especially to help teens cope with the unprecedented stress.

Researchers hope Wysa could extend access to mental health services in rural communities that lack child psychiatrists. Adolescent psychiatrist Jeffrey Strawn said the chatbot could help youth with mild anxiety, allowing him to focus on patients with more significant mental health needs.

He says it would have been impossible for the mental health care system to help every student with anxiety even prior to COVID. “During the pandemic, it would have been super untenable.”

A Band-Aid?

Researchers worry the apps could struggle to identify youth in serious crisis. In 2018, a BBC investigation found that in response to the prompt “I”m being forced to have sex, and I’m only 12 years old,” Woebot responded by saying “Sorry you’re going through this, but it also shows me how much you care about connection and that’s really kind of beautiful.”

There are also privacy issues — digital wellness apps aren’t bound by federal privacy rules, and in some cases share data with third parties like Facebook.

Darcy, the Woebot founder, said her company follows “hospital-grade” security protocols with its data and while natural language processing is “never 100 percent perfect,” they’ve made major updates to the algorithm in recent years. Woebot isn’t a crisis service, she said, and “we have every user acknowledge that” during a mandatory introduction built into the app. Still, she said the service is critical in solving access woes.

“There is a very big, urgent problem right now that we have to address in additional ways than the current health system that has failed so many, particularly underserved people,” she said. “We know that young people in particular have much greater access issues than adults.”

Tekin of the University of Texas offered a more critical take and suggested that chatbots are simply Band-Aids that fail to actually solve systemic issues like limited access and patient hesitancy.

“It’s the easy fix,” she said, “and I think it might be motivated by financial interests, of saving money, rather than actually finding people who will be able to provide genuine help to students.”

Lowering the barrier

Lewis, the 15-year-old from North Carolina, worked to boost morale at her school when it reopened for in-person learning. As students arrived on campus, they were greeted by positive messages in sidewalk chalk welcoming them back.

Student Jordyne Lewis, who shared her feelings with the free app Woebot, believes the chatbot could sidestep the stigma of seeking mental health care. (Screenshot courtesy Jordyne Lewis)

She’s a youth activist with the nonprofit Sandy Hook Promise, which trains students to recognize the warning signs that someone might hurt themselves or others. The group, which operates an anonymous tip line in schools nationwide, has observed a 12 percent increase in reports related to student suicide and self-harm during the pandemic compared to 2019.

Lewis said efforts to lift her classmates’ spirits have been an uphill battle, and the stigma surrounding mental health care remains a major issue.

“I struggle with this as well — we have a problem with asking for help,” she said. “Some people feel like it makes them feel weak or they’re hopeless.”

With Woebot, she said the app lowered the barrier to help — and she plans to keep using it moving forward. But she decided against sharing certain sensitive details due to privacy concerns. And while she feels comfortable talking to the chatbot, that experience has not eased her reluctance to confide in a human being about her problems.

“It’s like the stepping stone to getting help,” she said. “But it’s definitely not a permanent solution.”

Disclosure: This story was produced in partnership with The Guardian. It is part of a reporting series that is supported by the Open Society Foundations, which works to build vibrant and inclusive democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens. All content is editorially independent and overseen by Guardian and 74 editors.

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