Katy ISD trustees mull contract to monitor social media threats
School board will vote on $243K deal to hire security company at meeting later this month
As schools and districts across the country search for ways to stop the next spate of campus violence before it happens, Katy ISD’s trustees considered Wednesday whether to hire a security company to screen public social media posts to look for potential threats against its schools.
The board will vote on whether to sign a three-year, $243,000 contract with Social Sentinel at its regular board meeting later this month.
“No Katy ISD data is shared with Social Sentinel,” Superintendent Lance Hindt said at a work session Monday. “I think this can be a resource for us to identify potential concerns and address them proactively instead of reactively.”
Social Sentinel, based out of Vermont, is one of many technology firms doing some form of social media scanning or monitoring at universities and lower level grade schools, especially in the wake of school shootings. Critics have raised privacy concerns, but Social Sentinel says it does not monitor the social media accounts of specific students or staff members, and it does not have access to any private posts or messages.
Instead, CEO and Founder Gary Margolis said the service screens billions of public social media posts through an algorithm. The software compares posts against a library of about 450,000 terms that could indicate potential violence and flags any that mention schools or school districts using the service.
If a post is flagged, Social Sentinel sends a copy of the post to school administrators, who then decide how to proceed.
“Social media has become the primary source of communication for an entire generation, so we set out to find a very respectful way to provide some insight similar to the way schools will send out a playground monitor,” Margolis said.
Still, Grace Kingsley, a 17year-old senior at Taylor High School, worried the system could miss threats that lack a specific school name or inaccurately flag a nonviolent post as a threat.
“It just seems like there are loopholes,” Kingsley said. “If their accounts are private, like mine, you’ll miss so much.”
Robert Faris, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis who studies students’ use of social networks, said there is a pattern of public threats made online, particularly by young men.
“There is some indication that some of these troubled individuals, who are almost always boys, are having issues surrounding masculinity that has been challenged in some way,” Faris said. “Part of it is making this kind of aggressive front as a way to address what they might feel are shortcomings. They want to accomplish something with those public threats.”
Faris said once people realize a third-party firm is trawling through posts in search of threats, however, some troubled students may refrain from making public posts.
“It could drive these kinds of posts underground,” Faris said. “A system based on people expressing concerns about the people they know, their actual friends, would be more likely to have information that might be relevant to threats.”
Sarah Montgomery, Grace’s mother, said she would like more evidence that the system works before the board approves the contract for nearly a quarter-million dollars.
“I don’t think the board quite understands how it works,” Montgomery said. “It seemed like a vague discussion.”
Before the workshop began, about 150 people gathered in the parking lot to express support for Hindt, who has been at the center of a media firestorm after a former classmate accused Hindt of attacking him when both attended West Memorial Junior High School more than 35 years ago.
Hindt has denied attacking the classmate and said Monday he would prefer to meet with his accuser in private rather than have the incident dissected publicly. Hindt said he would like to speak with the accuser and “piece together a timeline” of what actually happened that day.
“I was only in the building with this individual for less than four months,” Hindt said. “I was a brand-new kid.”