Schools turn to media monitors
Promising safety, firms put eyes on students
Hours after the deadly school shooting in Parkland, Fla., companies that market their services to schools began to speak up. “Governor, take pride that a Vermont-based company is helping schools identify the violence before it happens,” one company wrote on Twitter to Gov. Phil Scott of Vermont.
The chief executive of another company appeared on the news to boast of a “home run”: Its algorithms, he said, had helped prevent two student suicides.
To an anguished question that often follows school shootings — Why didn’t anyone spot the warning signs? — these companies have answered with a business model: 24/7 monitoring of student activity on social media.
More than 100 public school districts and universities, faced with the prospect that the next attacker may be among their own students, have hired social media monitoring companies over the past five years, according to a review of school spending records. And each successive tragedy brings more customers: In the weeks after the Parkland attack, dozens of schools entered into such contracts.
The customers have included districts reeling in the aftermath of shootings, like the Newtown Public Schools in Connecticut; some of the nation’s largest urban school systems, like Los Angeles and Chicago; and prominent universities like Michigan State and Florida State.
In many cases the monitoring contracts have not worked out as planned. There is little evidence the companies have helped ferret out brewing threats of violence, bullying or self-harm, according to a review of contracts, marketing materials and emails obtained through public records requests.
The monitoring programs often have been initiated without notifying students, parents or local school boards. Because of their relatively low cost — contracts typically range from a few thousand dollars to $40,000 per year — the deals can get buried in school board agendas. By its count, Social Sentinel has contracts in more than 30 states.
“We’re a carbon monoxide detector,” said Gary Margolis, the company’s chief executive and a former campus police chief. “If a student is posting about shooting their teacher, we would hope we’d be able to find something like that.”
Mark Pompano, the security director for the school district that includes Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, has vetted hundreds of school safety products since the mass shooting there. In 2015, impressed by Social Sentinel’s pitch, he gave the company a try for a few months, but it never caught anything serious, he said.
“I cannot recall a single incident that we used Social Sentinel to pursue some type of security threat or anything like that,” Pompano said. “If something doesn’t work, we’re not going to stick with it.”
Today, Pompano said, the district relies mostly on tips from students. “It goes back to human intelligence, where kids have at least one trusted adult,” he said, “knowing what they’re telling them is confidential.”
In a few cases, school administrators said, monitoring services have helped them identify students who appeared to be at risk of harming themselves. More rare were instances in which an imminent threat to others was thwarted.