State wants to amass data on students’ lives
Florida may soon compile a vast collection of student records and social media posts in hopes of trying to prevent another school shooting, a move that has advocates concerned about children’s privacy.
A statewide database, scheduled to be operational Aug. 1, could use millions of pieces of information from school districts, police, mental health agencies, child welfare services and other agencies to help identify students who could be potential safety threats. The plan also calls for the mining their social media accounts for potentially troubling posts. This information can be used by teams of school and law enforcement officials who determine whether certain students pose a threat to themselves or others.
But it remains a mystery what exact information will be collected and how many people will have access to it and how it will be used. It’s not even clear if the state Department of Education, which is overseeing the effort, will meet the deadline set by Gov. Ron DeSantis in February. Neither the education department nor the governor’s office responded to those specific questions.
The Legislature authorized the database last year as part of a school safety bill passed in the wake of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, where 17 students and staff were killed. The Broward School District, the Broward Sheriff ’s Office, the FBI, Henderson Mental Health and the Department of Children and Families all had troubling interactions or crucial information involving the killer but didn’t share that information with the other agencies. The idea of the law was to reduce silos and increase sharing among government agencies.
But the plan faces opposition from 32 privacy, disability, privacy, education and civil-rights advocacy groups, which sent a letter to DeSantis on Tuesday asking that the database be scrapped. They said it could lead to students facing discrimination and false accusations of being a safety threat.
It could also deter students and families from seeking needed help out of fear they will wind up on a state database, said Amelia Vance, a lawyer who serves as director of education privacy for the Washington, D.C.-based Future of Privacy Forum, one of the groups that signed the letter.
The letter was prompted by a story May 30 in Education Week, which obtained public records that detailed what kind of information the state Department of Education has been considering. These include more than 2.5 million records related to those who received psychiatric examinations under the state’s Baker Act, records for over 9 million children in foster care, diagnosis and treatment records for substance abusers, criminal reports of suspicious activity that never led to arrests and reports on students who were bullied and harassed because of their race or sexual orientation.
“As soon as parents and students discover what data the state is using to correlate the threats, we’ll suddenly see much less reporting of bullying and harassment,” Vance said. “Kids don’t want to be in a database saying they were bullied because they were gay or Christian or have a disability.”
Stephanie Langer, a lawyer with the Miami-based Disability Independence Group Inc., said she fears the database would be used to stigmatize, remove and even jail students whose behavioral issues are a result of their disability. Her group also signed the letter.
“Kids who have a meltdown at school are already being arrested, suspended, Baker Acted, pushed out of school. When they want to get rid of a kid, they call them a safety risk,” Langer said. “This database is going to give them permission to do more of that.”
DeSantis’s office disputes the group’s portrayal of how the database would be used. The database will provide “timely, more accurate information” which school and law enforcement officials can use “to evaluate the seriousness of individual cases and is not being used to label students as potential threats,” the governor’s office said in a statement.
The information will be available “only to official entities in order to provide appropriate services to students who may be in need,” the office said.
State Sen. Lauren Book, D-Plantation, said she believes the database will be used to get children the help they need, rather than to label them as a potential shooter.
“Each piece of information in question is already documented somewhere, and the database would not collect new information to violate privacy,” said Book, who serves on a commission investigating the Stoneman Douglas tragedy. “Rather, the intent is fixing a broken system that does not currently allow agencies and advocates to talk with one another to identify students who need help, notice patterns, and provide the best assistance and mental health care possible.”
She said that’s not possible if agencies are “only looking at one piece of the puzzle.”
Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, chairman of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Public Safety Commission, said people should reserve judgment until they know what information will actually be included and who can have access to it.
With more than 400 police agencies in the state and 74 school districts, all with different data collection systems, it will be tough for the state to compile and integrate all the information anytime soon.
“They are not going to be able to do as much as some people want them do or other people are concerned about,” Gualtieri said. “It’s a monumental, Herculean task to bring all this stuff together in one place.”
But he said he’s heard many complaints about why no one was able to “connect the dots” involving the Stoneman Douglas killer when so many warnings signs were there.
“You can’t be yelling about putting together these records and then complain about all the agencies working in silos and and signs that were missed,” he said. “You can’t have it both ways.”