Surveillance systems in American schools increasingly monitor everything students write on school accounts and devices.<\/p>\n
Lesley Mathis knows what her daughter said was wrong. But she never expected the 13-year-old girl would get arrested for it.<\/p>\n
The teenage girl made an offensive joke while chatting online with her classmates, triggering the school\u2019s surveillance software<\/a>.<\/p>\n Before the morning was even over, the Tennessee eighth grader was under arrest. She was interrogated, strip-searched and spent the night in a jail cell, her mother says.<\/p>\n Earlier in the day, her friends had teased the teen about her tanned complexion and called her \u201cMexican,\u201d even though she\u2019s not. When a friend asked what she was planning for Thursday, she wrote: \u201con Thursday we kill all the Mexico\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n Mathis said the comments were \u201cwrong\u201d and \u201cstupid,\u201d but context showed they were not a threat.<\/p>\n \u201cIt made me feel like, is this the America we live in?\u201d Mathis said of her daughter’s arrest. \u201cAnd it was this stupid, stupid technology that is just going through picking up random words and not looking at context.\u201d<\/p>\n Surveillance systems in American schools increasingly monitor everything students write on school accounts and devices. Thousands of school districts<\/a> across the country use software like Gaggle and Lightspeed Alert to track kids\u2019 online activities, looking for signs they might hurt themselves or others. With the help of artificial intelligence<\/a>, technology can dip into online conversations and immediately notify both school officials and law enforcement.<\/p>\n Educators say the technology has saved lives. But critics warn it can criminalize children for careless words.<\/p>\n “It has routinized law enforcement access and presence in students\u2019 lives, including in their home,\u201d said Elizabeth Laird, a director at the Center for Democracy and Technology.<\/p>\n In a country weary of school shootings, several states have taken a harder line on threats to schools. Among them is Tennessee, which passed a 2023 zero-tolerance law requiring any threat of mass violence against a school to be reported immediately to law enforcement.<\/p>\n The 13-year-old girl arrested in August 2023 had been texting with friends on a chat function tied to her school email at Fairview Middle School, which uses Gaggle to monitor students’ accounts. (The Associated Press is withholding the girl\u2019s name to protect her privacy. The school district did not respond to a request for comment.)<\/p>\n Taken to jail, the teen was interrogated and strip-searched, and her parents weren’t allowed to talk to her until the next day, according to a lawsuit<\/a> they filed against the school system. She didn\u2019t know why her parents weren\u2019t there.<\/p>\n \u201cShe told me afterwards, \u2018I thought you hated me.\u2019 That kind of haunts you,\u201d said Mathis, the girl’s mother.<\/p>\n A court ordered eight weeks of house arrest, a psychological evaluation and 20 days at an alternative school for the girl.<\/p>\n Gaggle’s CEO, Jeff Patterson, said in an interview that the school system did not use Gaggle the way it is intended. The purpose is to find early warning signs and intervene before problems escalate to law enforcement, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cI wish that was treated as a teachable moment, not a law enforcement moment,\u201d said Patterson.<\/p>\n Students who think they are chatting privately among friends often do not realize they are under constant surveillance, said Shahar Pasch, an education lawyer in Florida.<\/p>\n One teenage girl she represented made a joke about school shootings on a private Snapchat story. Snapchat\u2019s automated detection software picked up the comment, the company alerted the FBI, and the girl was arrested on school grounds within hours.<\/p>\n