Posted on 09/16/2013 2:24:17 AM PDT by markomalley
A suburban Los Angeles school district is now looking at the public postings on social media by middle and high school students, searching for possible violence, drug use, bullying, truancy and suicidal threats.
The district in Glendale, California, is paying $40,500 to a firm to monitor and report on 14,000 middle and high school students' posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media for one year.
Though critics liken the monitoring to government stalking, school officials and their contractor say the purpose is student safety.
As classes began this fall, the district awarded the contract after it earlier paid the firm, Geo Listening, $5,000 last spring to conduct a pilot project monitoring 9,000 students at three high schools and a middle school. Among the results was a successful intervention with a student "who was speaking of ending his life" on his social media, said Chris Frydrych, CEO of the firm.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
They must think that students would use their real names so they could easily be tracked.
Why is this the concern of the schools? What goes on outside of school is of NO concern to them. Have schools become thought police?
Instead of all this spending of taxpayers money to spy on the kids why not use that money for education like writing in cursive or maybe some math or spelling.
Once the kids discover this is going on, you can count on them to post all sorts of false and misleading information for no other purpose than to mess with these nannies.
Isn’t this redundant? I thought the NSA was already on this.
“Why is this the concern of the schools? What goes on outside of school is of NO concern to them. Have schools become thought police?”
First, it’s wealth transfer, probably to somebody’s cousin’s firm. Then, yes, they condider that they’re the ones (responsible is the wrong word) in control of the kids. Yes, it’s about enforcing political correctness. A company I worked at had an “ethics” enforcer. His job had nothing to do with “ethics” and everything to do with enforcing political correctness, on and off the job. Worse, he had metrics to meet, as in I wrote up x employees this month. I terminated y employees this month. (I think he got neutered by the company lawyer as he was doing things that exposed the company to unlimited liability, as well as creating corporate level policy at a layer so far down you couldn’t see the board from there.)
They must think that students would use their real names so they could easily be tracked.
Exactly. How dumb can this school district be?
Not to mention that it is NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS what kids posts anywhere..........
Parents have decided to make it the schools’ business.
We have become a society that threatens lawsuits at the drop of a hat.
Parents threaten to sue when their child is punished too harshly. They threaten to sue when their child is bullied.
This anti- bullying business has, naturally, progressed to parents threatening to sue when their child is bullied online.
When one school or state gives in and gets into the Internet monitoring business, it gives more ammo to use against other schools that have not yet done so.
Is your local school refraining from this? Good - but it won’t last long.
At some point a family will threaten to sue your local school for “doing nothing” while pointing out other schools who are “doing something” to fight online bullying.
And to further complicate matters, there really are a lot of teenage psychos saying the worst things imaginable to each other online.
What’s next? Creepy men in trench coats hanging out in mall’s food courts, listening to what giggling teenagers are saying?
Because the school district had $40K it didn’t know what to do with.
This is old news. I didn’t read this article, but when this was first posted last month, I read that the school DID have some reasons to spy on the kids.
“Not to mention that it is NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS what kids posts anywhere..........”
When you have hundreds of kids posting social media posts and even threats directly related to the school and staff - then yeah. It IS the school’s business.
“O Miss Crabtree...” ping.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.