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Ohio’s largest school district recently began deploying monitoring software on students’ devices.

Columbus City Schools partnered with Gaggle, a Texas-based student safety technology company that provides constant monitoring, at the end of last school year, district spokeswoman Jacqueline Bryant said in an email.

“This is an additional layer of security to ensure students are not visiting unapproved websites,” she said in an email. “Gaggle uses advanced technology and human understanding to monitor students’ use of online tools 24 hours a day, 365 days a week and provides real-time analytics that quickly flag potentially concerning behavior or content; this includes signs of self-harm, depression, substance abuse, cyberbullying or other harmful situations.”

Gaggle currently works with about 1,500 school districts across the country, but declined to say how many of those districts are in Ohio, a Gaggle spokesperson said. Said Shelby Goldman.

“It is our practice not to answer questions about specific school districts,” she said in an email.

Ohio’s three largest school districts — Columbus, Cleveland And Cincinnati — Use Gaggle. Cleveland did not respond to questions from the Ohio Capital Journal about Gaggle.

Cincinnati Public Schools has been using Gaggle since 2013, and according to the school district, it is active for all grade levels. Using Gaggle costs the school district $323,780.

“The safety and well-being of Cincinnati Public Schools’ students and staff is the top priority, and as such, they use Gaggle to monitor threats to the safety of individual students and the school community as a whole,” the school district said. “The school district monitors content on district-provided devices and applications based on specific language and phrases and generates trigger alerts for review, rather than conducting continuous monitoring.”

Founded in the 1990s, Gaggle monitors school platforms such as Google Workspaces and Microsoft Office 365, but does not look at students’ personal email addresses or private social media accounts.

“Gaggle is an early warning system that identifies children in crisis situations so that schools can intervene before a tragedy occurs,” Goldman said in an email. “Gaggle works with school districts to help them monitor student activity on district-provided technology (devices and accounts).”

The company estimates that it has contributed 5,790 lives from 2018-23says their report from last autumn.

“We believe it is important to strike the right balance between monitoring for safety and protecting student privacy and confidentiality, and we are committed to continuing to support districts in achieving both,” Goldman said in an email.

Gaggle uses artificial intelligence to detect potential problems and a human safety team reviews them before contacting the school.

“Our reviewers look at context to determine whether an article is related to an actual issue or is perhaps just a simple reference to something that is harmless in context,” Goldman said in an email.

Gaggle can flag things as early warning signals or an imminent threat that are treated with higher urgency. It Ohio school districts reported 1,275 student incidents that required immediate intervention in 2021, according to a Facebook post by Gaggle from October 2022.

Columbus City Schools, which has about 47,000 students, is introducing Gaggle in middle and high schools. Students cannot opt ​​out.

The district signed two contracts with Gaggle – the first for $58,492.40 in January and $99,180 in June, according to school board records.

During the district’s Gaggle pilot from April 2022 to December 2023, 3,942 pieces of content were investigated by the Gaggles safety team, resulting in 226 “actionable student safety concerns sent to emergency contacts,” a school board document states.

Although Sharon Kim’s two students are still in elementary school and have not yet been affected by the district’s implementation of the Gaggle program, she is concerned about the district’s use of surveillance technology.

“School should be a safe place for our children,” Kim said. “They spend so much of their lives in school. It should be a place where they feel safe, not where they feel like they’re being monitored and controlled every single minute of the day. I really think this kind of monitoring is a huge hindrance to that.”

Follow OCJ Reporter Megan Henry on X.