Two-thirds of Ohioans support a universal free school breakfast and lunch program for all public school children, according to a Republican research firm.

“This is extremely rare in a time where voters are really reluctant to support further spending, either at the state or federal level,” Alexi Donovan, vice president of Tarrance Group Polling, said Monday during the monthly meeting.

This month’s meeting heard testimony on the importance of universal school meals and Tarrance Group Polling surveyed 600 Ohio voters about this topic in May.

“It is clear from the research and the data over the years, universal school meals help students thrive, physically, mentally, socially and educationally,” said John Stanford, director of Children’s Defense Fund–Ohio.

In Ohio, 1 in 6 children, or about 413,000 kids, live in a household that experiences hunger. Despite that, more than 1 in 3 children who live in a food insecure household do not qualify for school meals, according to a from Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio.

“We believe that in a country as wealthy as we are, we should not have hungry children,” said Lisa Quigley, director of .

Exposing students to various fruits and vegetables through school meals helps them get a taste for “food that’s far more nutritious than what a lot of them are bringing to school,” she said.

“What we’re finding in the schools that are doing universal school meals, the food is getting better,” Quigley said.

National security

Children’s hunger is a national security issue, said Cynthia Rees, Ohio’s director for the Council for a Strong America.

The that found 77% of young people between the ages of 17 and 24 are ineligible for military service without a waiver. The most prevalent disqualification rate was for being overweight at 11%, above drug and alcohol abuse (8%) and medical/physical health (7%).

“It is critical to recognize that overweight and obesity can often be manifestations of malnutrition, food insecurity or the lack of access to affordable healthy foods often result in consuming cheaper and more accessible food, which often lack nutritional value,” Rees said.

The food insecurity rate for Ohio children is 15%, with some counties having rates up to 24%, Rees said.

“Increasing children’s access to fresh and nutritious food now, including through free school meals for all students, could help America recover from the present challenges and bolster national security in the future,” she said. “The military has a long standing interest in the health and nutrition of our nation’s youth.”

Universal school meals would eliminate the stigma of categorizing students who receive free and reduced meals and those that don’t, Rees said.

“Instead, all students can just have a meal together,” she said. “When we make school meals accessible to all, we remove that stigma.”

Ohio legislation

Last year’s budget bill allowed any student who qualified for free or reduced school breakfast or lunch got those meals for free during the 2023-24 school year.

Currently in Ohio, children are eligible for free or reduced school meals if their household income is up to 185% of the federal poverty line, which is $57,720 for a family of four, according to the .

State Reps. Darnell Brewer, D-Cleveland, and Ismail Mohamed, D-Columbus, introduced a bill earlier this year that would require public schools to provide a meal to any student that asks.

would also ban a district from throwing away a meal after it was served “because of a student’s inability to pay for the meal or because money is owed for previously provided meals.” The has only had sponsor testimony so far in the House Primary and Secondary Education Committee.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on and .

New York City’s free online therapy platform for teens may violate state and federal laws protecting student data privacy, lawyers from the New York Civil Liberties Union and advocates charged in a letter Tuesday to the city’s Education and Health Departments.

, a $26 million partnership between the city Health Department and teletherapy giant Talkspace launched in late 2023, connects city residents between ages 13 and 17 with free therapists by text, phone, or video chat.

In less than a year, roughly 16,000 students have signed up, Health Department officials said. Sign-ups disproportionately came from youth who identified as Black, Latino, Asian American and female and live in some of the city’s lowest-income neighborhoods, .

Information shared with a therapist is subject to stringent protections under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA. But before connecting with a therapist through Teenspace, teens go through a registration process that asks for personal information like their name, school, mental health history, and gender identity. Advocates are concerned such information is being improperly collected and could be misused.

For one, teens enter the registration information before securing parental consent – a possible violation of federal student privacy laws, the letter contends.

And families don’t get a chance to review the privacy policy – which discloses that registration information can be used to “tailor advertising” and for marketing purposes – before entering the registration information, advocates allege. There’s an option for teens to request that their data be deleted from the company’s platform, but it’s hard to find, according to advocates.

“It’s all very invasive,” said Shannon Edwards, a parent and founder of AI For Families, an organization that seeks to help families navigate artificial intelligence, who co-authored the letter along with NYCLU and the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. “It’s also very unclear that parents understand what they’re getting themselves into.”

Advocates also pointed to the risk of a potential data breach – something the city has in recent years.

Advocates say similar about have been circulating for years and questioned whether city officials did sufficient due diligence or built in enough additional privacy safeguards before inking the contract.

“It’s the opacity of the relationship here, and the failure to make manifest what the city is doing to ensure there isn’t this data accumulation and sharing for inappropriate purposes,” said Beth Haroules, a senior attorney at the NYCLU who co-authored the letter.

Health Department spokesperson Rachel Vick said the agency has “taken additional steps to protect the data of Teenspace users and ensure information is not collected for personal gain, including stipulations that require all client data to remain confidential during and after the completion of the city’s contract and barring use of data for any purpose other than providing the services included in the contract.”

Client data is destroyed after 30 days if a teen doesn’t connect with a therapist, officials said.

A spokesperson for Talkspace referred questions to the Health Department.

The extent to which Teenspace is subject to state and federal laws governing student privacy in educational settings is somewhat murky, given that the contract is with the city’s Health Department, not its Education Department.

But NYCLU attorneys contend “the City cannot absolve itself of its responsibility to provide the protections inherent in federal and state laws…simply because the contract sits with DOHMH instead of DOE. The service is promoted on public school websites, and it is DOE’s responsibility to ensure that student data is protected, regardless of which City agency signs the contract.”

Parents may be more inclined to trust the platform because it has a “stamp of approval” from the school system, Edwards added.

A Health Department spokesperson didn’t specify whether the program is subject to education privacy laws, but said it’s “not a school based service.”

Teenspace has been the city’s highest-profile effort to address the ongoing youth mental health crisis.

“We are meeting people where they are with a front door to the mental health system that for too long has been too hard to find,” said Ashwin Vasan, the city’s health commissioner, in May.

Some teens have praised the program, noting it’s a way to bring mental health care to young people who may not otherwise have access.

But some mental health providers have argued it can’t replace the kind of intensive care a clinician provides, especially for kids with severe mental health challenges.

Company officials shared in May that they had helped 36 teens navigate serious incidents including reports of suicide attempts and abuse – cases they referred to child protective services, in-person therapists, or hospitals.

Talkspace CEO Jon Cohen previously told Chalkbeat the company uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to scan transcripts of therapy sessions to help identify teens at risk of suicide.

Even advocates critical of Teenspace’s privacy protections acknowledge the severe shortage of mental health providers and say teletherapy can play a role in filling the gap.

“We know you cannot find providers … there is such a need,” said Haroules. But advocates said the city can do more to ensure its vendors are meeting strict standards for data privacy, especially with such sensitive information.

“Everyone thinks, well, mental health is important for kids, these kids of services are required … when on the other side is: ‘How are they getting to it?’” said Edwards. “It doesn’t matter what the app is, there has to be a standard.”

This was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

When students in suburban Atlanta returned to school for in-person classes amid the pandemic, they were required to cover their faces with cloth masks like in many places across the U.S. Yet in this 95,000-student district, officials took mask compliance a step further than most. 

Through a network of security cameras, officials harnessed artificial intelligence to identify students whose masks drooped below their noses. 

“If they say a picture is worth a thousand words, if I send you a piece of video — it’s probably worth a million,” said Paul Hildreth, the district’s emergency operations coordinator. “You really can’t deny, ‘Oh yeah, that’s me, I took my mask off.’”

The school district in Fulton County had installed the surveillance network, by , years before the pandemic shuttered schools nationwide in 2020. Under a constant fear of mass school shootings, districts in recent years have increasingly deployed controversial surveillance networks like cameras with facial recognition and gun detection.

With the pandemic, security vendors switched directions and began marketing their wares as a solution to stop the latest threat. In Fulton County, the district used Avigilon’s “No Face Mask Detection” technology to identify students with their faces exposed. 

During remote learning, the pandemic ushered in a new era of digital student surveillance as schools turned to AI-powered services like remote proctoring and in search of threats and mental health warning signs. Back on campus, districts have rolled out tools like badges that track students’ every move. 

But one of the most significant developments has been in AI-enabled cameras. Twenty years ago, security cameras were present in 19 percent of schools, according to . Today, that . Powering those cameras with artificial intelligence makes automated surveillance possible, enabling things like temperature checks and the collection of other biometric data.

Districts across the country have said they’ve bought AI-powered cameras to fight the pandemic. But  as pandemic-era protocols like mask mandates end, experts said the technology will remain. Some educators have stated plans to leverage pandemic-era surveillance tech for student discipline while others hope AI cameras will help them identify youth carrying guns. 

The cameras have faced sharp resistance from civil rights advocates who questioned their effectiveness and argue they trample students’ privacy rights.

Noa Young, a 16-year-old junior in Fulton County, said she knew that cameras monitored her school but wasn’t aware of their high-tech features like mask detection. She agreed with the district’s now-expired mask mandate but felt that educators should have been more transparent about the technology in place.

“I think it’s helpful for COVID stuff but it seems a little intrusive,” Young said in an interview. “I think it’s strange that we were not aware of that.”

‘Smoke and mirrors’

Outside of Fulton County, educators have used AI cameras to fight COVID on multiple fronts. 

In Rockland Maine’s Regional School Unit 13, officials used federal pandemic relief money to procure a network of cameras for contact tracing. Through advanced surveillance, the cameras by allow the 1,600-student district to identify students who came in close contact with classmates who tested positive for COVID-19. In its , Verkada explains how districts could use federal funds tied to the public health crisis to buy its cameras for contact tracing and crowd control. 

At a district in suburban Houston, officials spent nearly $75,000 on AI-enabled cameras from , a surveillance company owned in part by the Chinese government, and deployed thermal imaging and facial detection to identify students with elevated temperatures and those without masks. 

The cameras can screen as many as 30 people at a time and are therefore “less intrusive” than slower processes, said Ty Morrow, the Brazosport Independent School District’s head of security. The checkpoints have helped the district identify students who later tested positive for COVID-19, Morrow said, although has argued Hikvision’s claim of accurately scanning 30 people at once is not possible. 

“That was just one more tool that we had in the toolbox to show parents that we were doing our due diligence to make sure that we weren’t allowing kids or staff with COVID into the facilities,” he said.  

Yet it’s this mentality that worries consultant Kenneth Trump, the president of Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services. Security hardware for the sake of public perception, the industry expert said, is simply “smoke and mirrors.”

“It’s creating a façade,” he said. “Parents think that all the bells and whistles are going to keep their kids safer and that’s not necessarily the case. With cameras, in the vast majority of schools, nobody is monitoring them.”

‘You don’t have to like something’

When the Fulton County district upgraded its surveillance camera network in 2018, officials were wooed by Avigilon’s AI-powered “Appearance Search,” which allows security officials to sift through a mountain of video footage and identify students based on characteristics like their hairstyle or the color of their shirt. When the pandemic hit, the company’s mask detection became an attractive add-on, Hildreth said.

He said the district didn’t actively advertise the technology to students but they likely became aware of it quickly after students got called out for breaking the rules. He doesn’t know students’ opinions about the cameras — and didn’t seem to care. 

“I wasn’t probably as much interested in their reaction as much as their compliance,” Hildreth said. “You don’t have to like something that’s good for you, but you still need to do it.”

A Fulton County district spokesman said they weren’t aware of any instances where students were disciplined because the cameras caught them without masks. 

After the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, pitched its cameras with AI-powered “gun detection” as a promising school safety strategy. Similar to facial recognition, the gun detection system uses artificial intelligence to spot when a weapon enters a camera’s field of view. By identifying people with guns before shots are fired, the service is “like Minority Report but in real life,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email at the time, referring to the that predicts a dystopian future of mass surveillance. During the pandemic, the company rolled out thermal cameras that a company spokesperson wrote in an email could “accurately pre-screen 2,000 people per hour.”

The spokesperson declined an interview request but said in an email that Athena is “not a surveillance company” and did not want to be portrayed as “spying on” students. 

Among the school security industry’s staunchest critics is Sneha Revanur, a 17-year-old high school student from San Jose, California, who founded to highlight the dangers of artificial intelligence on civil liberties. 

Revanur said she’s concerned by districts’ decisions to implement surveillance cameras as a public health strategy and that the technology in schools could result in harsher discipline for students, particularly youth of color. 

Verkada offers a cautionary tale about the potential harms of pervasive school surveillance and student data collection. Last year, when a hack exposed the live feeds of 150,000 surveillance cameras, including those inside Tesla factories, jails and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The Newtown district, which suffered a mass school shooting in 2012, said compromising information about students. The some educators from contracting with the California-based company. 

After a back-and-forth with the Verkada spokesperson, the company would not grant an interview or respond to a list of written questions. 

Revanur called the Verkada hack at Sandy Hook Elementary a “staggering indictment” of educators’ rush for “dragnet surveillance systems that treat everyone as a constant suspect” at the expense of student privacy. Constant monitoring, she argued, “creates this culture of fear and paranoia that truly isn’t the most proactive response to gun violence and safety concerns.” 

In Fayette County, Georgia, the district spent about $500,000 to purchase 70 Hikvision cameras with thermal imaging to detect students with fevers. But it and disabled them over their efficacy and Hikvision’s ties to the Chinese government. In 2019, the U.S. government , alleging the company was implicated in China’s “campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-technology surveillance” against Muslim ethnic minorities.

 The school district declined to comment. In a statement, a Hikvision spokesperson said the company “takes all reports regarding human rights very seriously” and has engaged governments globally “to clarify misunderstandings about the company.” The company is “committed to upholding the right to privacy,” the spokesperson said. 

Meanwhile, Regional School Unit 13’s decision to use Verkada security cameras as a contact tracing tool could run afoul of in Maine schools. The district didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

Michael Kebede, the ACLU of Maine’s policy counsel, cited recent studies on facial recognition’s flaws in and and called on the district to reconsider its approach. 

“We fundamentally disagree that using a tool of mass surveillance is a way to promote the health and safety of students,” Kobede said in a statement. “It is a civil liberties nightmare for everyone, and it perpetuates the surveillance of already marginalized communities.”

White faces

In Fulton County, school officials wound up disabling the face mask detection feature in cafeterias because it was triggered by people eating lunch. Other times, it identified students who pulled their masks down briefly to take a drink of water. 

In suburban Houston, Morrow ran into similar hurdles. When white students wore light-colored masks, for example, the face detection sounded alarms. And if students rode bikes to school, the cameras flagged their elevated temperatures. 

“We’ve got some false positives but it was not a failure of the technology,” Hildreth said. “We just had to take a look and adapt what we were looking at to match our needs.”

With those lessons learned, Hildreth said he hopes to soon equip Fulton County campuses with AI-enabled cameras that identify students who bring guns to school. He sees a future where algorithms identify armed students “in the same exact manner” as Avigilon’s mask detection. 

In a post-pandemic world, Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the nonprofit , worries the entire school security industry will take a similar approach. In February, educators in Waterbury, Connecticut, a new network of campus surveillance cameras with weapons detection. 

“With the pandemic hopefully waning, we’ll see a lot of security vendors pivoting back to school shooting rhetoric as justification for the camera systems,” he said. Due to the potential for errors, Cahn called the embrace of AI gun detection “really alarming.” 

Disclosure: This story was produced in partnership with . It is part of a reporting series that is supported by the which works to build vibrant and inclusive democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens. All content is editorially independent and overseen by Guardian and 74 editors.