As immigration authorities carry out what President Donald Trump has promised will be the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history, several states are passing laws to keep children out of foster care when their detained parents have no family or friends available to take temporary custody of them.

The federal government doesn’t track how many children have entered foster care because of immigration enforcement actions, leaving it unclear how often it happens. In Oregon, as of February two children had been placed in foster care after being separated from their parents in immigration detention cases, according to Jake Sunderland, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Human Services.

“Before fall 2025, this simply had never happened before,” Sunderland said.

As of mid-February, nearly by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The record 73,000 people in detention in January represented an compared with one year before. According to , parents of 11,000 children who are U.S. citizens were detained from the beginning of Trump’s term through August.

The news outlet NOTUS that at least 32 children of detained or deported parents had been placed in foster care in seven states.

Sandy Santana, executive director of Children’s Rights, a legal advocacy organization, said he thinks the actual number is much higher.

“That, to us, seems really, really low,” he said.

Separation from a parent is deeply traumatic for children and can lead to , including post-traumatic stress disorder. Prolonged, intense stress can lead to more-frequent infections in children and developmental issues. That “toxic stress” is also associated with damage to areas of the brain responsible for learning and memory, , a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.

, and amended existing laws during Trump’s first term to allow guardians to be granted temporary parental rights for immigration enforcement reasons. Now the enforcement surge that began after Trump returned to office last year has prompted a new wave of state responses.

In New Jersey, lawmakers are considering to amend a state law that allows parents to nominate standby, or temporary, guardians in the cases of death, incapacity, or debilitation. The bill would add separation due to federal immigration enforcement as another allowable reason.

Nevada and California passed laws last year to protect families separated by immigration enforcement actions. California’s law, called the , allows parents to nominate guardians and share custodial rights, instead of having them suspended, while they’re detained. They regain their full parental rights if they are released and are able to reunite with their children.

There are significant legal barriers to reunification once a child is placed in state custody, said Juan Guzman, director of children’s court and guardianship at the Alliance for Children’s Rights, a legal advocacy organization in Los Angeles.

If a parent’s child is placed in foster care and the parent cannot participate in required court proceedings because they are in detention or have been deported, it’s less likely they will be able to reunite with their child, Guzman said.

are U.S. citizens who live with a parent or family member who does not have legal immigration status, according to research from the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. Within that group, 2.6 million children have two parents lacking legal status.

Santana said he expects the number of family separation cases to grow as the Trump administration continues its immigration enforcement campaign, putting more children at risk of being placed in foster care.

the agency to make efforts to facilitate detained parents’ participation in family court, child welfare, or guardianship proceedings, but Santana said it’s uncertain whether ICE is complying with those rules.

ICE officials did not respond to requests for comment for this report.

Before the change in California’s law, the only way a parent could share custodial rights with another guardian was if the parent was terminally ill, Guzman said.

If parents create a preparedness plan and identify an individual to assume guardianship of their children, the state child welfare agency can begin the process of placing the children with that individual without opening a formal foster care case, he added.

While Nevada lawmakers expanded an existing guardianship law last year to include immigration enforcement, the measure requires the parents to file notarized paperwork with the secretary of state’s office, an administrative step that may be burdensome, said Cristian Gonzalez-Perez, an attorney at Make the Road Nevada, a nonprofit that provides resources to immigrant communities.

Gonzalez-Perez said some immigrants are still hesitant to fill out government forms, out of fear that ICE might access their information and target them. He reassures community members that the state forms are secure and can be accessed only by hospitals and courts.

The Trump administration has taken through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the IRS, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and other entities.

Gonzalez-Perez and Guzman said that not enough immigrant parents know their rights. Nominating a temporary guardian and creating a plan for their families is one way they can prevent feelings of helplessness, Gonzalez-Perez said.

“Folks don’t want to talk about it, right?” Guzman said. “The parent having to speak to a child about the possibility of separation, it’s scary. It’s not something anybody wants to do.”

is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

As federal immigration officials carry out mass arrests in Los Angeles and President Donald Trump unilaterally calls in the military to confront protesters — prompting civil unrest across the country this week — the city’s school chief vowed to . 

• L.A. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho announced  around high school graduations, my colleague Ben Chapman reports. 
  
• “Our schools are places of education and inspiration, not fear and intimidation,” Carvalho, once an undocumented immigrant himself, said while announcing an order for school police officers to “intervene” against any Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents should they attempt to detain or arrest anyone at school functions. “Many of us here are immigrants or children of immigrants.”   
  
• Some parents in the district — which enrolls an estimated 30,000 immigrant students — said they planned to  due to immigrant enforcement fears. 
  
• In April, Carvalho  who paid visits to two L.A. elementary schools to conduct “wellness checks” on unaccompanied minors who came to the country without their parents. 

For students graduating high school this spring, the anti-immigrant climate has raised , including worries about their ability to pursue college or job-training programs.

They’re coming for the youth: The 74’s Jo Napolitano reported this week on the  in New York, Massachusetts and other states, and the pain that followed. 

• “For other communities, this is a wake-up call,” immigrant rights activist Adam Strom said. “The unimaginable is happening in communities like their own, to students not so different from the kids in their own classrooms.”
• Among them is 9-year-old Mártir García Lara, an L.A. fourth grader who was deported to Honduras with his father. The father and son were detained by immigration officials when they showed up to a routine immigration hearing. | 
•  who arrived in the U.S. as unaccompanied  minors have been taken into federal custody following “welfare checks” like the ones at L.A. schools. 
• The Trump administration has said  they believe are now “slaves, sex slaves or dead.” Immigrant rights advocates say  to deport the adults around them. 

In Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis ordered the state labor department to  after it received a subpoena from the Trump administration, a whistleblower lawsuit alleges.

In the news

A ‘misconfiguration,’ kept under wraps: BoardDocs, a software tool used by thousands of school boards to publicize meetings and store confidential information, suffered a technical glitch that exposed the sensitive records of school districts nationally, I revealed this week. Multiple districts that are BoardDocs customers said they were unaware of the incident until I contacted them and, in several instances, received confirmation only after reaching out directly to parent company Diligent. | 

• Nineteen-year-old Matthew Lane pleaded guilty in Massachusetts federal court for his role in a recent cyberattack on education technology behemoth PowerSchool, which led to a data breach exposing the personal information of millions of students, parents and teachers globally. | 

David Hogg, an outspoken survivor of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, said he will not run again for vice chair of the Democratic National Committee after he faced fierce pushback for funding the campaigns of candidates running against sitting lawmakers in primary races. | 

New Jersey schools place children with disabilities in separate educational settings away from their nondisabled peers at the highest rate in the country, potentially in violation of a federal law that affirms the children’s right to learn in general ed classrooms “to the maximum extent possible.” | 

Following outcry, the U.S. Naval Academy has reversed its decision to scrap from its library 381 books that mentioned diversity, equity and inclusion. |

My colleague Linda Jacobson reported in depth this week on a California mom whose three-year crusade against a school district that supported her child’s social transition from female to male is at the heart of the Trump administration’s forceful effort to clamp down on educators who withhold changes in students’ gender identity from their parents. | 

Aggressive enforcement despite layoffs: Trump’s pick to lead civil rights enforcement at the Education Department, Kimberly Richey, said at a Senate hearing last week she is “always going to advocate” for the office even as the administration guts its staff. | 

• “If I am confirmed, the department will not stand idly by while Jewish students are attacked and discriminated against,” Richey said. “We will stop forcing schools to let boys and men into female sports and spaces,” she continued, referring to inclusive school policies that allow transgender students to participate in school athletics and use restrooms that align with their gender identities. | 

The Supreme Court announced it would not consider a case that challenged Maryland’s ban on semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 and imposed 10-round limits on gun magazines, rules that were implemented in response to the 2012 mass elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. | 

Firearms deaths among children have surged since a 2010 Supreme Court decision gave states more control over gun laws, a new study finds. | 

ICYMI @The74

Emotional Support

Don’t forget to practice good posture!

California Health Report spoke to four high school students. In order to protect the identities of the students who fear repercussions based on their immigration status, it has withheld their full names and the name of their school, in addition to generalizing the area where they live.

High school seniors around the country are graduating, a rite of passage that marks a profound shift. It can feel as if everyone is asking them what comes next. For immigrant students, these discussions have an extra layer of complexity this year.

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At one northern California school, recently arrived immigrant students are thinking about safety, politics, and the culture of belonging — considerations that weren’t front of mind as they filled out their applications in the fall, before President Donald Trump took office.

In addition to fears about being deported or being separated from family members, the students now worry about financial aid complications and whether their immigration status will prevent them from getting professional licenses in the fields they hope to study. Some have changed their plans, deciding to stay close to home and attend community college instead of attending a four-year university. Others feel grateful they live in California, which has historically provided more resources and what many feel is a more welcoming environment for undocumented students than some states.

But all of the students interviewed expressed some concern about what their next steps could mean for their safety.

The stress of worrying about immigration issues can make it more difficult to focus in class, said Beleza Chan, communications director at Immigrants Rising, a nonprofit organization that helps undocumented college students in California. It can be hard to stay motivated when the future feels so uncertain, she said.

And yet, “continuing to pursue your dreams is one way to fight back,” Chan added.

A California safety net for immigrant students, interrupted

When A., who is 18, came to the U.S. alone four years ago, his eyes were set on college. To him, that meant enrolling directly into a four-year university. But for most of this year, A had started letting go of that dream. His legal protections are only temporary, and without a green card, he wondered if straying far from the home he’s built with his aunt and cousins was the best idea. “I have a lot of mixed feelings,” he said.

Then, A. learned that he had been accepted to California State University, Chico, and a local organization would cover part of the cost. With encouragement from his advisors, A. decided to enroll.

But just as A. was wrapping his head around the idea that his dream of attending college and living on campus was coming true, he learned that a special agent from the Department of Homeland Security had visited his old address, where the agent left his business card with a relative who still lives there. A. is working with his attorney to figure out his next steps, but in the meantime, his fears feel closer than ever.

S., 18, has similar concerns. She entered the country on a temporary visa with her mother, a green card holder, nearly three years ago. She immediately applied for her own legal permanent residence, but the application is still pending. In the meantime, her temporary visa has expired, leaving her in a delicate legal situation.

Her lawyer has recommended that if her green card doesn’t come through soon, she should go to her home country and wait. But that would mean putting her college dreams on hold and returning to a country where she has few family members left. According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the average wait time for this type of green card application is 7.5 years.

Before this year, S. had no problem talking to others about her immigration status. Her application was pending, and even though she knew she had overstayed her visa, she believed it would be fixed soon. But she’s felt the culture shift.

”I feel like now I cannot be really open and talk about my experience because of how things have changed,” said S.

Early on in her college application process, S. was thinking big. Determined to study public health and medicine, she applied to 30 colleges across the country, from schools in the University of California and California State University systems to private universities on the East Coast. But after the election, she started doing more research, trying to understand not just what financial resources each school offers, but how that school does — or doesn’t — outwardly welcome undocumented students. She also wanted to know more about how states have responded to Trump’s deportation agenda.

As the acceptance letters began to pour in, S. learned that she was being offered a full scholarship to the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her excitement has been tempered, however, by the looming question of her legal status. If her green card is approved before classes start in August, she’ll enroll. But she’s already booked a plane ticket home, realistic about her chances and seeing no other choice.

Community colleges offer solutions for immigrant students

When C., who is 17, crossed the southern border into Arizona with her mother two years ago, she was nearly nine months pregnant. After spending most of her life concerned for her safety, C. said, “I’m a huge fan of all calm places.”

She found that in northern California, where she made friends in her high school’s newcomer program. C.’s teachers helped her find daycare for her daughter and support with housing and food. “I would give anything so that my daughter doesn’t have to go through the same things that I went through,” C. said.

Going into her last semester of high school, C. had already decided on her plan after graduation: community college.

As many of her peers are excited to embrace their independence for the first time, C. is experiencing something that educators say many of their newcomer students feel: a hesitancy to uproot themselves after years, perhaps a lifetime, of seeking a safe, stable place to live. C.’s community college of choice has a Head Start program for her daughter, and staying at home means she can pursue her education while continuing to live in a community she knows and trusts. C. expects to be eligible for in-state tuition; in addition, she has received a scholarship from a local philanthropic organization that will help her with living expenses.

C. plans to eventually transfer to a university to complete her bachelor’s degree and become a teacher in her northern California town. One day, she hopes to teach at the same high school she’s enrolled in now and help other newcomer students feel welcome.

For some students, though, the decision to attend community college can feel like a bit of a disappointment.

J., 18, came to the U.S. with her parents when she was just a few months old, and growing up, she’d always felt like an American. She didn’t think much about her legal status until she needed a Social Security number — to hold a job, get a driver’s license, or apply for college. She dreamed of higher education, not just for herself but to make her parents proud.

“Even if I don’t know what I want to do yet, I know that I am going to get that education,” she said.

J. is one of approximately 14,000 undocumented students who will graduate from California high schools this year. Only 10% of those students will pursue higher education, compared with 63% of students statewide who enroll in college after high school, according to the .

“Financial aid has always been a big part of undocumented students’ decisions,” Chan said. These students are not eligible for federal financial aid, but California and 23 other states allow some undocumented students to pay in-state tuition or access state financial aid. Now, those local decisions could be usurped by the federal government.

The Trump administration has said it will on April 28, pressuring California officials to cooperate with the administration’s agenda, though no changes have yet been made.

To navigate these complexities, J. and her classmates have been working with advisers through her school’s Upward Bound program, part of the federally funded TRIO programs, which provides resources and guidance to students from low-income backgrounds pursuing higher education. Oregon and California had waivers that allowed students to participate in the program regardless of their immigration status. But in late March, the .

All of the students interviewed for this story have been told they can keep participating because they’re already enrolled, but going forward, schools will need to verify all students’ immigration status and only enroll U.S. citizens, , and legal residents.

When J. was first accepted to California State University, Sacramento, she was thrilled, but then she began to worry about her safety. Her family worried that being hours away from home in a bigger city could put her at greater risk of deportation, and J. began considering her local community college as a safer and more affordable option. For now, J. has enrolled in her local community college, in the hopes that, by the time she finishes her associate degree, the doors to a bachelor’s degree will open for her.

Being undocumented is hard, but community helps

For A., the stress of entering the next phase of his life can feel isolating: “It’s really hard because you’re trying not to think about that, instead of just thinking about school stuff, you know?” he said. “You have a little bit more weight in your mind.”

Amid political uncertainty, educators still have the power — and the responsibility — to create a space that feels safe and welcoming for all of their students, said Xilonin Cruz-Gonzalez, deputy director of Californians Together, an advocacy group. In 2017, during the first Trump administration, Californians Together launched a project called Support for Immigrant & Refugee Students to train educators on immigration policy and ways they can create safe spaces for their students.

Chan says that a big part of creating that safe space is providing accurate, up-to-date information. Immigrants Rising has recently launched a new that helps college-bound immigrant students and educators wade through complicated eligibility information.

Chan has found that undocumented students’ mental health affects their academic performance. She’s been compiling research showing that depression and anxiety can lead to lower grades, higher dropout rates, decreased motivation, higher levels of self-harm and worse physical health among undocumented students. But despite the well-studied need for mental health services, a 2019 from the University of California, Irvine showed that undocumented students in higher education use such services less frequently than their documented peers.

“Students expressed low perceived need because they normalized mental strain as a natural product of their unstable immigration status,” wrote the study’s authors. “Many viewed treatment as futile because it could not address underlying immigration-related issues.”

But that doesn’t mean students have to face those challenges alone. Immigrants Rising hosts regular virtual for undocumented students around the country to share openly with one another. Many college campuses in California do similar work through UndocuAlly and UndocuLiaison programs that assign college staff members to be the official points of contact for undocumented students.

“We can’t solve all the aggressive immigration policies that are out there,” Chan said. “No amount of breathing exercises is going to get rid of that. But having community helps.”

It all began when school officials mistook a blurry image of a Mike and Ike candy for pills. 

Pennsylvania teenager Blake Robbins found himself  that gave rise to student privacy debates amid schools’ growing reliance on ed tech. 

Spy High, a four-part documentary series streaming now on Amazon Prime, puts the focus on a lawsuit filed in 2010 after Robbins’ affluent Pennsylvania school district accused him of dealing drugs — a conclusion officials reached after they surreptitiously snapped a photo of him at home with the chewy candy in hand. 

The moment had been captured on the webcam of his school-issued laptop — one of some 66,000 covert student images collected by the district, including one of Robbins asleep in his bed. 

I caught up with Spy High Director Jody McVeigh-Schultz to discuss why the 15-year-old case offers cautionary lessons about student surveillance gone awry and how it informs contemporary student privacy debates. 

How student surveillance plays out today: Meet the gatekeepers of students’ private lives. | 

In the news

Courts block DEI directive: Three federal courts ordered temporary halts on Thursday to Trump’s efforts to cancel student diversity initiatives — and demands for states to pledge allegiance to the administration’s interpretation of civil rights laws. | 

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that called for school discipline models “rooted in American values and traditional virtues,” taking aim at Obama- and Biden-era efforts to reduce racial disparities in suspensions and expulsions. | 

‘The history there is deeply, deeply disturbed’: Disability-rights advocates have decried plans at the National Institutes of Health to compile Amerians’ private medical records in a “disease registry” to track children and other people with autism. | 

• Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., faced criticism for recent comments that many kids “were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they’re 2 years old.” | 

A new lawsuit filed by students at military-run schools accuses the Defense Department of harming their learning opportunities by banning books related to “gender ideology” or “divisive equity ideology,” including texts that refer to slavery and sexual harassment prevention. | 

California lawmakers are demanding answers after Department of Homeland Security agents visited two Los Angeles elementary schools and asked to speak with five students who the federal agency said “arrived unaccompanied at the border.” | 

‘We all deserve reparations’: White House aide Stephen Miller said in an interview last week the country “used to have a functioning public school system” until it was destroyed by “open borders.” | 

The Justice Department seized thousands of photos and videos in an investigation of a former University of Michigan assistant football coach who was indicted on allegations he hacked into student athletes’ private accounts to steal intimate images. | 

A 48-year-old mother was arrested and accused of bringing a gun to her daughter’s Indiana elementary school and threatening the girl’s teacher over a classroom assignment about flags. While discussing flags, the teacher reportedly referred to a rainbow flag in the classroom with the words “be kind.” | 

Banning ‘frontal nudity’: A Texas school district has removed lessons on Virginia history from an online learning platform for elementary school students because the commonwealth’s flag depicts the Roman goddess Virtus with an exposed breast. | 

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments next month to weigh Trump’s executive order eliminating birthright citizenship, bringing into question a 127-year-old court precedent. | 

A class-action lawsuit accuses tech giant Google of amassing “thousands of data points that span a child’s life” without the consent of students or their parents. | 

A Florida teacher is out of a job after she called a student by their preferred name, allegedly violating a 2023 Florida law that requires schools to receive parental permission to refer to students by anything other than their legal names. | 

The vice president of the Buffalo, New York, chapter of Bikers Against Child Abuse was arrested and accused of sex crimes against children. | 

ICYMI @The74

Emotional Support

Don’t even think about touching Matilda’s cactus.

A 2023 by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reported 32 million instances of child sexual abuse material being flagged across social media and gaming platforms. has also warned about the rising number of cases where predators use these platforms to groom children through manipulation, coercion and deception.

A recent charging that “facilitated the criminal victimization of a 13-year-old child” highlights the systemic vulnerabilities that make young people easy targets. Despite Roblox’s, which cite ‘frequent’ audits and improvements to its algorithms to detect and block behavior that violates its Terms of Use, the lawsuit says loopholes allowed inappropriate content and predator interactions to persist. Discord, known for its private, invitation-only servers, has been cited multiple times for hosting unmoderated spaces where illicit activities thrive.

In fact, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children found that platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok were responsible for of online grooming cases in the U.K. With children spending an average of four to seven hours daily online, exposure to potential harm is greater than ever.

While no single group or entity can solve this crisis alone, social media, gaming and tech companies must prioritize user safety. Rapid advancements in technology and artificial intelligence have unlocked vast opportunities for implementing safeguards in a way that is more streamlined and automated than ever. But it’s not solely about technology enhancements; a multi-pronged approach that leverages technology, human oversight and accountability is necessary, with changes such as:   

• Stronger content moderation: AI-powered filtering is helpful but flawed. More human oversight is needed to identify harmful content and shut down predator accounts.
  
• Improved reporting mechanisms: Users should have an easy, one-click way to report inappropriate content, with clear follow-up actions.
  
• Age verification enhancements: Current systems are easily bypassed. More stringent ID-based verification should be mandatory.
  
• Proactive predator detection: Platforms should use behavioral analysis to flag predatory activity before harm occurs.
  
• Increased transparency and accountability: Lawsuits like the one against Roblox and Discord prove that self-regulation isn’t enough. Social media companies must be held legally responsible for failing to protect children.

With so many stakeholders — tech companies, parents, lawmakers and law enforcement — it’s easy for the legal and ethical responsibility for protecting minors to become blurred. But any crisis as large as this cannot be solved by solely one party, because no single entity can fully prevent these incidents.

Parents and guardians must start having conversations with their children about online safety — not tomorrow, but tonight. They must realize they are the first line of defense in protecting young people from online predators, so extra vigilance, open dialogue and education are critical. Minors must also be taught about red flags, processes for reporting inappropriate content and the importance of talking to a trusted adult when put in a difficult or inappropriate situation, so they can navigate online spaces safely.

But while all must share some responsibility, accountability is paramount. As governments worldwide grapple with how to balance child protection and internet freedom, legislators must push for stricter regulations and penalties for tech companies that fail to safeguard children. And tech companies must begin upholding a safety-by-design standard that invests in better detection of harmful content, grooming patterns and suspicious behavior.

Protecting children in the digital age requires constant vigilance, policy enforcement and education. It’s time to turn the tide against online exploitation to create a safer digital world where children can explore, play and learn without fear of exploitation.

But , brought by the 18-year-old in late October with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, may never get investigated. 

That’s because it’s one of thousands of federal civil rights complaints and investigations against school districts nationally — particularly those alleging sexual misconduct or racism — that advocates say have been left to languish by the Trump administration with little hope for resolution. As the president and Secretary Linda McMahon seek to dismantle the Education Department — with its civil rights office among the hardest hit by layoffs — attorneys say students like Celestine have lost one of their few avenues for relief. 

“When we filed the complaint on Oct. 29, we knew the election was a few days out and we knew this could very well be the outcome,” said Andrew Hairston, the director of the Education Justice Project at the nonprofit Texas Appleseed, who is representing Celestine in her complaint against the Beaumont Independent School District and its police department. “It’s very difficult for Black children, in particular, who face the harms of school police, to seek any vindication of their rights.” 

Since President Donald Trump took office in January, civil rights attorneys at the Education Department have faced a whirlwind of directives and layoffs, throwing into uncertainty more than 12,000 civil rights investigations that stemmed from complaints by students, parents and their advocates. The Education Department and the Beaumont school district didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

After investigations nationwide were paused following Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, the Education Department’s staff was cut roughly in half through layoffs of more than 1,300 employees, buyouts and early retirements. When the department announced mass firings earlier this month, at least 243 civil rights office staffers were cut. Meanwhile, seven of the 12 Office for Civil Rights regional offices were shuttered, including those in Philadelphia and Dallas, Texas, where Celestine’s complaint was filed. 

It’s a situation that civil rights advocates say has left the Education Department unequipped to carry out its functions mandated by Congress. In filed March 14, advocates and families accused the Trump administration of eviscerating students’ access to federal civil rights remedies, with particular harm to students of color, female students and LGBTQ+ youth. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has prioritized cases tied to antisemitism complaints and has that afford rights and protections to transgender students. 

The lawsuit alleges the changes undermine the civil rights office’s ability to process and investigate complaints and asked a judge to order that its staffing be restored to levels that allow complaints from the public to be investigated “promptly and equitably.” Staffing changes were “arbitrary and capricious” the lawsuit charges, because Trump administration officials “did not articulate a reasoned basis for their decision to sabotage” the Office for Civil Rights. 

“The fact that the federal government is kind of both eliminating these offices and then weaponizing what’s left of them to advance a very narrow definition of discrimination is not just troubling and sad, it’s also fundamentally antithetical to what democratic governance and law enforcement should look like,” said Johnathan Smith, the chief of staff and general counsel at the nonprofit National Center for Youth Law.

Smith represents the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the Education Department and McMahon. They include Nikki Carter, a Black mother of three, who alleges she was barred from her children’s Alabama schools in retaliation for her work as an advocate for children with disabilities. A second parent, identified only as A.W., charges they had to remove their child from school for safety reasons after the student was sexually assaulted and harassed by a classmate and the school did not adequately respond. Both parents are members of the , a nonprofit focused on the civil rights of children with disabilities.

Carter’s complaint was filed in September 2022 and A.W.’s in October 2023.

‘Communicating into a black hole’

It was spring 2024 when Celestine got into a fight and campus police in Beaumont were called to the scene. 

Though the civil rights complaint submitted to the Education Department by the nonprofit Texas Appleseed doesn’t seek to absolve Celestine for her role in the fight, it takes aim at what happened next: A police use-of-force incident captured on video.

“Responding after the fight occurred” when the teenager was sitting passively on the floor, the complaint states, the officer with the school district police department pepper-sprayed Celestine, grabbed her by the hair and kneed her in the face. 

“Such excessive force caused great harm” and was just the first form of punishment Celestine received for the fight, the complaint alleges. She was also suspended from school, placed in an alternative education program and required to complete community service — ”consequences that exceeded the nature of the incident in question,” it argues. 

“This complaint does not ignore the significance of an offense such as in-school fighting,” Texas Appleseed’s Hairston wrote to federal investigators. But the altercation that Celestine was involved in “did not warrant the abuse she was subjected to.” 

The issue at Beaumont is bigger than Celestine and a campus fight, Texas Appleseed contends. It “represents a salient example of how the school-to-prison pipeline operates,” according to the complaint, and highlights how Black students at the district and nationally are disproportionately subjected to law enforcement referrals in schools. 

The 12,000 civil rights investigations that were pending as of Jan. 14 ahead of Trump’s inauguration were listed in that hasn’t been updated since. Federal civil rights investigations routinely take years to resolve and the oldest pending complaint at the time, alleging sex-based discrimination in athletics against an Oklahoma school district was opened in 2007.

After Trump’s swearing-in, the Education Department paused all investigations in its civil rights office. In February, the agency ended the pause on investigations focused solely on disability-based discrimination, and then lifted the hold on sex- and race-based complaints on March 6 — just a week before the 243 OCR staffers were fired. At least 178 attorneys in the civil rights division and dozens of equal opportunity specialists were eliminated. 

The Dallas regional office was among those shut down altogether, possibly relegating Celestine’s case and thousands more to oblivion. Smith with the National Center for Youth Law said he’s heard from fired Education Department employees who’ve lost access to their email accounts and all ability to communicate with families and attorneys about pending complaints. 

“Unless someone is actually going to go into their email accounts and pull up those emails, those communications are lost,” Smith said. As a result, parents and school officials who are communicating with Education Department officials about pending cases are “literally communicating into a black hole because there’s no way for that information to go anywhere.” 

Even if pending cases are transferred to other regional offices, Smith said, they should be considered dead on arrival. 

“I just don’t see how anyone can believe that there’s going to be any real process or consideration of those complaints at this point,” Smith said. 

‘Reinterpreting what is racial discrimination’

While certain cases appear to be jettisoned, fired Education Department staffers who spoke to The 74 and others allege the department’s civil rights division has been weaponized to pursue politically motivated investigations. 

Among them is for opening a gender-neutral bathroom at one of its high schools. Last week, the Office for Civil Rights found the state of Maine violated Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination, for allowing transgender student athletes to participate on girls’ sports teams. 

As the Trump administration targets diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at schools and colleges, the Education Department against the Ithaca, New York, school district, charging a Students of Color United Summit designed to “provide a safe space” and “uplift students of color” was discriminatory against white students. 

Harold Jordan, the nationwide education equity coordinator at the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, accused the Trump administration of launching “directed investigations” to advance political agendas “based on something they read in the newspaper” rather than from complaints filed by students attending those schools. 

“This department is clearly fixated on race and reinterpreting what is racial discrimination,” Jordan said. Ideological beliefs around racial discrimination and transgender students’ rights, he said “seem to have spilled over into how they see civil rights enforcement.” 

Jordan said the ACLU represents students in about 20 pending federal civil rights complaints nationally, yet “nobody is hearing anything” from the civil rights office about the status of those investigations. Among the complaints is an allegation by seven students that Pennsylvania’s Central Bucks School District against LGBTQ+ students, particularly those who are transgender and nonbinary. 

“Given their diatribes about gender ideology and stuff, I suspect that they’re not going to be terribly sympathetic,” Jordan said. “But we ultimately don’t know, and ultimately they’re supposed to follow the law and enforce the law.” 

Meanwhile, at least one civil rights complainant bowed out before the Trump administration could even weigh in, said Katie McKay, an attorney at the Brooklyn law firm C.A. Goldberg where she works on cases involving sexual discrimination, harassment and assault at K-12 schools and colleges. McKay said a college student whose sexual assault case “had been open since Obama was in office,” decided to voluntarily close the complaint after Trump was elected for a second term “because of concerns that this administration would mishandle the case.” 

“It’s frustrating and sad to see that this person has been sitting with this unresolved issue for like a decade and then it’s kind of this non-resolution,” McKay said. The decision to terminate the complaint was made in part on against the president himself. In 2023, a for sexual abuse against the writer E. Jean Carroll in 1996. 

“There’s this fear that those values were going to be applied to the case,” McKay said. “Closing out the case at least created a sense of closure on their own terms rather than letting this administration speak for them.” 

It was October 2022 when Los Angeles schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho made a false assurance about a massive ransomware attack on the country’s second-largest school district — and the leak of thousands of highly sensitive student mental health records — that set me off.

Published reports that the breach exposed students’ psychological evaluations, Carvalho said, were “absolutely incorrect.” The dark web proved otherwise: On a shady corner of the internet, I revealed, hackers used the detailed, very confidential records about Los Angeles children as leverage in a sick ploy for money. After my story ran, L.A. schools acknowledged publicly that some 2,000 student psych evals were indeed exposed by the Vice Society ransomware gang. 

And so began my descent down the rabbit hole, marking the early days of an in-depth investigation I published Tuesday and supported by a grant from the .

What I found is that as educators take steps to protect themselves, their school districts and their reputations after cyberattacks, they employ a pervasive pattern of obfuscation that leaves students, parents and teachers — the real victims of the hacks and subsequent data breaches — in the dark. 

I spent a year (OK, more than a year) learning everything I could about more than 300 K-12 school cyberattacks since the pandemic pushed students into online learning and educators became lucrative targets for hackers. I reconfigured a crappy old laptop to track ransomware gangs on the dark web and to analyze the reams of sensitive files published to their sketchy leak sites. I obtained thousands of public records from more than two dozen school districts. I used the government procurement database GovSpend to uncover school spending after attacks, including ransom payments made to cyberthieves in Bitcoin. I scoured news reports, state data breach disclosures and district websites for public confirmations and, oftentimes, denials — sometimes even after their students’ and employees’ personal information had already been published. 

My reporting documented that educators routinely offered incomplete, misleading or downright inaccurate information about cyberattacks — and the risks that subsequent data breaches pose to students, parents and teachers for identity theft, fraud and other forms of online exploitation. 

The hollowness in schools’ messaging and the mechanisms that leave school communities clueless are no coincidence. Staring down a cyberattack and the prospect of being sued over the leak of sensitive information, school leaders turn to insurance companies, consultants and privacy lawyers to steer “privileged investigations,” which keep key details hidden from the public. Often contacted before the police, the paid consultants who arrive in the wake of a cyberattack are portrayed to the public as an encouraging sign, trained to handle the bad actors and restore learning.

But what isn’t as apparent to students, parents and district employees is that these individuals are not there to protect them — but to protect schools from them. 

School cybersecurity expert Doug Levin had this to say about our investigation: “For institutions whose mission is to lift up and protect children and youth, it is unconscionable that they are incentivized to cover up the criminal acts perpetrated against them by malicious foreign actors.”

K-12 cyberattacks in focus: Now you can fall down the school cyberattack rabbit hole, too! Use our new search feature to read about how incidents unfolded in your own community, complete with investigative reveals you won’t want to miss. 

Emotional support

This story was brought to you with invaluable editing and guidance from The 74’s Kathy Moore.

And Matilda.

We live at the entrance of a suburban neighborhood, and my son’s transportation van picks him up each day to drive him to his specialty school for youth with complex medical and special education needs. Bus driver Steve and bus monitor Carol have been escorting my son to and from school for the better part of five years. They are a dream team.

And, for the better part of five years, I have watched cars speed by as we load my son into his van. Steve has escalated his response to these delinquent drivers over the years. He flashes his lights. He beeps the horn. He rolls down his window and motions with his arms to stop. He yells out at the drivers. He calls in license plates on his radio to dispatch. He alerts the dispatchers to watch video from the cameras that are installed on his bus, to see if they can identify the dangerous drivers.

Despite his best efforts, none of it seems to make any difference. 

Perhaps that’s not surprising. Even though to pass a stopped school bus with its stop sign out and red lights flashing, upward of 242,000 drivers illegally pass yellow school buses each day in the United States, with more than occurring each school year. 

And that’s just for yellow school buses. But not all school buses are yellow.

For every school district’s fleet of yellow buses, there are an average of that transport some of the 7.5 million students, ages 3 to 21, who receive and benefit from additional support on their way to and from school. They represent 15% of all students in that age range in the United States.

Although all school transportation vans have a black School Bus sign on top, flashing red lights and a stop sign arm that extends during boarding, most of them are not yellow. 

And that seems to make matters worse.

One morning, bus driver Steve opened his door and literally forced a minivan that was speeding by us to stop. The driver was a mom who lives just a few houses away. She was holding her phone in her hand, and her three school-aged children were in the car. 

She looked bewildered, even though she has driven by us nearly every day for years. On this day, after I secured my son in his car seat, I walked over and re-introduced myself. I explained that our bus driver was asking her to stop because I was loading my son onto his school bus. 

“That is not a school bus,” she replied matter-of-factly. “I didn’t know I was supposed to stop.”

In her defense, she’s not alone. In my observations, drivers are just as likely to begrudgingly pull over and shout “I didn’t know I was supposed to stop” as they are to continue past us as though they didn’t see us in the first place. It doesn’t matter if it’s an elderly neighbor, a new driver, someone running late, a busy parent on the phone, even a public works employee driving an official town vehicle. Next to none of them stop.

My observations check out: A of over 3,500 drivers showed that people likely illegally pass stopped yellow school buses because they didn’t care (30.5%), were in a hurry (25.5%), didn’t know the law (24.3%) or were distracted (12.2%).

And that data is, of course, based on yellow school buses. Because for all the reports that have been written on the prevalence of illegal passing of school buses from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there is not a single mention of special education transportation vans.

Not one.

So here is a public-service announcement for drivers in every neighborhood in the nation: Not all school buses are yellow. And, no matter the color or the size of the vehicle being used to bring students to and from school, when the school bus lights are on and the stop arm is out, you are required to stop. 

Please don’t wait until a child is struck by a car driving illegally past a school transportation van to make this an issue you care about. 

The Providence School Board typically broadcasts its meetings to .

But Wednesday evening’s board meeting would not be televised.

Less than five minutes before the scheduled start time, school board President Erlin Rogel to express his regret that a weeklong internet outage at Providence schools would also affect the board’s regularly scheduled programming. But the portion of the meeting most germane to the network issues wouldn’t have been broadcast anyway, since it met in executive session.

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In a statement issued Thursday, Rogel described the executive session as “regarding the recent breach of the district’s network.” It included a presentation from the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) and the Providence Public School Department (PPSD).

“While I cannot disclose the specific contents of our discussion, I can state that the district is awaiting an analysis of this breach to learn more about its severity and the degree to which any information was exposed,” Rogel wrote. “While we await the results of that analysis, PPSD continues to mobilize every resource available to ensure that learning proceeds with as little disruption as possible.”

Rogel did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Rhode Island Current.

The school board president’s use of the term “breach” differs from the district’s official language, which has tiptoed around the problem’s exact nature. A to the PPSD community described “irregular activity” on the district network, which ultimately led IT staff to shut down internet access across district offices and schools. Internet remains largely absent in Providence schools, aside from a fleet of enlisted to provide connectivity in the main network’s absence.

A sent from PPSD to community members said a forensic analysis was still ongoing and that “there is no evidence that PPSD data has been affected.”

But on Monday, for the “irregular activity” with a post to its publicly accessible ransom blog that purported to include 41 watermarked, sometimes partially obscured, screenshots that preview the contents of the 201 gigabytes of data the hackers claim to have stolen, with identifying information — like alleged serial numbers for employee cell phones and parents’ contact information — included.

After penetrating a system, Medusa ransomware and amasses exploitable data. Once the bounty is big enough, it will encrypt files and make them inaccessible to users. A ransom note is then delivered to victims, with files held hostage unless a ransom is paid. Medusa hackers also employ a “” method, meaning they not only steal files, but will sell or release the data publicly if payment is not received.

The ransom page suggests PPSD can recover or delete its data by paying $1 million. A $100,000 payment would extend the timer by one day. The deadline is the morning of Sept. 25, according to the hackers’ countdown timer.

Specifics about district kept secure

Jay G. Wégimont, PPSD spokesperson, did not respond to numerous requests for clarification or comment on Friday.

Forensic analyses , meaning those answers won’t be available immediately. But it’s still unknown whether the school department has a cyber insurance policy, or the possible costs associated with the usage of hotspots that are currently substituting for a dedicated network. Also up in the air is whether the district successfully awarded a 2024 contract that would for copies of security software Cortex XDR Pro, a product from Palo Alto Networks that promises with proper installation.

Wégimont did not provide information as to the status of the district’s senior director of information technology, for which a has been online since May. The role is also vacant according to a Jan. 2024 . The contains 13 full-time information services roles for PPSD, down three from the previous year.

“We also want to note that our student and staff information systems are also separate from our network,” Superintendent Javier Montañez wrote in a Sept. 16 letter to the PPSD community.

Wégimont did not clarify what this means. Typically, large networks called domains offer varying levels of access for different types of users across IT services for big organizations like school districts.

Back-to-school for threat actors, too

Perennially underfunded school districts nationwide are a favorite among ransomware actors. A report published in Oct. 2022 cited research that over 647,000 K-12 students were potential victims of ransomware attacks as of 2021. Resulting learning loss ranged from days to weeks, while it took districts’ infrastructure anywhere from two to nine months to recover.

Providence officials have not confirmed ransomware as the source of their network woes. The alleged hack comes at an inopportune time for PPSD, which has been under state control since 2019 and will remain so for , state education officials announced last month.

If Medusa leaks the PPSD data it claims to have, and it contains private student information, the leakage could be in, a federal law meant to shield confidential student data. Best practices determine that affected school districts contact authorities once a breach is suspected. (Schools do not, however, have to contact the U.S. Department of Education about ransomware, although it is so they can receive federal resources.)

“As is standard operating procedure, the District and their professional third-party IT agency contacted RI State Police, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last Wednesday,” Wégimont said in a Sept. 18 email.

Kristen Setera, a spokesperson for the FBI Boston Division, declined to comment.

“Generally speaking, we do not comment on specific incidents because victims should feel confident that, when reporting a crime to the FBI, their status as ‘victim’ is paramount to the investigation and that their identity will not be disclosed,” Setera said in a Thursday morning email to Rhode Island Current. “If a victim wants to disclose our involvement, we leave it up to them to do so.”

In the meantime, Providence schools have made do with older technologies. Maribeth Calabro, president of the Providence Teachers Union, did not acknowledge requests for comment from Rhode Island Current, but did previously speak with multiple news outlets about the effects on the district’s teachers. Some are confused about which devices they can or can’t use, Calabro told the , and have opted to teach the old-school way instead, without computers.

A Tuesday on a social media post about the potential Providence hack seems to voice one student’s concern: “Bro.. I just want the school wifi back.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Rhode Island Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janine L. Weisman for questions: info@rhodeislandcurrent.com. Follow Rhode Island Current on and .

Investigators with the Los Angeles Unified School District’s inspector general’s office conducted a video interview with Chris Whiteley, the former senior director of software engineering at AllHere, after he told The 74 his former employer’s student data security practices violated both industry standards and the district’s own policies. 

Whiteley told The 74 he had alerted the school district, the IG’s office and state education officials earlier to the data privacy problems with Ed but got no response. His meeting with investigators occurred July 2, one day after The 74 published its story outlining Whiteley’s allegations, including that the chatbot put students’ personally identifiable information at risk of getting hacked by including it in all chatbot prompts, even in those where the data weren’t relevant; sharing it with other third-party companies unnecessarily and processing prompts on offshore servers in violation of district student privacy rules. 

In an interview with The 74 this week, Whiteley said the officials from the district’s inspector general’s office “were definitely interested in what I had to say,” as speculation swirls about the future of Ed, its ed tech creator AllHere and broader education investments in artificial intelligence. 

“It felt like they were after the truth,” Whiteley said, adding, “I’m certain that they were surprised about how bad [students’ personal information] was being handled.”

To generate responses to even mundane prompts, Whiteley said, the chatbot processed the personal information for all students in a household. If a mother with 10 children asked the chatbot a question about her youngest son’s class schedule, for example, the tool processed data about all of her children to generate a response. 

“It’s just sad and crazy,” he said.

The inspector general’s office directed The 74’s request for comment to a district spokesperson, who declined to comment or respond to questions involving the inquiry.

While the conversation centered primarily on technical aspects related to the company’s data security protocols, Whiteley said investigators probed him on his personal experiences with AllHere, which he described as being abusive, and its finances.

Whiteley was laid off from AllHere in April. Two months later, a notice posted to the said a majority of its 50 or so employees had been furloughed due to its “current financial position” and the LAUSD spokesperson said company co-founder and CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin had left. The former Boston teacher and Harvard graduate was successful in raising $12 million in venture capital for AllHere and appeared with L.A. schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho at ed tech conferences and other events throughout the spring touting the heavily publicized AI tool they partnered to create.

Just weeks ago, Carvalho spoke publicly about how the project had put L.A. out in front as school districts and ed tech companies nationally race to follow the lead of generative artificial intelligence pioneers like ChatGPT. But the school chief’s superlative language around what Ed could do on an individualized basis with 540,000 students had some industry observers and AI experts speculating it was destined to fail.

The chatbot was supposed to serve as a “friendly, concise customer support agent” that replied “using simple language a third grader could understand” to help students and parents supplement classroom instruction, find assistance with kids’ academic struggles and navigate attendance, grades, transportation and other key issues. What they were given, Whiteley charges, was a student privacy nightmare. 

Smith-Griffin recently deactivated her LinkedIn page and has not surfaced since her company went into apparent free fall. Attempts to reach AllHere for comment were unsuccessful and parts of the company website have gone dark. LAUSD said earlier that AllHere is for sale and that several companies are interested in acquiring it.

The district has already paid AllHere $3 million to build the chatbot and “a fully-integrated portal” that gave students and parents access to information and resources in a single location, the district spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday, and “was surprised by the financial disruption to AllHere.” 

AllHere’s collapse represents a stunning fall from grace for a company that was named among the world’s top education technology companies by Time Magazine just months earlier. Scrutiny of AllHere intensified when Whiteley became a whistleblower. He said he turned to the press because his concerns, which he shared first with AllHere executives and the school district, had been ignored.

Whitely shared source code with The 74 which showed that students’ information had been processed on offshore servers. Seven out of eight Ed chatbot requests, he said, were sent to places like Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Australia and Canada. 

‘How are smaller districts going to do this?’

What district leaders failed to do as they heralded their new tool, Whiteley said, is conduct sufficient audits. As L.A. — and school systems nationwide — contract with a laundry list of tech vendors, he said it’s imperative that they understand how third-party companies use students’ information. 

“If the second-biggest district can’t audit their [personally identifiable information] on new or interesting products and can’t do security audits on external sources, how are smaller districts going to do this?” he asked.

Over the last several weeks, the district’s official position on Ed has appeared to shift. In late June when the district spokesperson said that several companies were “interested in acquiring Allhere,” they also said its predecessor would “continue to provide this first-of-its-kind resource to our students and families.” In its initial response to Whiteley’s allegations published July 1, the spokesperson said that education officials would “take any steps necessary to ensure that appropriate privacy and security protections are in place in the Ed platform.” 

In in the Los Angeles Times, a district spokesperson said the chatbot had been unplugged on June 14. The 74 asked the spokesperson to provide documentation showing the tool was disabled last month but didn’t get a response. 

Even after June 14, Carvalho continued to boast publicly about LAUSD’s foray into generative AI and what he described with third-party vendors. 

On Tuesday, the district spokesperson told The 74 that the online portal — even without a chatty, animated sun — “will continue regardless of the outcome with AllHere.” In fact, the project could become a source of district revenue. Under the contract between AllHere and LAUSD, which was obtained by The 74, the chatbot is the property of the school district, which was set to receive 2% in royalty payments from AllHere “should other school districts seek to use the tool to benefit their families and students.” 

In the statement Tuesday, the district spokesperson said that officials chose to “temporarily disable the chatbot” amid AllHere’s uncertainty and that it would “only be restored when the human-in-the-loop aspect is re-established.” 

Whiteley agreed that the district could maintain the student information dashboard without the chatbot and, similarly, that another firm could buy what remains of AllHere. He was skeptical, however, that Ed the chatbot would live another day because “it’s broken”

“The name AllHere,” he said, “I think is dead.”

As the eight-year-old startup rolled out Los Angeles Unified School District’s flashy new AI-driven chatbot — an animated sun named “Ed” that AllHere was hired to build for $6 million — a former company executive was sending emails to the district and others that Ed’s workings violated bedrock student data privacy principles. 

Those emails were sent shortly before The 74 first reported last week that AllHere, with in investor capital, was in serious straits. A June 14 statement on the company’s website revealed a majority of its employees had been furloughed due to its “current financial position.” Company founder and CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles district said, was no longer on the job. 

Smith-Griffin and L.A. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho went on the road together this spring to unveil Ed at a series of high-profile ed tech conferences, with the schools chief dubbing it the nation’s first “personal assistant” for students and leaning hard into LAUSD’s place in the K-12 AI vanguard. He called Ed’s ability to know students “unprecedented in American public education” at the ASU+GSV conference in April. 

Through an algorithm that analyzes troves of student information from multiple sources, the chatbot was designed to offer tailored responses to questions like “what grade does my child have in math?” The tool relies on vast amounts of students’ data, including their academic performance and special education accommodations, to function.

Meanwhile, Chris Whiteley, a former senior director of software engineering at AllHere who was laid off in April, had become a whistleblower. He told district officials, its independent inspector general’s office and state education officials that the tool processed student records in ways that likely ran afoul of L.A. Unified’s own data privacy rules and put sensitive information at risk of getting hacked. None of the agencies ever responded, Whiteley told The 74. 

“When AllHere started doing the work for LAUSD, that’s when, to me, all of the data privacy issues started popping up,” Whiteley said in an interview last week. The problem, he said, came down to a company in over its head and one that “was almost always on fire” in terms of its operations and management. LAUSD’s chatbot was unlike anything it had ever built before and — given the company’s precarious state — could be its last. 

If AllHere was in chaos and its bespoke chatbot beset by porous data practices, Carvalho was portraying the opposite. One day before The 74 broke the news of the company turmoil and Smith-Griffin’s departure, spotlighted the schools chief at a Denver conference talking about how adroitly LAUSD managed its ed tech vendor relationships — “We force them to all play in the same sandbox” — while ensuring that “protecting data privacy is a top priority.”

In a statement on Friday, a district spokesperson said the school system “takes these concerns seriously and will continue to take any steps necessary to ensure that appropriate privacy and security protections are in place in the Ed platform.” 

“Pursuant to contract and applicable law, AllHere is not authorized to store student data outside the United States without prior written consent from the District,” the statement continued. “Any student data belonging to the District and residing in the Ed platform will continue to be subject to the same privacy and data security protections, regardless of what happens to AllHere as a company.” 

A district spokesperson, in response to earlier questioning from The 74 last week, said it was informed that Smith-Griffin was no longer with the company and that several businesses “are interested in acquiring AllHere.” Meanwhile Ed, the spokesperson said, “belongs to Los Angeles Unified and is for Los Angeles Unified.”

Officials in the inspector general’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment. The state education department “does not directly oversee the use of AI programs in schools or have the authority to decide which programs a district can utilize,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

It’s a radical turn of events for AllHere and the AI tool it markets as a “learning acceleration platform,” which were all the buzz just a few months ago. In April, Time Magazine education technology companies. That same month, Inc. Magazine dubbed Smith-Griffin in artificial intelligence in its Female Founders 250 list. 

Joanna Smith-Griffin, Founder and CEO of AllHere, joins on stage as he delivers the keynote at on Unlocking the Potential of AI. With Ed, students receive personalized support to help them excel in school.

— allherek12 (@allherek12)

Ed has been similarly blessed with celebrity treatment. 

“He’s going to talk to you in 100 different languages, he’s going to connect with you, he’s going to fall in love with you,” Carvalho said at ASU+GSV. “Hopefully you’ll love it, and in the process we are transforming a school system of 540,000 students into 540,000 ‘schools of one’ through absolute personalization and individualization.”

Smith-Griffin, who graduated from the Miami school district that Carvalho once led before going onto Harvard, couldn’t be reached for comment. Smith-Griffin’s LinkedIn page was recently deactivated and parts of the company website have gone dark. Attempts to reach AllHere were also unsuccessful.

‘The product worked, right, but it worked by cheating’

Smith-Griffin, a former Boston charter school teacher and family engagement director, founded AllHere in 2016. Since then, the company has primarily provided schools with a text messaging system that facilitates communication between parents and educators. , the tool relies on attendance data and other information to deliver customized, text-based “nudges.” 

The work that AllHere provided the Los Angeles school district, Whiteley said, was on a whole different level — and the company wasn’t prepared to meet the demand and lacked expertise in data security. In L.A., AllHere operated as a consultant rather than a tech firm that was building its own product, according to its contract with LAUSD obtained by The 74. Ultimately, the district retained rights to the chatbot, according to the agreement, but AllHere was contractually obligated to “comply with the district information security policies.” 

 The contract notes that the chatbot would be “trained to detect any confidential or sensitive information” and to discourage parents and students from sharing with it any personal details. But the chatbot’s decision to share and process students’ individual information, Whiteley said, was outside of families’ control. 

In order to provide individualized prompts on details like student attendance and demographics, the tool connects to several data sources, according to the contract, including , an online tool used to track students’ special education services. The document notes that Ed also interfaces with the stored on , a cloud storage company. , the Whole Child platform serves as a central repository for LAUSD student data to help educators monitor students’ progress and personalize instruction. 

Whiteley told officials the app included students’ personally identifiable information in all chatbot prompts, even in those where the data weren’t relevant. Prompts containing students’ personal information were also shared with other third-party companies unnecessarily, Whiteley alleges, and were processed on offshore servers. Seven out of eight Ed chatbot requests, he said, are sent to places like Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Australia and Canada. 

Taken together, he argued the company’s practices ran afoul of data minimization principles, a standard cybersecurity practice that maintains that apps should collect and process the least amount of personal information necessary to accomplish a specific task. Playing fast and loose with the data, he said, unnecessarily exposed students’ information to potential cyberattacks and data breaches and, in cases where the data were processed overseas, could subject it to foreign governments’ data access and surveillance rules. 

Chatbot source code that Whiteley shared with The 74 outlines how prompts are processed on foreign servers by a Microsoft AI service that integrates with ChatGPT. The LAUSD chatbot is directed to serve as a “friendly, concise customer support agent” that replies “using simple language a third grader could understand.” When querying the simple prompt “Hello,” the chatbot provided the student’s grades, progress toward graduation and other personal information. 

AllHere’s critical flaw, Whiteley said, is that senior executives “didn’t understand how to protect data.” 

“The issue is we’re sending data overseas, we’re sending too much data, and then the data were being logged by third parties,” he said, in violation of the district’s data use agreement. “The product worked, right, but it worked by cheating. It cheated by not doing things right the first time.”

In a 2017 policy bulletin, the district notes that all sensitive information “needs to be handled in a secure way that protects privacy,” and that contractors cannot disclose information to other parties without parental consent. A second policy bulletin, from April, outlines the district’s authorized use guidelines for artificial intelligence, which notes that officials, “Shall not share any confidential, sensitive, privileged or private information when using, prompting or communicating with any tools.” It’s important to refrain from using sensitive information in prompts, the policy notes, because AI tools “take whatever users enter into a prompt and incorporate it into their systems/knowledge base for other users.” 

“Well, that’s what AllHere was doing,” Whiteley said. 

‘Acid is dangerous’

Whiteley’s revelations present LAUSD with its third student data security debacle in the last month. In mid-June, a threat actor known as “Sp1d3r” began to sell for $150,000 a trove of data it claimed to have stolen from the Los Angeles district on Breach Forums, a dark web marketplace. LAUSD Bloomberg that the compromised data had been stored by one of its third-party vendors on the cloud storage company Snowflake, the repository for the district’s Whole Child Integrated Data. The Snowflake data breach may be one of the largest in history. The threat actor claims that the L.A. schools data in its possession include student medical records, disability information, disciplinary details and parent login credentials. 

The chatbot interacted with data stored by Snowflake, according to the district’s contract with AllHere, though any connection between AllHere and the Snowflake data breach is unknown. 

In its statement Friday, the district spokesperson said an ongoing investigation has “revealed no connection between AllHere or the Ed platform and the Snowflake incident.” The spokesperson said there was no “direct integration” between Whole Child and AllHere and that Whole Child data was processed internally before being directed to AllHere.

The contract between AllHere and the district, however, notes that the tool should “seamlessly integrate” with the Whole Child Integrated Data “to receive updated student data regarding attendance, student grades, student testing data, parent contact information and demographics.”

Earlier in the month, a second threat actor known as Satanic Cloud claimed it had access to tens of thousands of L.A. students’ sensitive information and had posted it for sale on Breach Forums for $1,000. In 2022, the district was victim to a massive ransomware attack that exposed reams of sensitive data, including thousands of students’ psychological evaluations, to the dark web. 

With AllHere’s fate uncertain, Whiteley blasted the company’s leadership and protocols.

“Personally identifiable information should be considered acid in a company and you should only touch it if you have to because acid is dangerous,” he told The 74. “The errors that were made were so egregious around PII, you should not be in education if you don’t think PII is acid.” 

L.A. parents and students, we want to hear from you.  using AllHere’s Ed:

Updated March 13

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Oklahoma has ruled Nex Benedict’s death a suicide caused by a combination of antihistamines and an antidepressant. A full toxicology report is expected by the end of the month. 

Updated Feb. 27

More than 350 civil rights groups, LGBTQ advocates and high-profile figures are of Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters and calling for a U.S. Department of Education investigation into the Feb. 8 death of a transgender student following an altercation in a school bathroom. The organization coordinating the push, the Human Rights Campaign, had previously called for a . 

“Long before Nex Benedict’s tragic death, Superintendent Walters’s troubling history of transphobic and racist behavior consistently put Oklahoma’s students, staff and teachers at risk,” Kelley Robinson, the group’s president, said in a statement. “Now, his callous response to Nex’s death makes it clearer than ever that he is unfit for the role — and is in fact a danger to Oklahoma’s youth.”

Oklahoma’s Rainbow Youth Project said it had received nearly 1,000 calls from LGBT youth experiencing mental health crises — almost all of them in the last week, after national news outlets reported Nex’s death. The organization pointed out that the number of such contacts has mushroomed in the months since Walters circulated and other claiming transgender students pose a danger to schools. In a statement following a groundswell of national attention to Nex’s death, Walters accused the “radical left” of . 

Owasso, Oklahoma, police officials had said preliminary autopsy reports found the 16-year-old’s death was not the result of “trauma” but later they did not mean to suggest that the fight, which happened , was not the cause.

On Feb. 7, a 16-year-old nonbinary student at Owasso High School in Oklahoma was involved in an altercation in a girls’ bathroom. On Feb. 8, Nex Benedict, who used they/them pronouns and whose family claims roots in the Choctaw Nation, was pronounced dead at a local hospital. 

Nearly two weeks later, after a flurry of social media posts from small LGBTQ publications, the U.S. edition of The Independent with Sue Benedict, Nex’s mother, who said Nex had endured months of bullying at school over their gender identity. Benedict said Nex told her they and another transgender student had been in a fight in the bathroom with three older girls and that Nex hit their head on the floor. 

Within 24 hours of the interview’s publication, numerous news outlets had begun sifting through an avalanche of often contradictory statements from school officials, law enforcement and the Benedicts’ friends and neighbors.

While the facts will likely take a long time to establish, advocates say one thing is clear: The legislative assault on LGBTQ rights in Oklahoma over the last two years — including the 2022 passage of a bathroom bill that forced Nex into a space considered unsafe for trans youth — has left students to fend for themselves in schools that feel increasingly hostile. 

Benedict said she was called to the school the afternoon of Feb. 7 and told that Nex had been suspended for two weeks. There were visible bruises and scratches on the teen’s face and head. Benedict drove to a hospital, where she asked for help filing a police report. The school should have called both an ambulance and the police, she said.  

In issued after the news story’s appearance, the Owasso Public Schools said Nex had been examined by the school nurse and that Benedict had been advised to have them examined at a medical facility. The other students did not need care. District policy is to inform parents of students involved in fights that they have the option of filing a police report, the statement added.

Officials with the Owasso Police Department this week said preliminary autopsy results showed Nex did not die as a result of “trauma,” in a search warrant filed Wednesday that they “suspect foul play.” A police spokesperson that the department had video from a camera in the school hallway showing Nex before and after the incident. There was no word at the time of publication about what the video showed.

On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona decried the incident on social media, calling for safer schools.  

I can’t put into words the grief that I feel for Nex, their family, and their community. As an educator and father, I’m devastated. Violence has no place in school. It is our responsibility to protect all students by creating spaces where they feel safe to be their true selves.

— Secretary Miguel Cardona (@SecCardona)

The teen’s death is the latest in a string of incidents in Oklahoma, which over the last two years has enacted at least four laws restricting the rights of LGBTQ youth. The 2022 bathroom law requires students to use the restroom that corresponds to the sex they were assigned at birth, mandates that schools discipline those who don’t comply and reduces state funding by 5% the following fiscal year for any district that does not impose consequences. 

In 2022, Chaya Raichik, who runs the far-right X account Libs of TikTok, posted a video of one of Nex’s teachers expressing support for LGBTQ students. “If your parents don’t love and accept you for who you are this Christmas, f***,” former eighth-grade teacher Tyler Wrynn said in his own TikTok post. “I’m your parents now. I’m proud of you.” The teacher after his post became a flashpoint because of its pro-LGBTQ stance. 

In August, Superintendent of Education Ryan Walters came under criticism for about a Tulsa librarian that was blamed for a bomb threat against the elementary school where she worked. Last month, he appointed Raichik to a state committee tasked with screening school library materials for “pornographic” and “woke” content — a move he said was part of an effort to “make schools safer.” Raichik this week accused “” of politicizing Nex’s death.

According to the Williams Institute at UCLA, there are about 2,000 transgender youth in Oklahoma. 

Whether exactly what transpired in the Owasso High School bathroom may never be determined, Nex’s death has fueled the ongoing debate over the impact a wave of “hostile” laws has had on queer students’ safety and schools’ willingness or ability to protect them, says Cait Smith, the director of LGBTQI+ policy at the Center for American Progress. Of the 667 bills introduced throughout the country in 2023 seeking to curtail rights based on sexual orientation or gender identity, 63% specifically targeted young people, she says. 

“There is a larger concern here, a larger trend that we have to be talking about,” says Smith. “We often call these hostile school climate bills. Schools in states where they have these laws passing [are] having to deal with policies that make it harder for them to create schools that are safe and affirming — let alone schools that allow students to thrive and feel comfortable enough to love school and do well at school.”

Though the U.S. Supreme Court in 2021 declined to that found students are entitled to use the restroom that matches their identity, trans bathroom use has continued to face challenges in legislatures and courts. At least seven bills restricting trans bathroom access passed last year, Smith says. Five of them were school-specific.

Supporters of bathroom bans say they are needed to protect cisgender girls and women from assault by trans people. 

LGBTQ students’ fears of poorly monitored school spaces such as locker rooms, stairwells and lunchrooms predate the current ideological firestorm. In a survey of LGBTQ youth experiences conducted in 2021 — just as the wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation was beginning to sweep statehouses — the advocacy group GLSEN found that 68% of queer students felt unsafe at school. Bathrooms topped the list of places they avoid, with 45% saying they feared using the restroom. 

The has linked a lack of bathroom access to increased mental and physical health issues among transgender youth and adults. Nearly 6 in 10 avoid using public restrooms out of fear, and 14% say they have been assaulted in bathrooms.

, the number of students who reported hearing negative remarks from teachers about sexual orientation doubled between 2019 and 2021, to 69%. The number who said they heard pejorative comments from adults about trans people rose from 46% to 80% during the same time period. Only 1% reported not hearing slurs from classmates.

Fourteen percent reported being physically assaulted in school because of their sexual orientation and 13% over their gender expression. More than half said they did not report the harassment or violence to school administrators, whom only 16% of LGBTQ students perceive as supportive. Only 6% believe their school’s anti-bullying policies include sexual orientation and gender identity. 

The ACLU of Oklahoma has and four school districts, charging the bathroom law is discriminatory and violates students’ educational rights. The case is pending in federal court. 

The board unanimously voiced support for the , a citizen-led initiative that will appear on the ballot March 5 requiring the city to create over 2,500 miles of street improvements. 

The updates are outlined in the city’s , laying out specific guidelines for street and transit improvements to be completed by 2035 — including protected bike lanes, bus-only lanes, safer crosswalks, new street lighting and wider sidewalks. 

But since the Mobility Plan was adopted, the initiative is only about complete, which activists say is not fast enough. The measure would make sure these improvements outlined in the Mobility Plan — actually get completed by 2035. 

“Our kids can’t afford to continue to wait years for the improvements that would make our streets safer and more walkable for them and their families,” said LAUSD school board member Kelly Gonez. “If the measure were approved by voters, we would make significant progress in achieving safer, greener and more walkable streets that our children and families deserve.”

The measure calls for the construction of various enhancements each time the city repaves at least one-eighth of a mile of a street. It would also require the city to create a tracking webpage that allows residents to view the progress of the Mobility Plan and see where and when improvements are being made.

Michael Schneider, the founder of , has been working for years to get the enforcement plan in place after seeing the city fail to efficiently implement the Mobility Plan.

“It’s supposed to be a 20-year plan, and they’ve turned it into a 160-year plan at our current pace,” Schneider said. “That’s just not acceptable, especially when more and more people are dying every year.”

Schneider’s organization created the measure and collected over 100,000 signatures in 2022 so it could get on the ballot this year.

Among improvements that would increase safety for bicyclists, pedestrians and drivers, Schneider, a father of three, also explained how it can keep children safe on their way to school.

“Crashes are going to happen,” Schneider said. “But the problem is when the cars are going about 20 or 25 miles an hour — that’s when they start to turn deadly. If we slow cars down through changes in the environment and make them pay more attention when they’re driving, it would make a huge impact on road safety, including around schools.” 

Board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin referenced students who have been on their way to school, including one fatal crash involving a student from last year.

“While we have a lot of urgent issues in this city, nothing is more important than the safety of our children,” Franklin.  

The measure will also give LA residents the power to sue the city if it fails to comply with the requirements.

Schneider also emphasized that the measure is coming at a time of increased risk and dangerous streets.

On Jan. 24, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) released the end-of-the-year on crime statistics, which shows a significant increase in traffic fatalities, fatal hit-and-runs and fatal pedestrian and bicyclist collisions in 2023.

For the first time in nine years, LA saw more deaths from traffic crashes than homicides. There were 336 fatal traffic crashes and 327 homicides in 2023, LAPD officials .

From 2022 to 2023, felony hit-and-runs in LA increased 23% while DUI crashes increased 32%. Additionally, fatal crashes involving pedestrians increased by nearly 13% from 2022 to 2023.

“When I was collecting signatures, one of the biggest questions we would get from voters is: ‘I don’t understand. The city already adopted this plan. Why is this needed?’” Schneider said. “But they’re just not getting it done. That’s why this is needed.”

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., was the latest act in a bipartisan effort to bolster federal regulations on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok amid a growing chorus of parents and adolescent mental health experts warning the services have harmed youth well-being and, in some cases, pushed them to suicide. 

In an unprecedented moment, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, at the urging of Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, stood up and turned around to face the audience, apologizing to the parents in attendance who said their children were damaged — and in some cases, died — because of his company’s algorithms. 

“I’m sorry for everything you’ve all gone through,” said Zuckerberg, whose company owns Facebook and Instagram. “It’s terrible. No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered.”

Senators argued the companies — and tech executives themselves — should be held legally responsible for instances of abuse and exploitation under tougher regulations that would limit children’s access to social media platforms and restrict their exposure to harmful content.

“Your platforms really suck at policing themselves,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, told Zuckerberg and the CEOs of X, TikTok, Discord and Snap, who were summoned to testify. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which allows social media platforms to moderate content as they see fit and generally provides immunity from liability for user-generated posts, has routinely shielded tech companies from accountability. As youth harms persist, he said those legal protections are “a very significant part of that problem.” 

Whitehouse pointed to a lawsuit against X, formerly Twitter, that was filed by two men who claimed a sex trafficker manipulated them into sharing sexually explicit videos of themselves over Snapchat when they were just 13 years old. Links to the videos appeared on Twitter years later, but the company allegedly refused to take action until after they were contacted by a Department of Homeland Security agent and the posts had generated more than 160,000 views. The by the Ninth Circuit, which cited Section 230. 

“That’s a pretty foul set of facts,” Whitehouse said. “There is nothing about that set of facts that tells me Section 230 performed any public service in that regard.”

In an opening statement, Democratic committee chair, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, offered a chilling description of the harms inflicted on young people by each of the social media platforms represented at the hearing. In addition to Zuckerberg, executives who testified were X CEO Linda Yaccarino, TikTok CEO Shou Chew, Snap co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel and Discord CEO Jason Citron.

“Discord has been used to groom, abduct and abuse children,” Durbin said. “Meta’s Instagram helped connect and promote a network of pedophiles. Snapchat’s disappearing messages have been co-opted by criminals who financially extort young victims. TikTok has become a, quote, ‘platform of choice’ for predators to access, engage and groom children for abuse. And the prevalance of [child sexual abuse material] on X has grown as the company has gutted its trust and safety workforce.” 

Citron testified that Discord has “a zero tolerance policy” for content that features sexual exploitation and that it uses filters to scan and block such materials from its service. 

“Just like all technology and tools, there are people who exploit and abuse our platforms for immoral and illegal purposes,” Citron said. “All of us here on the panel today, and throughout the tech industry, have a solemn and urgent responsibility to ensure that everyone who uses our platforms is protected from these criminals both online and off.” 

Lawmakers have introduced a slate of regulatory bills that have gained bipartisan traction but have failed to become law. Among them is the Kids Online Safety Act, which would require social media companies and other online services to take “reasonable measures” to protect children from cyberbullying, sexual exploitation and materials that promote self-harm. It would also mandate strict privacy settings when teens use the online services. Other proposals would to report suspected drug activity to the police — some parents said their children overdosed and died after buying drugs on the platforms — and a bill that would hold them accountable for hosting child sexual abuse materials. 

In their testimonies, each of the tech executives said they have taken steps to protect children who use their services, including features that restrict certain types of content, limit screen time and curtail the people they’re allowed to communicate with. But they also sought to distance their services from harms in a bid to stave off regulations. 

“With so much of our lives spent on mobile devices and social media, it’s important to look into the effects on teen mental health and well-being,” Zuckerberg said. “I take this very seriously. Mental health is a complex issue, and the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes.” 

Zuckerberg by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which concluded there is a lack of evidence to confirm that social media causes changes in adolescent well-being at the population level and that the services could carry both benefits and harms for young people. While social media websites can expose children to online harassment and fringe ideas, researchers noted, the services can be used by young people to foster community. 

In October, 42 state attorneys general , alleging that the social media giant knowingly and purposely designed tools to addict children to its services. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warning that social media sites pose a “profound risk of harm” to youth mental health, stating that the tools should come with warning labels. Among evidence of the harms is which found that Instagram led to body-image issues among teenage girls and that many of its young users blamed the platform for increases in anxiety and depression. 

Republican lawmakers devoted a significant amount of time during the hearing to criticizing TikTok for its ties to the Chinese government, calling out the app for collecting data about U.S. citizens, including in an effort to surveil American journalists. The Justice Department is reportedly investigating allegations that ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, used the app to surveil several American journalists who report on the tech industry. 

In response, Chew said the company launched an initiative — dubbed “Project Texas” — to prevent its Chinese employees from accessing personal data about U.S. citizens. But employees claim the company has . 

YouTube and TikTok are by far the platforms where teens spend the most hours per day, according to a 2023 Gallup survey although Neal Mohan, the CEO of Google-owned YouTube, was not called in to testify.

Mainstream social media platforms have also been exploited for domestic online extremism. Earlier this month, for example, a teenager accused of carrying out a mass shooting at his Iowa high school reportedly maintained an active presence on Discord and, shortly before the rampage, commented in a channel dedicated to such attacks that he was “gearing up” for the mayhem. Just minutes before the shooting, the suspect appeared to capture a video inside a school bathroom and uploaded it to TikTok. 

Josh Golin, the executive director of Fairplay, a nonprofit devoted to bolstering online child protections, blasted the tech executives’ testimony for being little more than “evasions and deflections.” 

“If Congress really cares about the families who packed the hearing today holding pictures of their children lost to social media harms, they will move the Kids Online Safety Act,” Golin said in a statement. “Pointed questions and sound bites won’t save lives, but KOSA will.” 

The safety act, known as KOSA, has faced pushback from civil rights advocates on First Amendment grounds, arguing the proposal could be used to censor certain content and . Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee and KOSA co-author, said last fall the rules are important to protect “minor children from the transgender in this culture” and cited the legislation as a way to shield children from “being indoctrinated” online. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, endorsed the legislation, that “keeping trans content away from children is protecting kids.” 

Snap’s Evan Spiegel and X’s Linda Yaccarino both agreed to support the Kids Online Safety Act.

Aliya Bhatia, a policy analyst with the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, said that although lawmakers made clear their intention to act, their directives could end up doing more harm than good. She said the platforms serve as “peer-to-peer learning and community networks” where young people can access information about reproductive health and other important topics that they might not feel comfortable receiving from adults in their lives. 

“It’s clear that this is a really tricky issue, it’s really difficult for the government and companies to decide what is harmful for young people,” Bhatia said. “What one young person finds helpful online, another might find harmful.”

South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsey Graham, the committee’s ranking Republican, said that social media companies can’t be trusted to keep kids safe online and that lawmakers have run out of patience.

“If you’re waiting on these guys to solve the problem,” he said, “we’re going to die waiting.” 

, the coalition expressed concerns that AI-enabled student monitoring tools could foster discrimination against marginalized groups, including LGBTQ+ youth and students with disabilities. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights should issue guidance on the appropriate uses of emerging classroom technologies, the lawmakers wrote, and crack down on practices that run afoul of existing federal anti-discrimination laws. 

“While the expansion of educational technology helped facilitate remote learning that was critical to students, parents and teachers during the pandemic,” the lawmakers wrote, “these technologies have also amplified student harms.” 

Lawmakers asked the Education Department’s civil rights office whether it has received complaints alleging discrimination facilitated by education technology software and whether it has taken any enforcement action related to potential civil rights violations. 

The letter comes in response to a recent national survey of educators, parents and students, the findings of which suggest that schools’ use of digital tools to monitor children online have based on their race, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity. The survey, conducted by the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, found that while activity monitoring has become ubiquitous in schools and is intended to keep students safe, it’s used regularly as a discipline tool and routinely brings youth into contact with the police.

Findings from the CDT survey, lawmakers wrote, “raise serious concerns about the application of civil rights laws to schools’ use of these technologies.” Letter signatories include Democratic Reps. Lori Trahan of Massachusetts, Sara Jacobs of California, Hank Johnson of Georgia, Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey and Adam Schiff of California. Trahan, who serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Innovation, Data and Commerce Subcommittee, has previously called for tighter student data privacy protections in the ed tech sector. 

The monitoring tools, such as those offered by for-profit companies GoGuardian and Gaggle, rely on artificial intelligence to sift through students’ online activities and flag school administrators — and sometimes the police — when they discover materials related to sex, drugs, violence or self-harm. 

Two-thirds of teachers reported that a student at their school was disciplined as a result of activity monitoring and a third said they know a student who was contacted by the police because of an alert generated by the software. 

Children with disabilities were more likely than their peers to report being watched, and special education teachers reported heightened rates of discipline as a result of activity monitoring. The findings, researchers argue, that entitle children with disabilities equal access to an education. Even beyond the technologies, students with disabilities are subjected to disproportionate levels of school discipline, including restraint and seclusion, when compared to their general education peers. 

Half of all students said their schools responded fairly to alerts generated by monitoring software, a sentiment shared by just 36% of LGBTQ+ youth. In fact, LGBTQ+ youth were more likely than their straight and cisgender peers to report that they or someone they know was disciplined as a result of monitoring. And nearly a third of LGBTQ+ youth reported that they or someone they know was outed because of the technology. 

More than a third of teachers said their school monitors students’ online behaviors outside of school hours — and sometimes on their personal devices. 

In a similar student survey, released this month by the American Civil Liberties Union, a majority of respondents expressed worries that the monitoring tools — despite being designed to keep them safe — could actually cause harm and a third said they “always feel” like they’re being watched. 

The 74 has reported extensively on schools’ use of digital surveillance tools to monitor students’ online behaviors, and the tools’ implications for youth civil rights. The company Gaggle previously flagged to administrators student communications that referenced LGBTQ+ keywords like “gay” and “lesbian.” The company says it halted the practice last year in the wake of pushback from civil rights activists. 

Given the survey findings, the lawmakers urged the Education Department to clarify “how educators can fulfill their civil rights obligations” as they develop policies related to artificial intelligence, whose rapidly evolving role in education more broadly — including students’ use of tools like ChatGPT — has become a topic of debate. 

“This research is particularly concerning due to linkages between school disciplinary policies and incarceration rates of our nation’s youth,” the coalition wrote, adding concerns that the tools can create hostile learning environments. 

Half of teachers say they know a student at their school who was disciplined or faced negative consequences for using — or being accused of using — generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT to complete a classroom assignment, , a nonprofit think tank focused on digital rights and expression. The proportion was even higher, at 58%, for those who teach special education. 

Cheating concerns were clear, with survey results showing that teachers have grown suspicious of their students. Nearly two-thirds of teachers said that generative AI has made them “more distrustful” of students and 90% said they suspect kids are using the tools to complete assignments. Yet students themselves who completed the anonymous survey said they rarely use ChatGPT to cheat, but are turning to it for help with personal problems.

“The difference between the hype cycle of what people are talking about with generative AI and what students are actually doing, there seems to be a pretty big difference,” said Elizabeth Laird, the group’s director of equity in civic technology. “And one that, I think, can create an unnecessarily adversarial relationship between teachers and students.”   

Indeed, 58% of students, and 72% of those in special education, said they’ve used generative AI during the 2022-23 academic year, just not primarily for the reasons that teachers fear most. Among youth who completed the nationally representative survey, just 23% said they used it for academic purposes and 19% said they’ve used the tools to help them write and submit a paper. Instead, 29% reported having used it to deal with anxiety or mental health issues, 22% for issues with friends and 16% for family conflicts.

Part of the disconnect dividing teachers and students, researchers found, may come down to gray areas. Just 40% of parents said they or their child were given guidance on ways they can use generative AI without running afoul of school rules. Only 24% of teachers say they’ve been trained on how to respond if they suspect a student used generative AI to cheat. 

The results on ChatGPT’s educational impacts were included in the Center for Democracy and Technology’s broader annual survey analyzing the privacy and civil rights concerns of teachers, students and parents as tech, including artificial intelligence, becomes increasingly engrained in classroom instruction. Beyond generative AI, researchers observed a sharp uptick in digital privacy concerns among students and parents over last year. 

Among parents, 73% said they’re concerned about the privacy and security of student data collected and stored by schools, a considerable increase from the 61% who expressed those reservations last year. A similar if less dramatic trend was apparent among students: 62% had data privacy concerns tied to their schools, compared with 57% just a year earlier. 

Those rising levels of anxiety, researchers theorized, are likely the result of the growing frequency of cyberattacks on schools, which have become a primary target for ransomware gangs. High-profile breaches, including in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, have compromised a massive trove of highly sensitive student records. Exposed records, investigative reporting by The 74 has found, include student psychological evaluations, reports detailing campus rape cases, student disciplinary records, closely guarded files on campus security, employees’ financial records and copies of government-issued identification cards. 

Survey results found that students in special education, whose records are among the most sensitive that districts maintain, and their parents were significantly more likely than the general education population to report school data privacy and security concerns. As attacks ratchet up, 1 in 5 parents say they’ve been notified that their child’s school experienced a data breach. Such breach notices, Laird said, led to heightened apprehension. 

“There’s not a lot of transparency” about school cybersecurity incidents “because there’s not an affirmative reporting requirement for schools,” Laird said. But in instances where parents are notified of breaches, “they are more concerned than other parents about student privacy.” 

Parents and students have also grown increasingly wary of another set of education tools that rely on artificial intelligence: digital surveillance technology. Among them are student activity monitoring tools, such as those offered by the for-profit companies Gaggle and GoGuardian, which rely on algorithms in an effort to keep students safe. The surveillance software employs artificial intelligence to sift through students’ online activities and flag school administrators — and sometimes the police — when they discover materials related to sex, drugs, violence or self-harm. 

Among parents surveyed this year, 55% said they believe the benefits of activity monitoring outweigh the potential harms, down from 63% last year. Among students, 52% said they’re comfortable with academic activity monitoring, a decline from 63% last year. 

Such digital surveillance, researchers found, frequently has disparate impacts on students based on their race, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity, potentially violating longstanding federal civil rights laws. 

The tools also extend far beyond the school realm, with 40% of teachers reporting their schools monitor students’ personal devices. More than a third of teachers say they know a student who was contacted by the police because of online monitoring, the survey found, and Black parents were significantly more likely than their white counterparts to fear that information gleaned from online monitoring tools and AI-equipped campus surveillance cameras could fall into the hands of law enforcement. 

Meanwhile, as states nationwide pull literature from school library shelves amid a conservative crusade against LGBTQ+ rights, the nonprofit argues that digital tools that filter and block certain online content “can amount to a digital book ban.” Nearly three-quarters of students — and disproportionately LGBTQ+ youth — said that web filtering tools have prevented them from completing school assignments. 

The nonprofit highlights how disproportionalities identified in the survey could run counter to federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on race and sex, and those designed to ensure equal access to education for children with disabilities. In a letter sent Wednesday to the White House and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, the Center for Democracy and Technology was joined by a coalition of civil rights groups urging federal officials to take a harder tack on ed tech practices that could threaten students’ civil rights. 

“Existing civil rights laws already make schools legally responsible for their own conduct, and that of the companies acting at their direction in preventing discriminatory outcomes on the basis of race, sex and disability,” the coalition wrote. “The department has long been responsible for holding schools accountable to these standards.”

Outraged at the new Black history standards in Florida, Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday blasted what she called revisionist history promoted in the state’s African American history standards approved this week by top education officials.

Just two days after the the standards, Harris told the crowd in Jacksonville at the Ritz Theater and Museum that Florida’s book bans, LGBTQ+ rights restrictions, and Black history revisions are part of a national right-wing agenda.

“Adults know what slavery really involved. It involved rape; it involved torture; it involved taking a baby from their mother; it involved some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world; it involved subjecting people to think of themselves and be thought of as less than humans,” Harris said.

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“So, in the context of that, how is it that anyone could suggest that, in the midst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?”

Harris continued: “And so, let us be clear: Teachers want to teach the truth. Teachers want to teach facts. And teachers dedicate themselves to some of the most noble work any human being could take on: to teach other people’s children — for the sake of the future of our nation.

“And so, they should not then be told by politicians that they should be teaching revisionist history in order to keep their jobs. What is going on?”

Critics of the first stand-alone say they largely limit elementary school instruction to identifying famous Black people. At the middle school level, the standards describes slavery as personally beneficial in instances where the enslaved learned skills. High schoolers will learn that the 1920 Ocoee Massacre involved violence against and by African Americans.

Extremist leaders

While Gov. Ron DeSantis didn’t address any of the specific criticisms against the standards, he took to his campaign Twitter account to ahead of her arrival.

“Democrats like Kamala Harris have to lie about Florida’s educational standards to cover for their agenda of indoctrinating students and pushing sexual topics onto children,” the governor wrote. “Florida stands in their way and we will continue to expose their agenda and their lies. The Harris-Biden administration is obsessed with Florida … yet they ignore the chaos at the border, crime-infested cities, economic malaise, and the military recruitment crisis.”

Aside from criticizing the standards, the vice president called out the state government’s lack of action against gun violence. Instead of wanting to arm teachers, leaders should be promoting gun safety, she said.

Ultimately, Harris characterized extremist leaders as figures fomenting culture wars meant to divide Americans.

“Let’s not fall in that trap,” she said. “We will stand united as a country. We know our collective history; it is our shared history. We are all in this together.

“We know that we will rise and fall together as a nation. We will not allow them to suggest anything other than what we know: The vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us.”

The whole story

For now, members of the work group that developed the African American history standards are focused on explaining how they concluded that Black people benefitted from slavery because they learned skills. A spokesperson from the Florida Department of Education published a statement on Thursday from two members of the work group, citing people like John Chavis and Booker T. Washington as examples of slaves who developed trades from which they benefitted.

“Any attempt to reduce slaves to just victims of oppression fails to recognize their strength, courage, and resiliency during a difficult time in American history,” according to a statement by William Allen and Frances Presley Rice who helped develop the standards. “Florida students deserve to learn how slaves took advantage of whatever circumstances they were in to benefit themselves and the community of African descendants.”

Allen and Rice added: “It is disappointing, but nevertheless unsurprising, that critics would reduce months of work to create Florida’s first ever stand-alone strand of African American History Standards to a few isolated expressions without context.”

Even so, the work group’s statement didn’t tackle the backlash against other aspects of the standards.

Black lawmakers speak out

This teaching of the 1920 Ocoee Massacre is more personal for Orange County State Sen. Geraldine Thompson. In 2020, she helped champion a bill to add the massacre to Florida’s K-12 education curriculum. She spoke out against the standards during the Wednesday meeting.

“When you look at the history, currently it suggests that the [Ocoee] massacre was sparked by violence from African Americans,” she wrote in a statement on Friday. “That’s blaming the victim, when in fact it was other individuals who came into the Black Community cand killed individuals and burned homes, schools, lodges, etc. So we want to tell the whole story.”

Other politicians such as State Rep. Dianne Hart from Hillsborough County commended Harris for her visit. Hart is the chair of the Florida Legislative Black Caucus.

“It is unfortunate that Florida has become the leader in all the wrong areas, and this new attempt to continue to diminish the importance of African-American history, and to present our students with a lack-luster version of the truth is evidence to that fact,” she wrote in a statement. “As chair of the Black Caucus, we have made this a priority issue and we will continue to advocate for truth, for facts, and for age-appropriate curriculum.”

There has been no shortage of criticism toward the standards, but no concrete actions have been announced. Though, State Sen. Bobby Powell of West Palm Beach said the “so-called” standards needed to be thrown out.

“When the dogs and the water cannons, the police batons, and the lynching mobs were let loose on these former African American slaves, was that for their ‘personal benefit’ as well? He wrote. “These so-called standards need to be thrown out immediately, and a full and honest examination of what’s really driving this one-sided agenda needs to begin.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on and .

In the aftermath of horrific school shootings across the country, schools have instituted a range of security measures. Diane Tavenner and Michael Horn argue that these steps likely have a cost in eroding mental health, which may further contribute to violence in schools and society. The point isn’t that schools shouldn’t “harden” per se, but that these steps are design decisions — and that schools must be more intentional about the ones they make, and why.

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Hey, Michael.

Horn: Hey, Diane. I am thrilled to actually be sitting across from you and getting to record this in person in California. We get to record podcasts like this maybe once or twice a year, so I relish these opportunities.

Tavenner: As do I, Michael. I don’t ever want to take being in person for granted again. I’m really sitting literally with being here together for this conversation. The technology that enables us to connect every week throughout the pandemic and beyond is really amazing, and there is nothing like being in person. Three years after the start of that pandemic, things feel like they’re really speeding back up again. I don’t want my appreciation to fade.

Horn: I’m with you on that. Of course, we started this podcast virtually because of the pandemic. We thought if we could engage in dialogue with each other, we could help show some folks some ways to think differently about school in the wake of the pandemic and to use that as an opportunity to create schooling environments that really allow all individuals to be successful and, to use your words of your book, leave prepared for this increasingly complex world.

Now, as the audience is going to hear in a moment, the topic that you’ve brought for us today is a fraught one, and there may be no better topic to illustrate just how complex that world is, and, and here’s the and, how much our society would benefit from rethinking how we restructure our schools given these challenges.

Tavenner: Michael, as you know, I’ve felt compelled for some time to talk about what is happening to schools in response to tragic mass shootings. I do say “to” schools, I think. To be clear, I don’t want to talk about the incidents themselves. I don’t have anything to offer that others haven’t already, but it feels important to discuss the impact on our schools and our communities and everyone who is surviving. And yet, I hesitate because the tragedy is so great and, as I suspect everyone realizes, far from over.

Horn: Look, I don’t know that I have much to add to that either. The messages of grief over Twitter or email, they frankly seem so empty compared to the magnitude of the loss that these families and communities are going through. Obviously as a dad of two elementary school kids, every single time you read one of these mass shootings in schools, it’s just literally earth-shattering. I know not only is the tragedies on your mind, Diane, but how we cope with that tragedy and frankly what we choose to do coming out of it.

Tavenner: The key word there, Michael, is “choose.” What’s bothering me is how we react to these tragedies. In our polarized society, the conversation that flares up each time there’s a shooting surprisingly starts from I think a place of alignment in this time when it feels like nothing is aligned. But look, people believe that children should be safe in school. Everyone believes that. That no parent should send their child to school and have them never return because they’d fallen victim to gun violence in their classroom. This alignment exists, but it quickly disappears with the discussion of how to ensure the safety of our children and teachers at school.

In general, on the one side, we have people who believe guns are the problem and we need to legislatively restrict access to them. On the other side, we have people who believe that people are the problem, specifically those committing these horrible acts, and they believe we need to do more to stop such people. That might be an oversimplification of the positions on this, but it’s not the thing I really want to talk about today. What I want to focus on is what is actually happening in schools while this debate is raging and remains for the most part unresolved and unaddressed, at least at the policy level.

Horn: And from our perspective, that seems like a conversation that you and I can actually have an impact on. I agree with the direction. We’re not going to get into what laws and actions society, broadly speaking, should put into action in this conversation. But suffice to say, I think that the evidence suggests the issue has not been addressed. Although it’s often observed that children are still largely safe in schools relative to other parts of society, all we need to do is also look at that data on the number and frequency of attacks to see that there’s a problem with these incidents rising across much of the nation.

What struck me as we’ve considered having this conversation is that schools actually have a role to play in this debate. There’s an empowerment message that I hope will come out of our conversation to help make the world a more peaceful and healthy place.

Tavenner: That’s exactly right, Michael. Not only do they have a role to play in the debate, but in the absence of an aligned vision and strategy and set of policies for how to address this terrible reality, I would argue that they… And I shouldn’t be saying they, it’s me too. This is my role. We’re acting I suspect somewhat unconsciously and in alignment with a vision and strategy that we may not have chosen, but exists and that I don’t think we agree with. Let me be specific. The argument being made by folks in our society who do not think friends or the problem goes like this, guns aren’t the issue, people are the issue, specifically people who have mental health challenges.

Our efforts should be focused on dealing with people with mental health issues that ultimately drive them to these horrible acts. There are two ways to do that. One is to do more to support mental health and two is to “harden schools” so they’re safer if and when a person does decide to attack them. It’s this last piece, Michael, that we really need to talk about. Because as you and I both know, schools are hardening and all of the science and evidence suggests that the hardening is going to, or quite frankly already is, exacerbating mental health challenges and will likely create new and additional issues.

Horn: I want to pause there because that’s a big and important statement, and it’s what we’re here to discuss today. This is going to be the emphasis. In order to do that, let’s start with this word hardening because it means something very specific in the context of schools and I want to make sure we’re all on the same page about this. When folks talk about hardening schools, they’re talking about a range of measures, a pretty wide range actually. Everything from protecting school entrances and windows, locking doors.

This doesn’t mean just front doors, classroom doors, adding metal detectors and armed security on school premises, installing cameras everywhere, running through active shooter drills, and in some cases, even equipping teachers with guns. There’s more, but you get the idea and the range of what we’re talking. There is a whole industry that’s cropped up around this to help schools take these measures. Now, , 95% of schools control access to the building today, which is up from 75% in 2000, those stats are from the Department of Education, and 80% of schools use security cameras now, up from 20% in 2000.

You get the idea of how this has increased. I think if you think about it from the perspective of schools and parents themselves, these actions seem very rational. We want to protect our children. We do what we’ve done frankly with airports. We make them more secure. Woe the conscience of the superintendent who doesn’t harden their schools and then has one of these incidents occur. You can just imagine the outcry of parents in the community. I’m going to stop there for now because I’ll have more to say on this in a moment, Diane, but I want to get you in.

Tavenner: Michael, we don’t even have to imagine the reaction because every time an incident occurs, we read about that reaction and we hear that reaction on television and on the news reports and the scrutiny begins immediately. Did the school leader along with the police and all the others and Bob do all of the things they were supposed to do? Because if they didn’t, I hate to be so… Well, I’m just going to say it. They have blood on their hands, Michael, I think largely as a result of this societal reality. As a leader of a school system, my experience is that people in schools aren’t thinking twice about implementing the hardening measures you have just listed.

There seems to be no questioning of them. And that’s what I really want to talk about because the changes that come with hardening schools are design changes to schools. And as listeners know, everything we talk about on this podcast is about the design of schools and how we can intentionally redesign and change them to get the outcomes we want. Interestingly, most of the design changes that are supported by what we know about how people learn and develop seem extraordinarily difficult to embrace and implement. It’s why we’re having this podcast all the time.

Just as an example, topics we talk about regularly is the use of time in school, the calendar that includes the extended summer break, discrete subject areas. I mean, you and I can go on and on and on, and we have all these episodes talking about these things. But in the case of the design changes driven by hardening, they are being implemented quickly and in my view, without the types of design processes we constantly talk about that enable a rigorous evaluation and consideration of what you’re actually doing to the school.

Horn: This is a really important and nuanced point. I’m going to pause again here on this moment just because I know it’s one that you’ve been a little hesitant to bring up. Because if people aren’t listening carefully, they might jump to accusing you of not caring about the safety of students. This is perhaps one of the reasons why these hardening changes are being so readily adopted. At the risk of repeating myself, imagine you’re that school board member or school administrator or the teacher.

You’re regularly watching school shootings unfold, and you see that a lot of the coverage is going to spotlight some safety thing, that one thing that the school could have done better, door left unlocked, a drill not followed, whatever it is. You get the message as that school leader that you better do what you can to keep your students safe. I’m not poo-pooing that, but you’re not looking at the evidence out there of what would make schools more safe.

I don’t want to belabor this point too much, but when we talked about discovery-driven planning on a few episodes, we’ve talked about how the first step after listing out critical assumptions in a new plan is to just do some basic research to test whether your hypotheses are likely to prove true. I’m just going to say here, the research on these actions seems mixed at best of whether the hardening really actually protects kids and teachers from these shootings.

, just as an example, Randy Borum of the University of South Florida and his colleagues in a systematic review of the literature concluded, “Using surveillance systems, metal detectors and access controlled devices, school administrators have made numerous attempts to enhance safety, although there is little empirical research available to evaluate these practices.” They couldn’t even find real research there, but there’s actually a bunch of other studies that show pretty negligible research. Now, I’m sure there’s more nuance here.

Certain measures may be no-brainers to create order in certain communities and others that aren’t effective and frankly might have some negative consequences actually. There is research that’s suggesting, too. Folks can read that in the same article in Education Next, which we’re going to link to in the transcript.

Tavenner: Yeah, we are. But here’s the thing, Michael, of course, people institute the hardening and react quickly. That is what people do, because if something happens at our school and we haven’t done everything we could have to prevent the actual shooting from happening or being worse than it was, then we will be held responsible by others and ourselves. As educators and people, that doesn’t feel like something we can live with, and so we harden. It sucks to be in this position as a school leader. Society is fighting. We don’t have a coherent policy that supports what we’re trying to do. The public, parents, teachers and students, they’re scared and they’re angry, and all of this is coming our way every single day.

Here’s the challenge, in the most recent school shooting in Tennessee, the school had properly hardened, Michael, and had done everything “right,” as did the police, and six people are still dead. If hardening were a solution that truly stopped school shootings that ended the loss of life, we would be having a different conversation right now. But it isn’t. The conditions that are created for children and people in hardened schools are undermining the elements of schools that we know promote mental health development, all of the things that people are saying we need to work on in order to stop these shootings.

Horn: This is the point, and it’s what Clay Christensen would’ve called an anomaly to the theory of hardening, right? The theory that we harden schools and then we’ll prevent these shootings. But it didn’t work here and it might not work that much anywhere, as I mentioned before, according to some of these reviews of the research. But again, for starters, it did not work in Tennessee, in this community. It’s taken us a while. We’ve done some maybe throat-clearing, but I think we’ve wanted to establish both our empathy and some facts on the ground, because this is the conversation now that we really want to have today, Diane.

When we’ve just rapidly hardened schools, we’re actually circumventing a normal design process where we’ve analyzed and weighed the evidence related to these design changes and then asked ourselves, do they align not just to what we want to prevent, but also to what we’re trying to accomplish, the outcomes we seek for students? I want to be super specific here so people understand what we’re saying, and I know you think about this all the time, so I’d love you to give us a specific example to make this very real for folks.

Tavenner: Let’s take locking doors. One of the most basic and universally recommended called “safety measures” for schools is to lock every door and keep them locked all of the time. I take the theory here is that if they’re locked, then the shooter can’t have access to things, right? Michael, this includes the front door of the school, as well as every door internally. There’s only supposed to be one entrance to the school. There’s a related recommendations about fencing and limiting access and only allowing there to be one entrance to the school. Michael, even as I say this and I’m explaining this, most people are probably thinking, what’s the big deal about locking doors?

I mean, isn’t that a small thing to do given the potential it has to save lives? Maybe, but let’s talk through what it looks like and feels like to be in a school every day, year after year when every single door is kept locked all of the time. What I can tell you it looks like from my experience of being in schools is that first of all, the parents don’t have keys to the school, Michael. In fact, oftentimes teachers only have certain keys to certain doors. There’s usually a small number of people who have all of these keys. And that means that a lot of people throughout the day aren’t able to get into a door at any given time.

When a student leaves a classroom to go to the bathroom or the office, someone has to physically let them back in the classroom when they return. When they want to get into the bathroom, someone has to unlock it, or they can only go at a time when it’s unlocked and supervised. If a teacher or administrator or parent wants to visit a classroom, they either have to unlock the door or knock and wait to be let in. You get the idea, Michael. Movement is restricted. I think maybe even more importantly, experienced as disruptive and unsafe to me and to others. Now when I’m in schools and I try to talk to people about this, they almost always say, “Yeah, it’s kind of a pain, but we need to keep our kids safe.

I’m yet to encounter anyone who’s thinking deeply about the long-term effects of what seems to be a pretty small change. But when I look at the science of learning and development, it’s hard not to wonder what happens to a developing brain that spends 10 to 15 years in an environment each day that sends a pretty clear signal, you are being locked in to keep you safe. Your movements are restricted to keep you safe. You should be wary of and scrutinize every person who enters your classroom or space because they may be a threat. You are locked out of your learning spaces if you’re late or have different needs that don’t happen to line up during a scheduled time of movement.

And you may be a threat coming back into those spaces. I could go on and on about what children will internalize in this environment. Again, I see it as I see it. We suspect people feel like these things feel a bit fuzzy and it’s not clear what the impact will be. That may be true. I’m going to resist looking to incarceration and refugee camps and all sorts of other parallels that feel too extreme for people to consider here. Instead, I’m going to ask us to consider exercise and eating as examples. The evidence is abundantly clear. Let’s just say, for example, people who walk even 30 minutes every day are healthier and have significant lifetime benefits, or let’s take eating.

If you just reduce the number of calories you consume each day by even 100 or 200 calories, if you do this consistently every day over time, it will have a significant impact on your weight and your health. The same goes for sleep and water intake and all sorts of things. My question is, why would we think that there would not be an impact of having a daily experience over prolonged periods of time that involves being locked in and out? We know from psychology that even short-term experiences with restricting movement and freedom and psychologically confining people and literally confining people can really mess them up.

You couple that with an overlay of what is being done and it seems inarguable that there will be impacts on how an entire generation views the world, people, their own movement, freedom, safety, and quite frankly, themselves. I know I’m ranting to hear a bit, Michael, so stop me.

Horn: No. Permission to have gone all through that because I think this is really the point. I want to make a few others on it, but I, just to put a fine piece on this. If we are serious about improving people’s mental health, that is… Let’s put it this way. If it’s a root cause of these shootings that we’re seeing throughout the nation and we’re serious about improving people’s mental health, frankly, to reduce those shootings or any number of other pathologies, schools have an active role to play. Let’s empower them. It’s not as an additional task to all the things that they’re already doing, but it’s actually a core part of their design.

I think that’s what comes out of all the things you just said. Look, we’ve talked before in this podcast about how in the course of academics, so like that coordinating of schools, we can help build kids’ resilience, their well-being and their empathy, their attachment, their self-esteem. I’m just naming a few here, but we can also do things that do the opposite of that, that damage kids’ mental health. We get this decision in essence of supporting and making mental health stronger or damaging. We can do things in damaging that also undermine the trust of community.

Frankly, as I read the literature, trust and the ability for people to speak up and say, “Hey, listen so and so, I think might need some help out there,” that actually could be vital in not only preventing some of these disasters, but also getting people the real support that they need to get healthy and thrive, which that’s what I want for individuals. I want to emphasize, again, I’m sure we’re going to get some folks chiming in, I am not saying that there’s a clear-cut answer here. It’s almost always certain circumstance driven rather than a blind faith in best practices.

There’s certain measures that might work in your community. They might not work elsewhere and so forth. But I think the big thing is we ought to consider and weigh the evidence and then make a measured deliberate choice. I think that’s your point as well, Diane.

Tavenner: It is, Michael. Another point we’re saying again and again, this is not easy. Nothing about this is easy. Actually, nothing about being a school leader or a person responsible for leading schools is easy. It never has been, but it certainly seems more and more difficult every day. The last thing I want to do is pile on and add yet one more thing to people doing this critically important work. I know firsthand what it means to be sagging under the weight of everything we’re talking about and more. It’s likely not what any of us signed up for. And yet, it is where we find ourselves. What feels critically important is that we are conscious of where we are and the choices we’re making because none of them are benign.

Michael, we share a very close friend whose three nieces were in the school building the day of one of the very deadly school shootings in Texas. She and her family and her community will never be the same, and those are in her words. She’s very clear about that. Two of the 10 people who were killed that day were substitute teachers who, Michael, didn’t have keys to locked doors because they were substitutes and couldn’t get the spaces where they could escape as a result of those locked doors. While an anecdote, it illustrates the research base point that we don’t have meaningful evidence of the efficacy of so many of the hardening actions on mitigating school shootings.

What we do have evidence about is the next chilling thing she shared with us, which was the shooting happened at the end of the school year. The school just went to summer break and didn’t return until the fall. When they did return, the school had undertaken more hardening tactics. Specifically, they had installed metal detectors and created a significantly more stringent dress code. Because in this particular shooting, this shooter was a student who had come to school hiding his weapon under a trench coat and began shooting from his first period class. The metal detectors and dress code were presented as measures to prevent that from ever happening again.

Put yourself in the shoes of those student survivors for a moment though. What did it feel like when they returned to their school as victims and survivors of the shooting now only to be viewed and treated as a threat? Michael, we’re treating our children as dangerous threats. We’re treating anyone and everyone who comes to schools as threats. We know what the evidence tells us about the impacts of living for long periods of time in a state of fearful alert. It has an impact on our physical health and our mental health and the very fabric of our community and our society.

I don’t want to be unconscious about the fact that decisions I’m making as a school leader in the name of keeping my students safe may be creating more danger by exacerbating, accelerating, amplifying, whatever you want to say, the very mental health challenges that are being identified as the cause of the school shootings and tearing at the fabric of our communities, which are the thing that support people who are experiencing a mental health crisis. I know we’re saying the same things, but these impacts are happening on a grand scale across our country to all of our children. I just think we can’t let this pass.

Horn: Yeah, no, I totally agree. I do want to add a few more points. For folks listening, if you’re not convinced at this point, I just think there’s another set of reasons both why school communities are making the actions that they’re doing and why we ought to be cautious about it. On the ledger of why it’s so easy to move to this hardening position, I actually think in many ways it’s in the DNA of schools. Julia Freeland Fisher, my friend and colleague of the Christensen Institute, she wrote in her book, , that, “schools institutionalized this monopoly by closing rather than opening their doors to people beyond what John Dewey dubs schools ’embryonic community.'”

This notion of creating this embryonic community that shelters kids from the outside world, which is Julia’s point, this is actually all a historical, Diane, in some sense. It’s really an experiment of the last 120 years or so. As Clay Christensen said, kids used to work for the parents actually starting at age six to really make the communities and families function, but now, actually parents in our society work for the kids. I get it. Society has changed in a lot of ways, but there are good reasons to wonder about fostering that embryonic community and wrapping kids up in a lockdown cocoon that actually shuts out the outside world at the expense of all else.

Frankly, it limits their development of social capital. That’s the argument behind Julia’s book. I think this gets to what we’re designing schools to do from an outcomes perspective. If we’re serious about schools, helping kids develop opportunity, not just self-actualize and have great mental health, but get access to life opportunities, which I think is a big purpose of schools, then who you know really matters. Connecting consciously students to the outside world as a matter of design is really important. The expeditions that you do are a very conscious choice.

It’s so that students can learn about different career opportunities, what’s entailed in them, what it looks like, what you do, how that lines up to what I enjoy and what my strengths are, what I make in terms of money. And also though so you can develop an outside network over time that gets access to these people and opportunities. I’m not going to go through the entire logic chain and research behind social capital, except to say that right now who you know is a bit of a lottery, and schools actually have a role in changing that. It’ll help improve academics. It gives more purpose to the work. It certainly stands to improve mental well-being and a sense of self.

It stands to change lives and life opportunities. Again, I’m going to say it again, I think we have to make measured judgments on these things. Maybe you don’t lock doors, but you do put in certain measures to make sure weapons aren’t coming into the schools. I’m making this up. I don’t know, but I’d want to go through a discovery driven process to get the outcomes that we desire and mitigate the bad things that we don’t want and make very conscious trade-offs.

I want to say this explicitly, I don’t want us to settle as schools, but I want to say we’re going to choose this trade-off so that we get these other benefits. I just don’t think we’re having that conversation in each school and community right now.

Tavenner: I agree with you, Michael. What you’re saying is bringing something up for me then. I may have previously shared, but I think it’s so aligned to what we’re talking about and why I wanted to engage in this conversation. My dear friend Antonio Saunders talks often about the differences between unconscious and conscious leaders. One of the differences he illuminates is that unconscious leaders spend their lives fighting injustice. And as a result, they become expert in the skills required in a world that they quite frankly don’t want, a world filled with fighting and anger and violence.

Whereas conscious leaders spend their lives designing and creating the world that they want to live in, and so become experts in the skills needed in the world that they strive for. I want your children and mine to grow up in schools and communities that believe in and nurture their potential and help to develop them into contributing members of society. Even as a school leader, I have choice in agency in the environment and experience of the children who are in my care. Michael, thanks for having this conversation with me. I’m very glad we’re able to do so in person.

While this feels like a pretty hard pivot, given what we’ve just been saying, I am always curious about what you’re reading, listening to, or watching lately. Maybe we’ll leave the dialogue here and you can share one.

Horn: On a lighter note perhaps. Well, don’t laugh at me, but in addition to basketball watching, I’ve been reading Harry Potter. I will tell you, I’m really late to this party, because it came out when I was in high school, I think, the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I kind of had this attitude of I’m not going to read it, and so I consciously didn’t. And then at some point when I had kids, I said, “OK, maybe I’ll read it aloud to them.”

They don’t really let me read books aloud to them. They were a little scared. It was my opportunity to jump back in. We just finished Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and we’ll do the second book shortly. But as I often am late to the party, I was really late to this one and we enjoyed it as a family.

Tavenner: It’s pretty late. I think it was a long time a book ago because the first year of Summit, Harry Potter is what got me through that year. I would read Harry Potter before I would go to bed and it would make my dreams about Hogwarts and Harry Potter land versus the running of the school, which cost me a few hours of sleep that year. I’m actually reading by James Clear.

As you like to say, I’m a bit late to that party as well, because it is a best line book. I feel like everyone’s read it. But nevertheless, he describes it as a handbook for how to have the life that you want through very small and enduring daily habits. I did find it really engaging and useful. It’s affirming where I do that well in my life and illuminating the places and reminding me of the places I don’t fully systematize and have space to improve. It’s a good fast.

Horn: I highly recommend it. For all of you though, again, back to the serious topic that we’ve addressed today, just thank you for tuning in and staying with us through the important conversation around rethinking schools and the roles that they do and can play in the lives of individuals and our communities at large. We’ll see you next time on Class Disrupted.

Michael B. Horn strives to create a world in which all individuals can build their passions and fulfill their potential through his writing, speaking, and work with a portfolio of education organizations. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning and the recently released . He is also the cofounder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, a nonprofit think tank.

Diane Tavenner is CEO of Summit Public Schools and co-founder of the Summit Learning Program. She is a life-long educator, innovator, and the author of  

While districts nationwide have become victims in in the last several years, cybersecurity experts said the extortion tactics leveraged against the Minneapolis district are particularly aggressive and an escalation of those typically used against school systems to coerce payments.

In a dark web blog post and an online video uploaded Tuesday, the ransomware gang Medusa claimed responsibility for conducting a February cyberattack — or what Minneapolis school leaders euphemistically called an “encryption event” — that led to . The blog post gives the district until March 17 to hand over $1 million. If the district fails to pay up, criminal actors appear ready to post a trove of sensitive records about students and educators to their dark web leak site. The gang’s leak site gives the district the option to pay $50,000 to add a day to the ransom deadline and allows anyone to purchase the data for $1 million right now.

On the video-sharing platform Vimeo, the group, calling itself the Medusa Media Team, posted a 51-minute video that appeared to show a limited collection of the stolen records, making clear to district leaders the sensitive nature of the files within the gang’s possession. 

“The video is more unusual and I don’t recall that having been done before,” said Brett Callow, a threat analyst with the cybersecurity company Emsisoft. 

A preliminary review of the gang’s dark web leak site by The 74 suggest the compromised files include a significant volume of sensitive documents, including records related to student sexual violence allegations, district finances, student discipline, special education, civil rights investigations, student maltreatment and sex offender notifications. 

The video is no longer available on Vimeo and a company spokesperson confirmed to The 74 that it was , which prohibits users from uploading content that “infringes any third party’s” privacy rights. 

As targeted organizations decline to pay ransom demands in efforts to recover stolen files, Callow said the threat actors are employing new tactics “to improve conversion rates.”

“This is likely just an experiment, and if they find this works they will do it more frequently,” Callow said. “These groups operate like regular businesses, in that they A/B test and adopt the strategies that work and ditch the ones that don’t.” 

Here’s a snippet of the video’s introduction (with all sensitive records omitted):

The Minneapolis school district hasn’t acknowledged being a ransomware victim, while Callow and other cybersecurity experts have been harshly critical of how it has disclosed the attack to the public. In , the district attributed “technical difficulties” with its computer systems to the referenced “encryption event,” a characterization that experts blasted as creative public relations that left potential victims in the dark about the incident’s severity. 

The district “has not paid a ransom” and an investigation into the incident “has not found any evidence that any data accessed has been used to commit fraud,” school officials said in the March 1 statement.  

In a statement to The 74 Tuesday, the district said it “is aware that the threat actor who has claimed responsibility for our recent encryption event has posted online some of the data they accessed.” 

“This action has been reported to law enforcement, and we are working with IT specialists to review the data in order to contact impacted individuals,” the statement continued.

Minnesota-based student privacy advocate Marika Pfefferkorn called on the district to be more forthcoming as it confronts the attack. 

“First and foremost, they owe an apology to the community by not being explicit right away about what was happening,” said Pfefferkorn, executive director of the Midwest Center for School Transformation. “Because they haven’t communicated about it, they haven’t shared a plan about, ‘How will you address this? How will you respond?’ Not knowing how they are going to respond makes me really nervous.”

School cybersecurity expert Doug Levin, the national director of the K12 Security Information eXchange, said that district officials appear to have coined the term “encryption event,” but available information suggests the school system was the victim of “classic double extortion,” an exploitation technique that’s become popular among ransomware gangs in the last several years. 

With its video and dark web blog, Medusa may have spent “a little more time and energy” than other ransomware groups in presenting the stolen data in a compelling package, “but the tactics seem to be the same,” Levin said. “Now that we have a group coming forward with compelling evidence that they have exfiltrated data from the system and it’s actively extorting them, that’s all I would need to know to classify this as ransomware.”

In double extortion ransomware attacks, threat actors gain access to a victim’s computer network, download compromising records and lock the files with an encryption key. Criminals then demand their victim pay a ransom to regain control of their files. Then, if a ransom is not paid, criminals sell the data or publish the records to a leak site. 

Such a situation recently played out in the Los Angeles Unified School district, the nation’s second-largest school system. Last year, the ransomware gang Vice Society broke into the district’s computer network and made off with some 500 gigabytes of district files. When the district refused to pay an undisclosed ransom, Vice Society uploaded the records to its dark web leak site. 

District officials have sought to downplay the attack’s effects on students. But an investigation by The 74 found thousands of students’ comprehensive and highly sensitive mental health records had been exposed. The district then acknowledged Feb. 22 that some 2,000 student psychological assessments — including those of 60 current students — had been leaked.

Districts that become ransomware targets could face significant liability issues. Earlier this month, the education technology company Aeries Software a negligence lawsuit after a data breach exposed records from two California school districts. District families accused the software company of failing to implement reasonable cybersecurity safeguards. 

Federal authorities have made progress in curtailing cybercriminals. In January, authorities seized control of a prolific ransomware gang’s leak site and earlier this month officials with ties to a Russian-based ransomware group that’s known to target schools. 

At least 11 U.S. school districts have been the victims of ransomware attacks so far in 2023, according to Emsisoft research. Last year, 45 school districts and 44 colleges. 

In Minneapolis, a lack of transparency from the district could put affected students and staff at heightened risk of exploitation, Emsisoft’s Callow said. 

“There absolutely are times when districts have to be cautious about the information they release because it is the source of an ongoing investigation,” he said. “But calling something a ransomware incident as opposed to an encryption event really isn’t problematic. Nor is telling people their personal information may have been compromised.”

Pfefferkorn, the Minneapolis student privacy advocate, said she’s concerned about the amount of data the school district collects about students and worries it lacks sufficient cybersecurity safeguards to keep the information secure. She pointed to Minneapolis schools’ since-terminated contract with the digital student surveillance company Gaggle, which monitors students online and alerts district officials to references about mental health challenges, sexuality, drug use, violence and bullying. 

The district said it adopted the monitoring tool in a pandemic-era effort to keep kids safe online, but the unauthorized disclosure of Gaggle records maintained by the district could make them more vulnerable, she said. 

There’s little recourse, she said, for students and educators whose sensitive records were already leaked by Medusa. 

“It’s already out there and that cannot be repaired,” she said. “There’s information out there that’s going to impact them for the rest of their lives.”

A spokesperson for the company, which describes itself , cited a societal shift toward greater acceptance of LGBTQ youth — rather than criticism of its product — as the impetus for the change as part of a “continuous evaluation and updating process.”

The company, which uses artificial intelligence and human content moderators to sift through billions of student communications each year, has long defended its use of LGBTQ-specific keywords to identify students who might hurt themselves or others. In arguing the targeted monitoring is necessary to save lives, executives have pointed to the prevalence of bullying against LGBTQ youth and data indicating they’re than their straight and cisgender classmates. 

But in practice, Gaggle’s critics argued, the keywords put LGBTQ students at a heightened risk of scrutiny by school officials and, on some occasions, the police. Nearly a third of LGBTQ students said they or someone they know experienced nonconsensual disclosure of their sexual orientation or gender identity — often called outing — as a result of digital activity monitoring, according to released in August by the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. The survey encompassed the impacts of multiple monitoring companies who contract with school districts, such as GoGuardian, Gaggle, Securly and Bark. 

Gaggle’s decision to remove several LGBTQ-specific keywords, including “queer” and “bisexual,” from its dictionary of words that trigger alerts was first reported in . It follows extensive reporting by The 74 into the company’s business practices and sometimes negative effects on students who are caught in its surveillance dragnet. 

Though Gaggle’s software is generally limited to monitoring school-issued accounts, including those by Google and Microsoft, the it can scan through photos on students’ personal cell phones if they plug them into district laptops.

The keyword shift comes at a particularly perilous moment, as Republican lawmakers in multiple states . Legislation has looked to curtail classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity, ban books and classroom curricula featuring LGBTQ themes and prohibit transgender students from receiving gender-affirming health care, participating in school athletics and using restroom facilities that match their gender identities. Such a hostile political climate and pandemic-era disruptions, a recent youth survey by The Trevor Project revealed, has contributed to an uptick in LGBTQ youth who have seriously considered suicide. 

The U.S. Education Department received 453 discrimination complaints involving students’ sexual orientation or gender identity last year, according to data provided to The 74 by its civil rights office. That’s a significant increase from previous years, including in 2021 when federal officials received 249 such complaints. The Trump administration took and complaints dwindled. In 2018, the Education Department received just 57 complaints related to sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination.

The increase in discrimination allegations involving sexual orientation or gender identity are part of , according to data obtained by The New York Times. The total number of complaints for 2021-22 grew to 19,000, a historic high and more than double the previous year. 

In September, The 74 revealed that Gaggle had donated $25,000 to The Trevor Project, the nonprofit that released the recent youth survey and whose advocacy is focused on suicide prevention among LGBTQ youth. The arrangement was framed on Gaggle’s website as a collaboration to “improve mental health outcomes for LGBTQ young people.” 

The revelation was met with swift backlash on social media, with multiple Trevor Project supporters threatening to halt future donations. Within hours, the group announced it had returned the donation, acknowledging concerns about Gaggle “having a role in negatively impacting LGBTQ students.” 

The Trevor Project didn’t respond to requests for comment on Gaggle’s decision to pull certain LGBTQ-specific keywords from its systems. 

In a statement to The 74, Gaggle spokesperson Paget Hetherington said the company regularly modifies the keywords its software uses to trigger a human review of students’ digital communications. Certain LGBTQ-specific words, she said, are no longer relevant to the 24-year-old company’s efforts to protect students from abuse and were purged late last year.

“At points in time in the not-too-distant past, those words were weaponized by bullies to harass and target members of the LGBTQ+ community, so as part of an effective methodology to combat that discriminatory harassment and violence, those words were once effective tools to help identify dangerous situations,” Hetherington said. “Thankfully, over the past two decades, our society evolved and began a period of widespread acceptance, especially among the K-12 student population that Gaggle serves. With that evolution and acceptance, it has become increasingly rare to see those words used in the negative, harassing context they once were; hence, our decision to take these off our word/phrases list.”

Hetherington said Gaggle will continue to monitor students’ use of the words “faggot,” “lesbo,” and others that are “commonly used as slurs.” A previous review by The 74 found that Gaggle regularly flagged students for harmless speech, like profanity in fictional articles submitted to a school’s literary magazine, and students’ private journals. 

Anti-LGBTQ activists have , and privacy advocates warn that in the era of “Don’t Say Gay” laws and abortion bans, information gleaned from Gaggle and similar services could be weaponized against students.

Gaggle executives have minimized privacy concerns and claim the tool saved more than 1,400 lives last school year. That statistic hasn’t been independently verified and there’s a dearth of research to suggest digital monitoring is an effective school-safety tool. A recent survey found a majority of parents and teachers believe the benefits of student monitoring outweigh privacy concerns. The Vice News documentary included the perspective of a high school student who was flagged by Gaggle for writing a paper titled “Essay on the Reasons Why I Want to Kill Myself but Can’t/Didn’t.” Adults wouldn’t have known she was struggling without Gaggle, she said. 

“I do think that it’s helpful in some ways,” the student said, “but I also kind of think that it’s — I wouldn’t say an invasion of privacy — but if obviously something gets flagged and a person who it wasn’t intended for reads through that, I think that’s kind of uncomfortable.” 

Student surveillance critic Evan Greer, director of the nonprofit digital rights group said the tweaks to Gaggle’s keyword dictionary are unlikely to have a significant effect on LGBTQ teens and blasted the company’s stated justification for the move as being “out of touch” with the state of anti-LGBTQ harassment in schools. Meanwhile, Greer said that LGBTQ youth frequently refer to each other using “reclaimed slurs,” reappropriating words that are generally considered derogatory and remain in Gaggle’s dictionary. 

“This is just like lipstick on a pig — no offense to pigs — but I don’t see how this actually in any meaningful way mitigates the potential for this software to nonconsensually out LGBTQ students to administrators,” Greer said. “I don’t see how it prevents the software from being used to invade the privacy of students in a wide range of other circumstances.”

Gaggle and its competitors — including , and — have faced similar scrutiny in Washington. In April, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey argued in a report that the tools could be misused to discipline students and warned they could be used disproportionately against students of color and LGBTQ youth. 

In , Gaggle founder and CEO Jeff Patterson said the company cannot test the potential for bias in its system because the software flags student communications anonymously and the company has “no context or background on students,” including their race or sexual orientation. They also said their monitoring services are not meant to be used as a disciplinary tool. 

In the survey released last summer by the Center for Democracy and Technology, however, 78% of teachers reported that digital monitoring tools were used to discipline students. Black and Hispanic students reported being far more likely than white students to get into trouble because of online monitoring. 

In October, the White House cautioned school districts against the “continuous surveillance” of students if monitoring tools are likely to trample students’ rights. It also directed the Education Department to issue guidance to districts on the safe use of artificial intelligence. The guidance is expected to be released early this year.

As an increasing number of districts implement Gaggle for bullying prevention efforts, surveillance critic Greer said the company has failed to consider how adults can cause harm.

“There is now a very visible far-right movement attacking LGBTQ kids, and particularly trans kids and teenagers,” Greer said. “If anything, queer kids are more in the crosshairs today than they were a year ago or two years ago — and that’s why this surveillance is so dangerous.”

If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. For LGBTQ mental health support, contact The Trevor Project’s toll-free support line at 866-488-7386.

A resounding 96% of apps used regularly in schools have data-sharing practices that “are not adequately safe for children,” according to a new report by the nonprofit Internet Safety Labs, which conducts software safety tests. In an analysis of apps commonly required or recommended by schools, the group found that many shared students’ personal data to marketing firms that build extensive profiles of children to sell products through targeted advertising.

“At a minimum, it fuels marketers’ and data brokers’ personal data profiles ultimately used to bombard young minds with highly targeted and persuasive advertising or opinions,” according to the report. “At worst, in the wrong hands it can lead to emotional trauma, aberrant seduction or even physical danger with location information.”

Once their data reaches the “Wild West” digital advertising ecosystem, students lose control of how that information is used and retained, said Irene Knapp, the group’s technology director and a former Google software engineer. Knapp said the widespread exchange of data between the apps and advertisers, including sensitive information such as mental health records, could come back to harm students later on. Such data could make it more difficult for students to get health insurance when they’re older, Knapp said, and could be used to serve them products based on their conditions. For example, the data could be used to “discover kids who have a propensity to gambling addiction and sell them Candy Crush,” a reference to the mobile game known for its obsessive users.

“It gets difficult holding this advertising ecosystem to account because the harms and the original cause are far apart,” Knapp said. “But that’s why we have to identify where these leaks happen and start to close them.”

To reach its conclusions, researchers tested more than 1,300 digital tools that were required or recommended by a random sampling of 13 schools in each state, totaling 663 campuses serving nearly half a million students. Almost a quarter of the services included advertisements and 13% had targeted ads, researchers found. Schools routinely recommended tools that weren’t specifically designed with schools in mind, including Spotify and YouTube. Yet even among the digital tools specifically geared toward students, 18% contained ads and 9% used targeted ads — a finding the group argues is “still too high to be safe for students.”

Meanwhile, the tools routinely shared information with Big Tech data aggregators: 68% of apps shared data with Google, 36% with Apple and 33% with Facebook. More than three-quarters of the apps accessed users’ location information, researchers found, and more than half tapped into students’ calendars and contacts. The analysis found that school utility apps, which allow schools to share with students and parents information like lunch schedules and other announcements, were the most likely to pass student data to the Big Tech giants. Districts often contract with Blackboard and Apptegy for the apps. Neither company responded to requests for comment.

“Those community engagement platform apps, they came out to be pretty dangerous it turned out,” said Lisa LeVasseur, the group’s executive director. “Were we surprised? I’d say no. It’s disappointing.”

Schools in the study sample recommended an average of 125 different apps, highlighting the ubiquity of technology in modern education, especially as the pandemic forced school closures and remote learning. Yet even as school districts’ reliance on tech companies grows, they generally lack the staffing to ensure that recommended technologies sufficiently safeguard student privacy, according to a recent report by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit think tank.

The Internet Safety Labs report comes at a moment of heightened scrutiny around how technology companies use the data they collect about children. Earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission announced that it would toughen its enforcement of education technology companies that sell student data for targeted advertising and that “illegally surveil children when they go online to learn.”

Just this week, the commission reached a record-breaking $520 million settlement with Epic Games, creator of the hugely popular video game Fortnite, and accused it of illegally collecting information about young children in violation of federal privacy rules and tricking players into making unintentional purchases.

Ultimately, Internet Safety Labs found that schools need more resources to thoroughly vet the technologies they use — especially as districts face greater cybersecurity threats. With limited accountability to ensure that software providers behave ethically, it’s up to schools to keep kids safe.

“With technology right now, there’s no norms for product safety, none whatsoever,” LeVasseur said. “It’s as if you bought your car and you had to install seat belts, airbags, windshield wipers, lights, like all of the safety features. That’s what we have with technology right now. It’s all, ‘Do it yourself, try to be safe. Godspeed you’re on your own.’ ”

OMAHA — Some local parents and students consider a pride flag or “safe space” stickers displayed in a handful of Omaha suburban high school classrooms as inappropriately political.

But these symbols aren’t political to local LGBTQ students. To them, these handheld flags, stickers and supportive posters help them feel accepted and safe.

That is why a first-year Millard North High School principal’s meeting with teachers last month and discussion of the district’s ban on political posters and items is causing a stir.

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Students say they feel unsafe

Students like senior Jayden Randels and junior Scar Connor noticed the flags and stickers coming down and felt less welcome at school, both told the Nebraska Examiner this week.

Randels said he noticed that one of his favorite teachers had a blank spot on a classroom wall where a 2-inch by 2-inch human rights and equality flag used to be.

He relayed that the teacher, whom he did not identify, told him that teachers had been asked to remove the flags and stickers and didn’t give much detail. He noticed similar symbols coming down in other classes.

Randels and Connor said people who haven’t been discriminated against because of who they are don’t understand the value of tokens of visual support.

“They give me the peace of mind to know that, at least within that classroom, I have a safe space and an adult who I can trust and talk to about issues that might be going on,” Randels said.

Meeting with the principal

Connor said she heard about the principal’s meeting with staff and spoke to at least three teachers about it. She said they came away from the meeting with the same impression.

Some staffers believed that they could no longer post pride flags or safe space stickers or risk breaking the district’s years-old ban on political items, the teachers union confirmed.

Connor spoke with the principal, Aaron Bearinger, on Thursday. She spoke with him after getting sent to the office for putting up posters around the school that were critical of him.

The posters urged those who read them to ask the principal why he did not support LGBTQ+ kids. Connor said Bearinger seemed upset about being labeled that way. She said she chafed when he asked her if he should allow someone to put up NRA stickers.

Conner said she disagreed with the comparison. Straight kids don’t have the same risk of suicide and are bullied less often than LGBTQ kids, she said.

Academic research shows LGBTQ young people have contemplated suicide in higher numbers than straight peers and miss more school from fears of being bullied.

Connor said Bearinger told her that pride flags were allowed in the school. Connor and her mother said the principal had drawn a line at safe space stickers and human rights posters with the names of advocacy groups on them, saying district policy did not allow them in classrooms.

The principal, according to Connor, asked her to consider a student who has other beliefs and feels uncomfortable talking to a teacher with a “safe space” sticker up.

Bearinger, reached this week through a district spokeswoman, said he did not recall specifics about his discussion with the student about the “safe space” stickers.

District response

Millard Public Schools spokeswoman Rebecca Kleeman confirmed Thursday that the district has “no policies preventing flags, stickers or other symbols.”

She said what happened at Millard North may have been a misunderstanding. The district has a non-discrimination policy that includes sexual orientation and gender identity.

“There was a conversation at Millard North with faculty — and these are conversations at all of our schools — and I think that was misinterpreted,” Kleeman said.

Millard does not allow teachers to bring items tied to politics or advocacy organizations into the classroom unless otherwise directly related to district-approved curriculum, she said.

But teachers with pride flags and student-supportive stickers can put something up like that in their classrooms as long as they cover or remove any advocacy group names.

She recommended that teachers observe the district’s process for seeking approval for classroom posters and reach out to their administrators if they have a question about the rules.

Teachers, senator respond

Tim Royers, president of the Millard Education Association, said the union is trying to figure out what happened at Millard North. He said the union would defend teachers’ rights to support all of their students.

Parents and students upset with the flags and stickers being pulled down reached out to State Sen. Megan Hunt of Omaha. She met Thursday with Millard district superintendent John Schwartz.

She came away with the impression that the district is trying to convey that they aren’t bad people, when what she and others want is to know when kids can get back their visual support.

For Hunt, the issue is personal. She said she remembers being told she couldn’t go to prom in high school with a girl, that if they wanted to go together it had to be as a group.

She said she got angry at hearing from someone who reached out that the principal had conflated LGBTQ advocacy with the NRA and asked whether he should accept a Satanic Club. She said a district representative apologized.

Hunt said she wanted Millard leaders to understand that backing LGBTQ kids is not taking sides. LGBTQ kids are as politically diverse as any, with liberals, conservatives and more.

“It’s really not that complex,” Hunt said. “Some kids feel vulnerable. Some kids feel unsafe, and there are teachers in the schools who make them feel a little safer, for that one period every day they don’t have to worry about being bullied or judged.”

All kids are welcome

Mike Kennedy, a conservative member of the Millard school board, said he and Millard leaders want all students to feel welcome, and that’s why he said the district tries to avoid politics.

Because of increased political tension locally and nationally, he said, Millard has charted a middle path away from the politics of the day. He said their focus is academics.

“I love all of our students …,” he said. “What we are trying to make sure is that the district is not giving a seal of approval to any viewpoint or political persuasion.”

He and other conservatives have seen the pushes in other red states to re-emphasize bans on political items in classrooms, including some specifically targeting LGBTQ symbols.

Millard, he said, is trying to find a way to be respectful of students and parents on all sides of the political aisle, and he said the board is hopeful the principal can find a way forward.

District officials said Bearinger met with students who expressed concerns and talked to their families. They said the principal has a “safe space” sticker on his own office window.

The principal answered the Examiner’s questions with a statement: “Millard is home. I have been a part of this school for nearly two decades, and care deeply about the students and staff.

“If a young person says they are upset, that is a conversation I take very seriously. I am and will continue to work to make sure everyone who is a part of our school feels heard and knows they are welcome.”

Why symbols matter

Jay Irwin, director of Women’s and Gender Studies and a professor of sociology at UNO, said flags and stickers are important for LGBTQ student feelings of safety and comfort.

“For a young person to see such messages tells them they are not alone, they are valid, and that they matter,” he said.

Connor, who identified herself as a member of the LGBTQ community at Millard North, said she knows students for whom school is the only place they can be themselves.

She, Randels and Hunt reject the idea that supporting people for who they are is somehow political speech. They say it shouldn’t be considered political, but instead an issue of human rights.

“They’re missing the fact that they could really be impacting queer students’ mental health with this,” she said. “It disrupted my happiness and focus on learning.”

Connor’s mother, Aasta Connor, said she came away from talking to the principal thinking the school is trying to satisfy some people upset by the flags instead of focusing on the kids.

“I just want them to make it right and allow teachers to show support for the queer community,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if somebody agrees. It’s not a group you choose to be in.

“You just are.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nebraska Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Cate Folsom for questions: info@nebraskaexaminer.com. Follow Nebraska Examiner on and .

Within seven minutes of receiving a 911 call about an active shooter in a St. Louis high school, police and armed security guards were already in the building and engaging the suspect in gun fire. 

The immediate response by police and school security on Oct. 24 at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School has drawn praise and received credit for minimizing loss of life. 

However, a day after the tragedy, St. Louis Public School District officials faced questions abouts why the seven security guards stationed inside the school weren’t armed. 

The district employs 25 armed guards who patrol outside schools, district officials said, but district policy forbids firearms inside buildings. 

“We thought it was best for us, for our officers and for the normalcy of school for kids to not have officers armed in the school,” said Deandre Davis, director of safety and security for SLPS.

Armed security wouldn’t have been a match for the shooter anyway, since he was carrying an AR-15-style rifle, said Matt Davis, president of the district’s school board.

“The assailant had a high-powered rifle,” Matt Davis said, “so much so that he could force himself into a secured building. The building is riddled with bullets. I don’t know how much firepower it would take to stop that person. You saw the police response. It was massive.”

Whether someone in the school should have been armed — and if that would have made any impact whatsoever — isn’t just a question in the aftermath of last month’s shooting. It will likely be a focus for state lawmakers when they return to the Capitol in January.

Right now school districts have the option to have armed security, including allowing teachers or administrators to carry a firearm. Republican state Sen. Rick Brattin of Harrisonville said he’s exploring legislation to make it mandatory. 

“We need to step it up to where there’s a requirement to how you’re going to protect kids,” Brattin said.

Missouri Democrats responded to the shooting by , like establishing universal background checks for gun purchases and extreme risk protection orders — or red flag laws — allowing judges to temporarily separate at-risk individuals from their firearms.

Republicans, who hold super majorities in both the House and Senate, have largely panned the proposals as an infringement on Second Amendment rights. 

Gov. Mike Parson said tougher gun laws won’t stop gun violence. 

“You got a criminal that committed a criminal act, you know, and all the laws in the world are not going to stop those things,” . 

 This year alone, there have been across the country. 

It was inevitable that a shooting would happen in Missouri, Matt Davis said, but the only solution state legislators have offered is to “harden schools” with more guns and security.  

“There’s how many hundreds of bills, hundreds of solutions, hundreds of things where people can come together and compromise to protect their Second Amendment rights and to protect our kids in school,” Matt Davis said. “If you have the job as a politician and can write laws, and you can’t think of anything to do to stop this, then do something else.” 

School protection officers

Included in a bill passed by Missouri lawmakers in 2009 was a provision giving school officials and school boards the authority to decide if a person with a concealed carry permit could carry a gun on school campuses. 

There’s no state agency that tracks which campuses have given this authorization, according to the state Department of Public Safety. 

Four years later, Brattin said he decided to push legislation to establish a school protection officer program after hearing about school shootings and realizing “what a soft target our schools really are.” 

For some rural schools, it takes law enforcement 45 minutes to respond to a call, Brattin said, and several of the districts didn’t have access to school security guards. 

A released by the Missouri Governor’s School Safety Task Force confirmed this, finding that 40% of public school districts that responded to a survey didn’t have any school security. The survey was completed by more than half of the public school districts in Missouri.

Some teachers and administrators were already carrying firearms to respond to potential threats, so Brattin said he wanted to offer them training. 

“I wanted to develop something that had a rigorous form of training to it,” Brattin said.

Brattin’s 2013 bill didn’t pass, but one provision from his proposal made it onto a bill that was signed by the governor. It allowed the POST Commission, which facilitates training for law enforcement statewide, to determine for these teachers and administrators. 

Those standards include more than 100 hours of training in handling imminent threats, de-escalation and administering first aid. 

The next year Brattin was able to get his proposal attached as an amendment to a wide-ranging gun , which the bill sponsor, then-Sen. Will Kraus, boasted would make training for teachers and administrators who want to be school protection officers mandatory. 

The idea behind Brattin’s amendment was to take the state’s a “step further,” Kraus said at the time.

“So this actually puts an additional requirement on those individuals,” Kraus said during a 2014 floor debate. “I think it’s important that we train those individuals if they are going to carry [on campuses].”

But the 2014 law didn’t make training mandatory. 

According to Department of Public Safety spokesman Mike O’Connell, the state has a “narrow role” of facilitating the school protection officer training program. 

If school districts want to use the state’s training program, they can, but he said, “there’s nothing that says you can’t do this on your own.”

It’s up to each district to decide who becomes a school protection officer, he said, and “there’s nothing that we would have a say in.” 

As of today, 70 people in 29 school districts have opted to go through the state’s training. St. Louis is not among them. 

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education does not oversee the training or certification of either school resource officers or school protection officers, a department spokesperson said. 

Now, Brattin wants to make it mandatory for schools to allow someone to carry in the building. But it remains unclear how the state would track these individuals or if training could be required of these gun carriers. 

Brattin said there is “ambiguity” on tracking who receives training because school districts can opt to authorize people under the concealed carry law or under the school protection officer statute.  

“Nothing is stopping these schools just from authorizing a teacher to have a CCW (concealed carry weapon),” Brattin said. “That’s something that is already authorized. [The school protection officer measure] didn’t nullify that.” 

Democrats demand universal background checks

Two weeks before he entered a St. Louis high school and killed a teacher and student, 19-year-old Orlando Harris attempted to buy a gun from a licensed dealer in St. Charles. 

An FBI background check blocked the sale, according to St. Louis police officials, and he ultimately bought the weapon that he used in the shooting from a private seller. 

Background checks are not required under federal or Missouri law to legally buy a firearm from an unlicensed private seller. Democrats want Missouri to join 21 states and the District of Columbia in extending background checks beyond federal law.

“A requirement for universal background checks on all firearm purchases would have blocked this sale,” House Democratic leaders wrote in to the governor and GOP legislative leaders.

Nine days before the shooting, Harris’ mother asked police to take the gun away from him because she was concerned about his mental state. Police said state law didn’t give them the authority to take Harris’ weapon.

“The State of Missouri does not have a red flag law,” St. Louis Police Sgt. Charles Wall said in a statement to the media. “That means SLMPD officers did not have clear authority to temporarily seize the rifle when they responded to the suspect’s home when called by the suspect’s mother on 10/15/22.”

Brattin, like many Missouri Republicans, said he strongly opposes red flag laws because people could abuse the process.

He believes Harris’ family should have taken the gun away from him on their own.

“First and foremost, if the mother knew that, she could have had a family member just go and take the gun themselves from the son, instead of having to get law enforcement involved,” Brattin said.

St. Louis Police Chief Michael Sack said the mother worked with officers to give the gun to an adult who was lawfully able to possess it. 

“The mother at the time wanted it out of the house, so they facilitated that,” Sack said. “This other party had it. How [Harris] acquired it after that, we don’t know.”

St. Louis school leaders and elected officials don’t want to see more armed security. Instead, they are .

“I do not think that we need guns in our schools, period,” said Sen. Karla May, D-St. Louis, in an interview with The Independent after the shooting. “What we need to do is strengthen our state gun laws and we won’t have to worry about people having unlimited access to ammunition, and clips that shoot 20 and 40 rounds at one time.”

May said arming teachers and people in the school sends a certain message to the children. 

“And that’s not the message we want to send,” May said. “We want a safe, peaceful environment for our kids to grow up in. And we can do that by strengthening the gun laws in this state.”

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In a new video breakdown, The 74’s Mark Keierleber talks through these recent incidents, summarizes experts’ concerns about an ongoing coordinated campaign, and shares some of the jaw-dropping footage that’s emerged from these errant police calls. Watch his deep dive.

The Biden administration on Tuesday urged school districts nationwide to refrain from subjecting students to “continuous surveillance” if the use of digital monitoring tools — already accused of targeting at-risk youth — are likely to trample students’ rights. 

The White House recommendation was included in an in-depth but non-binding white paper, dubbed the that seeks to rein in the potential harms of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence technologies, from smart speakers featuring voice assistants to campus surveillance cameras with facial recognition capabilities. 

The blueprint, which was released by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and extends far beyond the education sector, lays out five principles: Tools that rely on artificial intelligence should be safe and effective, avoid discrimination, ensure reasonable privacy protections, be transparent about their practices and offer the ability to opt out “in favor of a human alternative.”

Though the blueprint lacks enforcement, schools and education technology companies should expect greater federal scrutiny soon. In , the White House announced that the Education Department would release by early 2023 recommendations on schools’ use of artificial intelligence that “define specifications for the safety, fairness and efficacy of AI models used within education” and introduce “guardrails that build on existing education data privacy regulations.” 

During , Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said officials at the department “embrace utilizing Ed Tech to enhance learning” but recognize “the need for us to change how we do business.” The future guidance, he said, will focus on student data protections, ensuring that digital tools are free of biases and incorporate transparency so parents know how their children’s information is being used.

“This has to be baked into how we do business in education, starting with the systems that we have in our districts but also teacher preparation and teacher training as well,” he said.

Amelia Vance, president and founder of Public Interest Privacy Consulting, said the document amounts to a “massive step forward for the advocacy community, the scholars who have been working on AI and have been pressuring the government and companies to do better.” 

The blueprint, which offers a harsh critique of and systems that predict student success based on factors like poverty, follows in-depth reporting by The 74 on schools’ growing use of digital surveillance and the tech’s impact on student privacy and civil rights.

But local school leaders should ultimately decide whether to use digital student monitoring tools, said Noelle Ellerson Ng, associate executive director of advocacy and governance at AASA, The School Superintendents Association. Ellerson Ng opposes “unilateral federal action to prohibit” the software.

“That’s not the appropriate role of the federal government to come and say this cannot happen,” she said. “But smart guardrails that allow for good practices, that protect students’ safety and privacy, that’s a more appropriate role.”

The nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology praised the report. The group recently released a survey highlighting the potential harms of student activity monitoring on at-risk youth, who are already disproportionately disciplined and referred to the police as a result. In a statement Tuesday, it said the blueprint makes clear “the ways in which algorithmic systems can deepen inequality.” 

“We commend the White House for considering the diverse ways in which discrimination can occur, for challenging inappropriate and irrelevant data uses and for lifting up examples of practical steps that companies and agencies can take to reduce harm,” CEO Alexandra Reeve Givens said in a media release. 

The document also highlights several areas where artificial intelligence has been beneficial, including improved agricultural efficiency and algorithms that have been used to identify diseases. But the technologies, which have grown rapidly with few regulations, have introduced significant harm, it notes, including that screen job applicants and facial recognition technology that . 

After the pandemic shuttered schools nationwide in early 2020 and pushed students into makeshift remote learning, companies that sell digital activity monitoring software to schools saw an increase in business. But the tools have faced significant backlash for subjecting students to relentless digital surveillance. 

In April, Massachusetts Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey warned in a report the technology could carry significant risks — particularly for students of color and LGBTQ youth — and promoted a “need for federal action to protect students’ civil rights, safety and privacy.” Such concerns have become particularly acute as states implement new anti-LGBTQ laws and abortion bans and advocates warn that digital surveillance tools could expose expose youth to legal peril. 

Vance said that she and others focused on education and privacy “had no idea this was coming,” and that it would focus so heavily on schools. Over the last year, the department sought input from civil rights groups and technology companies, but Vance said that education groups had lacked a meaningful seat at the table. 

The lack of engagement was apparent, she said, by the document’s failure to highlight areas where artificial intelligence has been beneficial to students and schools. For example, the document discusses a tool used by universities to predict which students were likely to drop out. It considered students’ race as a predictive factor, leading to discrimination fears. But she noted that if implemented equitably, such tools can be used to improve student outcomes. 

“Of course there are a lot of privacy and equity and ethical landmines in this area,” Vance said. “But we also have schools who have done this right, who have done a great job in using some of these systems to assist humans in counseling students and helping more students graduate.” 

Ellerson Ng, of the superintendents association, said her group is still analyzing the blueprint’s on-the-ground implications, but that student data privacy efforts present schools with “a balancing act.”

“You want to absolutely secure the privacy rights of the child while understanding that the data that can be generated, or is generated, has a role to play, too, in helping us understand where kids are, what kids are doing, how a program is or isn’t working,” she said. “Sometimes that’s broader than just a pure academic indicator.”

Others have and just of recommendations from civil rights groups and tech companies. Some of the most outspoken privacy proponents and digital surveillance critics, such as Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, argued it falls short of a critical policy move: outright bans.

As Cahn and other activists mount campaigns against student surveillance tools, they’ve highlighted how student data can wind up in the hands of the police.

“When police and companies are rolling out new and destructive forms of AI every day, we need to push pause across the board on the most invasive technologies,” he said in a media release. “While the White House does take aim at some of the worst offenders, they do far too little to address the everyday threats of AI, particularly in police hands.”