Southern California school district monitors students' online posts

A Southern California school district is trying to stop cyber bullying and a host of other teenage ills by monitoring the public posts students make on social media outlets in a programme that has stirred debate about what privacy rights teenage students have when they fire up their smartphones.

Glendale Unified School District hired Geo Listening last year to track posts by its 14,000 or so middle and high school students.

The district approached the company in hopes of curtailing online bullying, drug use and other problems after two area teenagers committed suicide last year.

The company expects to be monitoring about 3,000 schools worldwide by the end of the year, according to its founder, Chris Frydrych.

The Glendale district is paying US$40,500 to Geo Listening for the company's computers to scour public posts by students on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, blogs and other sites.

Analysts are alerted to terms that suggest suicidal thoughts, bullying, vandalism and even the use of obscenities, among other things. When they find posts they think should spur an intervention or anything that violates schools' student codes of conduct, the company alerts the campus.

The district began a pilot programme to monitor students online last year at its three high schools, Glendale, Hoover and Crescenta Valley.

"We think it's been working very well," said the district's superintendent, Dick Sheehan . "It's designed around student safety and making sure kids are protected."

Some students say they are bothered by the monitoring, even if it's intended to help them.

"We all know social media is not a private place, not really a safe place," said Young Cho, 16, a junior at Hoover High.

"But it's not the same as being in school. It's students' expression of their own thoughts and feelings to their friends. For the school to intrude in that area ... I understand they can do it, but I don't think it's right."

The company did not have a list of students' names and instead used "deductive reasoning" to link public accounts to students, Frydrych said. It also only looked at public postings.

Brendan Hamme, an attorney with the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the district was walking a fine line. The programme was "sweeping and far afield of what is necessary to ensure student safety," he said.