By Sherman Smith, Kansas Reflector
LAWRENCE — The Lawrence public school district switched digital surveillance software vendors for the new school year while facing litigation that accuses school officials of unconstitutional spying on students, including high school journalists.
The district on Monday asked a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit brought by current and former students in part because it stopped using Gaggle, a surveillance program the district deployed in November 2023. But the district failed to disclose to the court that it is now monitoring students with ManagedMethods, which offers the same kind of surveillance of student devices, files, emails and online accounts.
Companies such as Gaggle and ManagedMethods enjoy lucrative contracts from school districts that buy into their promise of ensuring student safety by using artificial intelligence to warn school leaders of potential self-harm and concerning behavior. But academic research questions how effective the software is while raising concerns that such excessive surveillance may actually harm students’ learning, social development and mental health.
Student journalists at Lawrence High School identified numerous flaws in the Gaggle software, from a failure to detect test messages about self-harm to falsely flagging artwork as child pornography.
The software allowed school leaders to monitor the journalists’ work before it was published, an unlawful practice known as “prior restraint,” and some of the students’ files disappeared without warning. The district told student journalists in April 2024 they would be exempted from the surveillance, but the district continued to monitor them anyway.
Nine current and former students sued the school district, school board and assistant principal Greg Farley in August, alleging unconstitutional searches and seizures and First Amendment violations.
The lawsuit challenges the school district’s “decision and policy to subject all students to round-the-clock digital surveillance — scanning their files, flagging their speech, and removing their creative work from access, often without any notice, suspicion of suspected wrongdoing, or meaningful recourse,” according to the complaint filed in federal court. The surveillance extended to students’ personal phones and computers.
The complaint said school leaders had conducted “suspicionless searches and seizures of student expression on a scale and scope that no court has ever upheld — and that the Constitution does not permit.”
The district, which is represented by Wichita attorney Alan Rupe, argued in Monday’s court filings that the the claims are all moot because the district no longer uses Gaggle. Superintendent Jeanice Kerr Swift filed an affidavit with the court that says the contract with Gaggle expired during the summer and has not been renewed, and that the district “has stopped using Gaggle to monitor students.”
None of the court filings mention that the school is still monitoring students through a different software vendor.
In response to Kansas Reflector questions, the superintendent said the district switched vendors in a cost-saving move.
“In the regular course of business this fall, as part of the continuing effort to evaluate and streamline contracts with vendors and identify cost savings, the district implemented Managed Methods, a proficient tool that continues to monitor for student safety,” Kerr Swift said in an emailed statement.
The school agreed to pay Gaggle $53,000 under a contract for the 2024-25 school year. The superintendent said ManagedMethods will save the district about $35,000 this year. She didn’t respond to a follow-up question about how the two programs compare.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs didn’t respond to Kansas Reflector inquiries.
Research published in July in the Journal of Medical Internet Research and by the National Institutes of Health examined surveillance products from 17 companies, including Gaggle and ManagedMethods, and raised concerns about the use of the software in schools.
Alison O’Daffer, a Ph.D. student at University of California San Diego, Wendy Liu, an associate professor of marketing at the university, and Cinnamon Bloss, director of the Center for Empathy and Technology at the university, produced the study. The authors found “a notable lack of transparency” about how the programs work, and questioned whether they were effective in preventing violence. They also pointed to the potential harm the programs could have on students.
“Excessive surveillance may lead to a loss of students’ intimate privacy which can impede their learning, social development, and mental health,” the authors wrote in their summary. “Sharing of student data with outside companies also exposes such data to wider cybersecurity attacks. The sensitivity of the topic area, an opaque market, a lack of empirical assessment of effectiveness, and the growing prowess of data extraction and analysis are concerning.
“These factors, taken together with trade-offs of decreased privacy and increased cybersecurity risks, suggest that the school-based online surveillance industry may require more oversight from regulators, greater monitoring from the public, and more thorough risk assessment.”
