Ohio School Districts Use Surveillance Software to Monitor Student Devices

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

This story mentions suicide. If you or someone you know needs support now call, text or chat the 988 Lifeline.

Ohio’s largest school district recently started using surveillance software on students’ devices.

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

“This is an added layer of security to ensure students are not visiting unapproved sites,” she said in an email. “Gaggle employs advanced technology and human insight to review students’ use of online tools 24/7/365 days a week and provides real-time analysis, swiftly flagging any potentially concerning behavior or content; this includes signs of self-harm, depression, substance abuse, cyberbullying, or other harmful situations.”

Gaggle is currently partnered with about 1,500 school districts across the country, but would not answer how many of those districts are in Ohio, Gaggle spokesperson Shelby Goldman said.

“We have a practice to not answer questions about specific school districts,” she said in an email.

Ohio’s three largest school districts — Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati — use Gaggle. Cleveland did not answer questions the Ohio Capital Journal sent about Gaggle.

Cincinnati Public Schools started using Gaggle in 2013 and it is active for all grades, according to the district. It costs the district $323,780 to use Gaggle.

“Cincinnati Public Schools prioritizes the safety and well-being of its students and staff, and utilizes Gaggle to monitor threats for individual student safety and the safety of each school community,” according to the district. “The District monitors content on District-provided devices and applications based on specific language and phrases, generating trigger alerts for review, rather than continuous monitoring.”

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

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

The company estimates it helped save 5,790 lives from 2018-23, according to their report from last fall.

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

Gaggle uses Artificial Intelligence technology to spot things that could be an issue and a Human Safety Team reviews them before contacting the school.

“Our reviewers are looking at the context to determine if an item is related to an actual concern or maybe a simple reference to something that is harmless when in context,” Goldman said in an email.

Gaggle can flag things as early warning signs or an imminent threat, which is treated with a higher level of urgency. It altered Ohio school districts to 1,275 student incidents that required immediate intervention in 2021, according to an October 2022 Facebook post from Gaggle.

Columbus City Schools, which has about 47,000 students, is implementing Gaggle in middle and high schools. Students can’t opt out of it.

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

During the district’s Gaggle pilot from April 2022 to December 2023, 3,942 pieces of content were looked at by Gaggle’s Safety Team which led to 226 “actionable student safety concerns that were sent to Emergency Contacts,” according to a school board document.

Even though Sharon Kim’s two students are in elementary school and won’t yet be affected by the district’s Gaggle implementation, she is concerned about the district using surveillance technology.

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

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

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter