Senior reporter Jo Napolitano spent nearly a year and a half calling 630 high schools in every state plus Washington, D.C. to test whether they would admit a 19-year-old Venezuelan transplant who spoke little English and whose education was interrupted after ninth grade. Using her own name, she told school officials the new arrival was her nephew, that he had recently moved to their district and was eager to resume his studies. 

“Hector Guerrero,” a stand-in for others like him, was refused 330 times, including more than 200 denials in states where he had a legal right to attend according to his age. Many schools, including those that reluctantly accepted him, tried hard to steer Hector to GED programs, adult education or community college — anything but public school.

The 74’s investigation, which exposed a pervasive hostility and suspicion toward older newcomers, proved enrollment for this group is arbitrary across the map, with little consistency within states, counties or school districts: Staffers within the very same building sometimes disagreed. 

And those answering these high-stakes enrollment questions — from temporary office workers to school principals — often provided bad information. 

Almost all 50 states and D.C. have laws establishing a maximum age for public school enrollment. In 35 states and the District of Columbia, general education students can attend high school to at least 20 — often to 21. 

The 74 reached out to 25 states and the U.S. Capitol where Hector was within the maximum enrollment age but faced a high volume of rejections to alert education department officials to our findings.

“It is very concerning that there is confusion among school districts about this issue,” said Jackie Matthews of the Illinois State Board of Education. “We are updating our enrollment and registration guidance to clarify the maximum age of enrollment and are issuing additional guidance to address specific questions about enrolling newcomer students. We hope to bring greater clarity to the field.”

Illinois, where students can stay in high school until age 21, had among the highest refusal rates of any state in the country — 25 out of 32 schools turned Hector away.

In Chicago alone, he was rejected by seven out of eight high schools — and was likely to be refused by one other. Among the rejections: Benito Juarez Community Academy, founded in 1977 when a group of Latina mothers demanded a bilingual high school in their neighborhood.

“We are concerned anytime we hear reports that a prospective student and/or family member may have been turned away from their right to a free public education,” a spokeswoman for the city’s public schools, which serve 323,251 children, wrote in an email. “We have shared the findings on specific schools and are doubling down on our efforts to ensure those particular schools — and all staff — understand the law and our own CPS policies.”

The school system, like many other districts and state education departments around the country, noted it has long taken steps to educate staff about newcomers’ rights. Chicago Public Schools, which at the district level has publicly welcomed immigrant families — many arriving to the city after being bused from southern states — called it “a matter of rightful presence.”

The New Mexico Public Education Department’s general counsel drafted a memorandum to all districts and charters outlining their legal obligations to these and other students. A spokeswoman there confirmed the action is in response to The 74’s findings. The memo was sent out in early August.

“School districts and charter schools have a responsibility to educate these students regardless of  their relative academic ability or likelihood of success,” it reads. “They are entitled to receive as much education as other students, until graduation or equivalent, or aging out of the public school system.” 

State education officials in Michigan say they need additional legislative action to guarantee students’ rights. Spokesman Bob Wheaton said current state law is silent on whether districts must enroll prospective students who will turn 19 or 20 during the school year — even though the law states such students are eligible to attend and school districts receive state aid for supporting them. 

“State law says these students are eligible to attend but doesn’t say schools must enroll them,” Wheaton wrote. “That’s why we support legislation to change that.” 

Hector was turned down by 11 of 16 Michigan high schools with one other saying it would likely refuse him. Wheaton said a team of staffers within the department is working to explore and recommend a change to the statute’s language.

He said The 74’s investigation “shines a light on the need for states to improve not just their policy in this area but the implementation of their policy.”

Officials in D.C., where Hector was rejected by 6 out of 7 schools, also vowed to take action on the issue before the start of the academic year. The Office of the State Superintendent of Education will “ensure staff consistently share key resources and information with any student or family that contacts a school about enrollment, so that the correct process can be followed and the student enrolled,” a spokesman wrote. 

The 74 called 20 high schools in Georgia, where students have a right to attend until age 21, and received 14 refusals and two likely rejections. The state education department did not pledge to take any additional steps to ensure immigrant students’ rights based on our findings — but the Atlanta Public Schools had a starkly different reaction. 

A district administrator who works with multilingual learners reached out to The 74 two days after our story published and said the 50,000-student school system had been “diligently educating our registrars to ensure no eligible student is denied enrollment in our district.” She said it intended to take further steps based on our findings. 

State education department officials in Minnesota, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, Mississippi and South Carolina said they will reach out to all of the individual schools that refused Hector — in addition to numerous other measures — while Colorado said it will contact the districts as a whole.   

Colorado will also advise school superintendents of their responsibility toward these students at upcoming presentations and conferences, a spokesman said. It will highlight enrollment in the commissioner’s monthly communication to superintendents for August and include periodic reminders throughout the school year.

Virginia, where Hector was accepted by just 1 out of 11 schools, also pledged to act on our findings. 

“Your reporting showed that a number of our school divisions could use a refresher on the current enrollment requirements, so we are using the start of the school year as an opportunity to remind all divisions of the obligations involving enrollment,” state education officials said. “It is not something we would usually send.”

The North Dakota Department of Public Instruction holds an annual workshop in the summer for school administrators, typically in August, to help prepare for the new school year. At this year’s gathering, a spokesperson said, the department will remind administrators of the state law about maximum age for school admittance — and ask that they ensure staffers who handle enrollment are made aware of it. 

North Dakota must admit all students who have not turned 21 by Aug. 1 of that school year.

“This reminder will certainly be verbal and I suspect there will also be a written reminder as well,” the spokesperson said. “I’m sure your story will be mentioned.”

The department has also reached out to the two high schools that refused Hector. 

The 74 contacted a minimum of five high schools in each state. Napolitano then added hundreds more in various locations across the country based primarily on the number and percentage of Hispanic and immigrant residents living there. The calls, which numbered in the thousands, were made between February 2023 and May 2024. They were recorded in those states that allow for one-party consent. 

Roughly 1.1 million people ages 18 to 20 entered the United States between 2012 and 2021, according to the Migration Policy Institute. 

The 74 aimed to expose how schools handle enrollment requests for older immigrant  students in this openly xenophobic era, one in which the southern border has become a hate-fueled political weapon and more and more Americans say they no longer view immigration as good for the country despite the economic boost newcomers bring. 

Conservative forces have been trying to bar undocumented children from school for several years. They now want schools to collect information on students’ immigration status when they enroll and charge tuition for undocumented children or the children of undocumented parents. Such steps would defy — and potentially set the stage to overturn — Plyler v. Doe, the landmark 1982 Supreme Court ruling that a child cannot be denied a public education based on immigration status. 

Texas, which has some of the most restrictive immigration laws in the nation and is constantly pushing for even more draconian measures to keep new arrivals out, had among the worst acceptance rates in the nation: 18 of 29 schools refused to admit Hector. Two others said they were likely to turn him away. 

The Texas Education Agency said it shared The 74’s findings with the state’s Special Investigations Unit. It’s unclear what action may be taken. In Texas, where roughly 1 in 6 residents is an immigrant, students can remain in high school until age 21 and, if a school district accepts them, up to age 26. 

State education officials in Alaska, Hawaii and Maine — where Hector was denied by 16 of 27 total schools — did not respond to repeated calls and emails asking for comment. 

Educators and advocates from across the country reached out to The 74 on their own shortly after our June 17 investigation was published to report that these discriminatory enrollment practices were widespread — sometimes involving immigrants as young as 17.

Several said they were heartened to hear at least some states are moving quickly to re-enforce the law.

“I believe that when people are reminded of the facts and stop to think about the importance of allowing all students to pursue an education, they will push for positive change,” said student immigration advocate and policy expert Timothy Boals. 

Adam Strom, of Re-Imagining Migration, said immigrant students still face barriers once they enter school, but getting through the door is a crucial first step.

“That work begins, but does not end, with ensuring that all eligible students have unfettered access to education,” he said. “There is more work to be done to ensure equitable educational opportunities, however this is a hopeful start.”

The approach, known as “balanced” literacy, has been dominant in U.S. classrooms for decades, but has come under fire recently amid research and reporting exposing its shortcomings. Criticism crescendoed this fall after the release of the influential Sold a Story podcast, which linked America’s “reading crisis” to schools’ use of literacy materials that teach children to guess words they don’t know based first on pictures and sentence structure — a method called “three cueing.”

But actually ridding classrooms of these approaches may prove challenging. Since Oct. 20 when the podcast launched, districts have continued to make large purchases of materials that include the problematic three-cueing tactics.

Over that time span, at least 225 districts have spent over $1.5 million on new books, trainings and curriculums linked to three cueing, according to The 74’s review of their purchase orders accessed through the data service GovSpend. Two districts — Palatine, Illinois and Conroe, Texas — each spent over $170,000 on the materials and four others spent more than $50,000.

Previous analyses have highlighted sales going to the reading materials’ primary publisher, finding some large school systems had spent $10 million or more over the last decade. But this report is the first known to zero in on individual districts’ purchasing of the key authors in question, spending decisions made during a national re-examination of literacy instruction.

Along with books and worksheets, at least nine districts indicated that they had paid for new professional development in the flawed literacy approaches and schools made at least 85 purchases of an assessment system for early readers rife with inconsistencies.

The numbers likely understate the total because school districts in many cases have not yet submitted their more recent purchase orders to the GovSpend database, a process which can take several months, GovSpend staff said. From Oct. 21 to Nov. 31, the database shows over $1.2 million in total spending on the curricular materials, and from Dec. 1 through Feb. 27, the date The 74 pulled the figures, under $350,000.

Matthew Mugo Fields, president of New Hampshire-based Heinemann, the publisher at the center of Sold a Story, said none of his company’s literacy programs are designed to prioritize guessing.

“Guessing at words in lieu of decoding is not the instructional intent of those programs,” he said.

In some cases, district officials stood by the literacy materials, saying their teachers swear by them. Others defended their purchases as one tool among many at educators’ disposal for teaching kids how to read, acknowledging that they were insufficient on their own.

Krissy Hufnagel, curriculum director for schools in Mason, Ohio, the state where balanced literacy first took root, said her district had to bolster their supply of books after losing some of the titles they sent home with families during the pandemic. She has followed along for years the debate over how best to teach literacy, she said, and “absolutely” agrees with her district’s $69,500 purchase in October of guided reading materials for first graders from the Fountas and Pinnell Classroom, one of the key curriculums whose efficacy has been cast into doubt.

“It’s just one piece of the puzzle,” Hufnagel said. “We purchased decodables, we purchased read-alouds and we purchased guided, leveled books.”

Decodable books encourage young readers to develop their skills in phonics by using words they can sound out and by excluding pictures that would give away challenging words. Schools are increasingly prioritizing phonics-based instruction thanks to a vast body of research documenting its central role in how young children can become strong readers.

Heinemann says it is working to incorporate its stand-alone phonics materials into its other existing programs. In the Oct. 21 to Feb. 27 timeframe, 13 districts’ purchase orders mentioned phonics and totaled roughly $4,300.

Timothy Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Chicago studying early literacy, described the mix-and-match approach as a “bandage.” The most common curriculums that incorporate cueing — the Reading Recovery program, Lucy Calkins’s “Units of Study” and Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell’s “Leveled Literacy Intervention” — have a limited research base, he said.

“You’re actually teaching kids to read like poor readers rather than like good readers,” he said. Students may still make progress using those techniques, but their gains are “overwhelmingly” better when learning via a more structured, phonics-driven approach.

Vicky Wieben is a parent who said she’s seen the harms of three cueing first hand. When her son struggled to read in the early grades, their school in an affluent suburban district outside Des Moines, Iowa, sent home books from the Reading Recovery program along with laminated instructions for the parents. The sheet told her to prompt her son to look at the picture when he didn’t know a word, then use the surrounding words for context and, if none of that worked, see if he could sound it out using the letters, she said.

“Anything that took any kind of sounding out … he would just be silent,” Wieben said. His teacher joked that the child’s imagined stories were better than the books themselves. But the mother knew that was a red flag. “He would make up what he was seeing in the picture and hope that that was good enough,” she said.

Her son, now a seventh grader, still has “holes and gaps” even in elementary school content, she said, and tested at a third-grade level in sixth grade.

Millions of other youngsters have had similar struggles. In 2022, national exams showed two-thirds of U.S. fourth graders were below proficient in reading, the age by which educators hope young people will have finished learning to read and begun reading to learn. Scores dipped after the pandemic, but even before COVID, only 35% of learners notched at or above proficient.

In an effort to turn things around, more than half of states have passed measures promoting the “science of reading,” an approach that, compared to balanced literacy, places a greater emphasis on sounding out words.

Sara Hunton, curriculum coordinator for Portales schools in New Mexico, said her district had to purchase “supplemental materials” after the state’s 2019 law because the Leveled Literacy Intervention program they use isn’t on the state’s approved list.

Researchers like Shanahan emphasize that the debates are “not black and white,” and that studies show young learners need not just phonics instruction, but also lessons in vocabulary and access to challenging reading material, among other things.

In 2022, Lucy Calkins, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College once revered for her literacy program, updated her Units of Study curriculum to give students more direct instruction in phonics. Fields, Heinemann’s president, said the Fountas and Pinnell Classroom is going through a similar update process and will be including more decodable books in its next iteration. Fields did not specify any elements of either program that the authors are removing and distanced their instruction from the three-cueing method.

“We don’t use, nor have we ever used, the term ‘three cueing,’ to refer to what it is that we do,” he said.

Michelle Faust, a literacy coach working in Lexington, South Carolina, was skeptical of the new Units of Study. Over a decade ago, she was trained in the Calkins approach, but soon saw its weaknesses in the classroom. Yet, she was pleasantly surprised with the updates.

“My kindergarten teachers have been working with the new Units [of Study] this year — and they are science of reading people — and they are happy with the revisions,” she said. “Lucy has taken the Sold a Story podcast to heart and revised accordingly.”

Updated or not, Terri Marculitis, director of curriculum and instruction for Middleborough Public Schools in Massachusetts, said her district will never again purchase materials from Fountas and Pinnell Classroom. The school system bought materials until last school year, she said, and the results were “poor at best.”

“We have students in high school who have significant gaps in foundational literacy,” she said. She attributes those holes to the flawed curriculum “100%.”

Fields did not respond directly when asked whether Heinemann’s sales had changed in the wake of Sold a Story, but said the company has had to have “clarifying conversations” with several school district customers in recent months.

Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell declined The 74’s request for an interview. Lucy Calkins sent a written statement.

“Our new publications are informed by the science of reading research, new research on comprehension and by ongoing classroom-based research,” she said. The professor, whose LLC through which districts hire her team for training is reportedly worth nearly $23 million, added that she holds monthly office hours to help educators implement her materials on the ground.

Emily Hanford, the American Public Media reporter who created the blockbuster Sold a Story series, said she’s not surprised schools are continuing to purchase the materials her podcast warned against. Yes, reading instruction needs to change, she said. Yes, schools need to do better. But “no one changes a culture quickly,” Hanford said.

“There are people who have been using these materials for a long time. … These ideas have been entrenched in American education for decades now, so things aren’t going to necessarily change quickly.”

See the full list of district purchase orders marked Oct. 21 though Feb. 27:

Megan Waskiewicz used to sit at the top of the bleachers, rest her back against the wall and hide her face behind the glow of a laptop monitor. While watching one of her five children play basketball on the court below, she knew she had to be careful. 

The mother from Pittsburgh didn’t want other parents in the crowd to know she was also looking at child porn.

Waskiewicz worked as a content moderator for Gaggle, a surveillance company that monitors the online behaviors of some 5 million students across the U.S. on their school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts. Through an algorithm designed to flag references to sex, drugs, and violence and a team of content moderators like Waskiewicz, the company sifts through billions of students’ emails, chat messages and homework assignments each year. Their work is supposed to ferret out evidence of potential self-harm, threats or bullying, incidents that would prompt Gaggle to notify school leaders and, in some cases, the police.

As a result, kids’ deepest secrets — like nude selfies and suicide notes — regularly flashed onto Waskiewicz’s screen. Though she felt “a little bit like a voyeur,” she believed Gaggle helped protect kids. But mostly, the low pay, the fight for decent hours, inconsistent instructions and stiff performance quotas left her feeling burned out. Gaggle’s moderators face pressure to review 300 incidents per hour and Waskiewicz knew she could get fired on a moment’s notice if she failed to distinguish mundane chatter from potential safety threats in a matter of seconds. She lasted about a year.

“In all honesty I was sort of half-assing it,” Waskiewicz admitted in an interview with The 74. “It wasn’t enough money and you’re really stuck there staring at the computer reading and just click, click, click, click.”

Content moderators like Waskiewicz, hundreds of whom are paid just $10 an hour on month-to-month contracts, are on the front lines of a company that claims it saved the lives of 1,400 students last school year and argues that the growing mental health crisis makes its presence in students’ private affairs essential. Gaggle founder and CEO Jeff Patterson has warned about “a tsunami of youth suicide headed our way” and said that schools have “a moral obligation to protect the kids on their digital playground.” 

Eight former content moderators at Gaggle shared their experiences for this story. While several believed their efforts in some cases did shield kids from serious harm, they also surfaced significant questions about the company’s efficacy, its employment practices and its effect on students’ civil rights.

Among the moderators who worked on a contractual basis, none had prior experience in school safety, security or mental health. Instead, their employment histories included retail work and customer service, but they were drawn to Gaggle while searching for remote jobs that promised flexible hours. 

They described an impersonal and cursory hiring process that appeared automated. Former moderators reported submitting applications online and never having interviews with Gaggle managers — either in-person, on the phone or over Zoom — before landing jobs.

Once hired, moderators reported insufficient safeguards to protect students’ sensitive data, a work culture that prioritized speed over quality, scheduling issues that sent them scrambling to get hours and frequent exposure to explicit content that left some traumatized. Contractors lacked benefits including mental health care and one former moderator said he quit after repeated exposure to explicit material that so disturbed him he couldn’t sleep and without “any money to show for what I was putting up with.”

Gaggle content moderators encompass as many as 600 contractors at any given time and just two dozen work as employees who have access to benefits and on-the-job training that lasts several weeks. Gaggle executives have sought to downplay contractors’ role with the company, arguing they use “common sense” to distinguish false flags generated by the algorithm from potential threats and do “not require substantial training.” 

While the experiences reported by Gaggle’s moderator team resemble those of social media platforms like Meta-owned Facebook, Patterson said his company relies on “U.S.-based, U.S.-cultured reviewers as opposed to outsourcing that work to India or Mexico or the Philippines,” as the social media giant does. He rebuffed former moderators who said they lacked sufficient time to consider the severity of a particular item.

“Some people are not fast decision-makers. They need to take more time to process things and maybe they’re not right for that job,” he told The 74. “For some people, it’s no problem at all. For others, their brains don’t process that quickly.”

Executives also sought to minimize the contractors’ access to students’ personal information; a spokeswoman said they only see “small snippets of text” and lacked access to what’s known as students’ “personally identifiable information.” Yet former contractors described reading lengthy chat logs, seeing nude photographs and, in some cases, coming upon students’ names. Several former moderators said they struggled to determine whether something should be escalated as harmful due to “gray areas,” such as whether a Victoria’s Secret lingerie ad would be considered acceptable or not. 

“Those people are really just the very, very first pass,” Gaggle spokeswoman Paget Hetherington said. “It doesn’t really need training, it’s just like if there’s any possible doubt with that particular word or phrase it gets passed on.” 

Molly McElligott, a former content moderator and customer service representative, said management was laser focused on performance metrics, appearing more interested in business growth and profit than protecting kids. 

“I went into the experience extremely excited to help children in need,” McElligott wrote in an email. Unlike the contractors, McElligott was an employee at Gaggle, where she worked for five months in 2021 before taking a position at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in New York. “I realized that was not the primary focus of the company.”

Gaggle is part of a burgeoning campus security industry that’s seen significant business growth in the wake of mass school shootings as leaders scramble to prevent future attacks. Patterson, who founded the company in 1999 by offering student email accounts that could be monitored for pornography and cursing, said its focus now is mitigating the pandemic-driven youth mental health crisis.

Patterson said the team talks about “lives saved” and child safety incidents at every meeting, and they are open about sharing the company’s financial outlook so that employees “can have confidence in the security of their jobs.”

‘We are just expendable’

Under the pressure of new federal scrutiny along with three other companies that monitor students online, Gaggle executives recently told lawmakers it relies on a “highly trained content review team” to analyze student materials and flag safety threats. Yet former contractors, who make up the bulk of Gaggle’s content review team, described their training as “a joke,” consisting of a slideshow and an online quiz, that left them ill-equipped to complete a job with such serious consequences for students and schools.

As an employee on the company’s safety team, McElligott said she underwent two weeks of training but the disorganized instruction meant her and other moderators were “more confused than when we started.”

Former content moderators have also flocked to employment websites like Indeed.com to warn job seekers about their experiences with the company, often sharing reviews that resembled the former moderators’ feedback to The 74.

“If you want to be not cared about, not valued and be completely stressed/traumatized on a daily basis this is totally the job for you,” one anonymous reviewer wrote on Indeed. “Warning, you will see awful awful things. No they don’t provide therapy or any kind of support either.

“That isn’t even the worst part,” the reviewer continued. “The worst part is that the company does not care that you hold them on your backs. Without safety reps they wouldn’t be able to function, but we are just expendable.” 

As the first layer of Gaggle’s human review team, contractors analyze materials flagged by the algorithm and decide whether to escalate students’ communications for additional consideration. Designated employees on Gaggle’s Safety Team are in charge of calling or emailing school officials to notify them of troubling material identified in students’ files, Patterson said.

Gaggle’s staunchest critics have questioned the tool’s efficacy and describe it as a student privacy nightmare. In March, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey urged greater federal oversight of Gaggle and similar companies to protect students’ civil rights and privacy. In a report, the senators said the tools could surveil students inappropriately, compound racial disparities in school discipline and waste tax dollars.

The information shared by the former Gaggle moderators with The 74 “struck me as the worst-case scenario,” said attorney Amelia Vance, the co-founder and president of Public Interest Privacy Consulting. Content moderators’ limited training and vetting, as well as their lack of backgrounds in youth mental health, she said, “is not acceptable.”

In its recent letter to lawmakers, Gaggle described a two-tiered review procedure but didn’t disclose that low-wage contractors were the first line of defense. CEO Patterson told The 74 they “didn’t have nearly enough time” to respond to lawmakers’ questions about their business practices and didn’t want to divulge proprietary information. Gaggle uses a third party to conduct criminal background checks on contractors, Patterson said, but he acknowledged they aren’t interviewed before getting placed on the job.

“There’s a lot of contractors. We can’t do a physical interview of everyone and I don’t know if that’s appropriate,” he said. “It might actually introduce another set of biases in terms of who we hire or who we don’t hire.”

‘Other eyes were seeing it’

In a previous investigation, The 74 analyzed a cache of public records to expose how Gaggle’s algorithm and content moderators subject students to relentless digital surveillance long after classes end for the day, extending schools’ authority far beyond their traditional powers to regulate speech and behavior, including at home. Gaggle’s algorithm relies largely on keyword matching and gives content moderators a broad snapshot of students’ online activities including diary entries, classroom assignments and casual conversations between students and their friends. 

After the pandemic shuttered schools and shuffled students into remote learning, Gaggle oversaw a surge in students’ online materials and of school districts interested in their services. Gaggle reported a 20% bump in business as educators scrambled to keep a watchful eye on students whose chatter with peers moved from school hallways to instant messaging platforms like Google Hangouts. One year into the pandemic, Gaggle reported a 35% increase in references to suicide and self-harm, accounting for more than 40% of all flagged incidents. 

Waskiewicz, who began working for Gaggle in January 2020, said that remote learning spurred an immediate shift in students’ online behaviors. Under lockdown, students without computers at home began using school devices for personal conversations. Sifting through the everyday exchanges between students and their friends, Waskiewicz said, became a time suck and left her questioning her own principles. 

“I felt kind of bad because the kids didn’t have the ability to have stuff of their own and I wondered if they realized that it was public,” she said. “I just wonder if they realized that other eyes were seeing it other than them and their little friends.”

Student activity monitoring software like Gaggle has become ubiquitous in U.S. schools, and 81% of teachers work in schools that use tools to track students’ computer activity, according to a recent survey by the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. A majority of teachers said the benefits of using such tools, which can block obscene material and monitor students’ screens in real time, outweigh potential risks.

Likewise, students generally recognize that their online activities on school-issued devices are being observed, the survey found, and alter their behaviors as a result. More than half of student respondents said they don’t share their true thoughts or ideas online as a result of school surveillance and 80% said they were more careful about what they search online. 

A majority of parents reported that the benefits of keeping tabs on their children’s activity exceeded the risks. Yet they may not have a full grasp on how programs like Gaggle work, including the heavy reliance on untrained contractors and weak privacy controls revealed by The 74’s reporting, said Elizabeth Laird, the group’s director of equity in civic technology. 

“I don’t know that the way this information is being handled actually would meet parents’ expectations,” Laird said. 

Another former contractor, who reached out to The 74 to share his experiences with the company anonymously, became a Gaggle moderator at the height of the pandemic. As COVID-19 cases grew, he said he felt unsafe continuing his previous job as a caregiver for people with disabilities so he applied to Gaggle because it offered remote work. 

About a week after he submitted an application, Gaggle gave him a key to kids’ private lives — including, most alarming to him, their nude selfies. Exposure to such content was traumatizing, the former moderator said, and while the job took a toll on his mental well-being, it didn’t come with health insurance. 

“I went to a mental hospital in high school due to some hereditary mental health issues and seeing some of these kids going through similar things really broke my heart,” said the former contractor, who shared his experiences on the condition of anonymity, saying he feared possible retaliation by the company. “It broke my heart that they had to go through these revelations about themselves in a context where they can’t even go to school and get out of the house a little bit. They have to do everything from home — and they’re being constantly monitored.” 

Gaggle employees are offered benefits, including health insurance, and can attend group therapy sessions twice per month, Hetherington said. Patterson acknowledged the job can take a toll on staff moderators, but sought to downplay its effects on contractors and said they’re warned about exposure to disturbing content during the application process. He said using contractors allows Gaggle to offer the service at a price school districts can afford. 

“Quite honestly, we’re dealing with school districts with very limited budgets,” Patterson said. “There have to be some tradeoffs.” 

The anonymous contractor said he wasn’t as concerned about his own well-being as he was about the welfare of the students under the company’s watch. The company lacked adequate safeguards to protect students’ sensitive information from leaking outside the digital environment that Gaggle built for moderators to review such materials. Contract moderators work remotely with limited supervision or oversight, and he became especially concerned about how the company handled students’ nude images, which are reported to school districts and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Nudity and sexual content accounted for about 17% of emergency phone calls and email alerts to school officials last school year, according to Gaggle. 

Contractors, he said, could easily save the images for themselves or share them on the dark web. 

Patterson acknowledged the possibility but said he wasn’t aware of any data breaches. 

“We do things in the interface to try to disable the ability to save those things,” Patterson said, but “you know, human beings who want to get around things can.”

‘Made me feel like the day was worth it’

Vara Heyman was looking for a career change. After working jobs in retail and customer service, she made the pivot to content moderation and a contract position with Gaggle was her first foot in the door. She was left feeling baffled by the impersonal hiring process, especially given the high stakes for students. 

Waskiewicz had a similar experience. In fact, she said the only time she ever interacted with a Gaggle supervisor was when she was instructed to provide her bank account information for direct deposit. The interaction left her questioning whether the company that contracts with more than 1,500 school districts was legitimate or a scam. 

“It was a little weird when they were asking for the banking information, like ‘Wait a minute is this real or what?’” Waskiewicz said. “I Googled them and I think they’re pretty big.”

Heyman said that sense of disconnect continued after being hired, with communications between contractors and their supervisors limited to a Slack channel. 

Despite the challenges, several former moderators believe their efforts kept kids safe from harm. McElligott, the former Gaggle safety team employee, recalled an occasion when she found a student’s suicide note. 

“Knowing I was able to help with that made me feel like the day was worth it,” she said. “Hearing from the school employees that we were able to alert about self-harm or suicidal tendencies from a student they would never expect to be suffering was also very rewarding. It meant that extra attention should or could be given to the student in a time of need.” 

Susan Enfield, the superintendent of Highline Public Schools in suburban Seattle, said her district’s contract with Gaggle has saved lives. Earlier this year, for example, the company detected a student’s suicide note early in the morning, allowing school officials to spring into action. The district uses Gaggle to keep kids safe, she said, but acknowledged it can be a disciplinary tool if students violate the district’s code of conduct. 

“No tool is perfect, every organization has room to improve, I’m sure you could find plenty of my former employees here in Highline that would give you an earful about working here as well,” said Enfield, one of 23 current or former superintendents from across the country who Gaggle cited as references in its letter to Congress. 

“There’s always going to be pros and cons to any organization, any service,” Enfield told The 74, “but our experience has been overwhelmingly positive.”

True safety threats were infrequent, former moderators said, and most of the content was mundane, in part because the company’s artificial intelligence lacked sophistication. They said the algorithm routinely flagged students’ papers on the novels To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye. They also reported being inundated with spam emailed to students, acting as human spam filters for a task that’s long been automated in other contexts. 

Conor Scott, who worked as a contract moderator while in college, said that “99% of the time” Gaggle’s algorithm flagged pedestrian materials including pictures of sunsets and student’s essays about World War II. Valid safety concerns, including references to violence and self-harm, were rare, Scott said. But he still believed the service had value and felt he was doing “the right thing.”

McElligott said that managers’ personal opinions added another layer of complexity. Though moderators were “held to strict rules of right and wrong decisions,” she said they were ultimately “being judged against our managers’ opinions of what is concerning and what is not.” 

“I was told once that I was being overdramatic when it came to a potential inappropriate relationship between a child and adult,” she said. “There was also an item that made me think of potential trafficking or child sexual abuse, as there were clear sexual plans to meet up — and when I alerted it, I was told it was not as serious as I thought.” 

Patterson acknowledged that gray areas exist and that human discretion is a factor in deciding what materials are ultimately elevated to school leaders. But such materials, he said, are not the most urgent safety issues. He said their algorithm errs on the side of caution and flags harmless content because district leaders are “so concerned about students.” 

The former moderator who spoke anonymously said he grew alarmed by the sheer volume of mundane student materials that were captured by Gaggle’s surveillance dragnet, and pressure to work quickly didn’t offer enough time to evaluate long chat logs between students having “heartfelt and sensitive” conversations. On the other hand, run-of-the-mill chatter offered him a little wiggle room. 

“When I would see stuff like that I was like ‘Oh, thank God, I can just get this out of the way and heighten how many items per hour I’m getting,’” he said. “It’s like ‘I hope I get more of those because then I can maybe spend a little more time actually paying attention to the ones that need it.’” 

Ultimately, he said he was unprepared for such extensive access to students’ private lives. Because Gaggle’s algorithm flags keywords like “gay” and “lesbian,” for example, it alerted him to students exploring their sexuality online. Hetherington, the Gaggle spokeswoman, said such keywords are included in its dictionary to “ensure that these vulnerable students are not being harassed or suffering additional hardships,” but critics have accused the company of subjecting LGBTQ students to disproportionate surveillance. 

“I thought it would just be stopping school shootings or reducing cyberbullying but no, I read the chat logs of kids coming out to their friends,” the former moderator said. “I felt tremendous power was being put in my hands” to distinguish students’ benign conversations from real danger, “and I was given that power immediately for $10 an hour.” 

A privacy issue

For years, student privacy advocates and civil rights groups have warned about the potential harms of Gaggle and similar surveillance companies. Fourteen-year-old Teeth Logsdon-Wallace, a Minneapolis high school student, fell under Gaggle’s watchful eye during the pandemic. Last September, he used a class assignment to write about a previous suicide attempt and explained how music helped him cope after being hospitalized. Gaggle flagged the assignment to a school counselor, a move the teen called a privacy violation. 

He said it’s “just really freaky” that moderators can review students’ sensitive materials in public places like at basketball games, but ultimately felt bad for the contractors on Gaggle’s content review team. 

“Not only is it violating the privacy rights of students, which is bad for our mental health, it’s traumatizing these moderators, which is bad for their mental health,” he said. Relying on low-wage workers with high turnover, limited training and without backgrounds in mental health, he said, can have consequences for students. 

“Bad labor conditions don’t just affect the workers,” he said. “It affects the people they say they are helping.” 

Gaggle cannot prohibit contractors from reviewing students’ private communications in public settings, Heather Durkac, the senior vice president of operations, said in a statement. 

“However, the contractors know the nature of the content they will be reviewing,” Durkac said. “It is their responsibility and part of their presumed good and reasonable work ethic to not be conducting these content reviews in a public place.” 

Gaggle’s former contractors also weighed students’ privacy rights. Heyman said she “went back and forth” on those implications for several days before applying to the job. She ultimately decided that Gaggle was acceptable since it is limited to school-issued technology. 

“If you don’t want your stuff looked at, you can use Hotmail, you can use Gmail, you can use Yahoo, you can use whatever else is out there,” she said. “As long as they’re being told and their parents are being told that their stuff is going to be monitored, I feel like that is OK.” 

Logsdon-Wallace and his mother said they didn’t know Gaggle existed until his classroom assignment got flagged to a school counselor. 

Meanwhile, the anonymous contractor said that chat conversations between students that got picked up by Gaggle’s algorithm helped him understand the effects that surveillance can have on young people. 

“Sometimes a kid would use a curse word and another kid would be like, ‘Dude, shut up, you know they’re watching these things,’” he said. “These kids know that they’re being looked in on,” even if they don’t realize their observer is a contractor working from the couch in his living room. “And to be the one that is doing that — that is basically fulfilling what these kids are paranoid about — it just felt awful.” 

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.

Disclosure: Campbell Brown is the head of news partnerships at Facebook. Brown co-founded The 74 and sits on its board of directors.

“Not very good aim,” responds Randy Boyden, a school resource officer with the police department in South St. Paul, Minnesota, called in for backup that day by school staff.

“What are you going to do?” the brash fourth-grader spits back before taking another shot. 

Sydney, a victim of child abuse and neglect whose real name The 74 is shielding, suffers from multiple disorders and, as a result, struggles to regulate her behavior and emotions. She fell into an hours-long fit of rage that day after not wanting to go to Spanish class, including wielding a pair of scissors, throwing a chair against a classroom window and biting and kicking her teacher. She landed blows on several of the adults in the room and by the time the cops arrived, school staff had already restrained Sydney in an effort to de-escalate the situation.

“If you get it into my mouth, I’ll eat it,” Boyden tells the overwrought girl in an exchange that student disabilities experts saw as taunting and one called “really disturbing.”

Sydney throws two more crackers before she climbs onto a high cabinet, rips a speaker off the wall and flings it to the ground. At this moment, it seems most likely the student could hurt herself, yet it isn’t until she scampers down and jabs a SMART Board with a marker that the adults move in.

Special education teacher Tony Phillips and school Principal Terry Bretoi grab her by the elbows, force her to walk in circles and then lower her to the ground. As they press down on her arms and shoulders, Boyden and another police officer, Mellissa Cavalier, join in. The officers hold Sydney to the carpet by her kneecaps as she tries to break free, squirming and whimpering in distress. Eventually, she lets go of the marker, stops resisting and her 75-pound body goes limp. 

The final physical struggle inside her elementary school involving the police lasts for nearly six, difficult-to-watch minutes. Students like Sydney, Black and in special education, are among the most likely in the U.S. to be physically restrained in school. Except for the occasional cell phone video, however, the highly controversial tactic is rarely witnessed by outsiders. In Sydney’s case, the video documentation recorded on police body cameras is even more remarkable because it captures the second time in little more than a week that educators and those same two officers physically restrained the disabled girl during a mental health crisis.

Just eight days earlier, after she ran out of school, six adults dragged her by the limbs and forced her into the back of a police car where they locked her inside as she put words to her misery. 

“I hate school, I hate work and I want to die,” she says. “That’s what’s wrong.”

This story is based on records provided exclusively to The 74 by Sydney’s adoptive parents, including the police body-cam footage, audio recordings, police reports, special education reports, disciplinary records and other documents. The videos, after being edited to obscure Sydney’s identity, were shared with experts who commented for this story. The 74 sought out the officers and school staff in the videos, some of whom have since changed jobs or plan to soon. They either did not respond or declined to be interviewed.

After watching videos from both incidents, special education attorney Wendy Tucker said they reaffirmed The Center for Learner Equity’s opposition to police presence in schools, particularly when it comes to their interactions with children who are disabled. When George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in nearby Minneapolis, it generated a national conversation about police use of force. Dozens of districts nationwide cut ties with the police, who disproportionately arrest children with disabilities.

“This video demonstrates front and center the problem of mixing kids with disabilities and police officers,” said Tucker, the national nonprofit’s senior policy director. “This girl is the poster child for removing law enforcement from schools.” 

Imminent danger vs. property damage

For Sydney’s adoptive parents, whose real names were also changed to protect their daughter, the video footage from the two incidents in the winter of 2019 spurred a years-long campaign to hold officials accountable for the girl’s cuts, bruises and mental scars. In response, the Minnesota Department of Education found that school staff violated state law, but officers never faced similar sanctions. In late February, the education department sent a letter notifying Sydney’s parents that they would investigate an allegation that she “may have been mentally injured” by school staff.

Robert, the girl’s father, said that educators and police had only intensified his daughter’s struggles — a reality he said reflects America’s bleak mental health system. Rather than understanding the girl’s disabilities and calming the situation, he charged, they responded with excessive force and a desire to take control. It remains unclear the degree to which the two school resource officers were trained in how to de-escalate situations involving children with disabilities.

“Police aren’t designed to respond to this type of thing, it’s not their job,” Robert said. “Their job is to find the killer, it’s to stop the speeding car that robbed a bank. It’s not necessarily to respond to the school for a 9-year-old that’s having a mental health crisis.” 

Educators and police were clearly placed in a volatile situation with Sydney. Federal law requires school officials to accommodate Sydney and other children with special needs, but some educators have acknowledged they struggle to support students with the most significant behavioral health issues. Sydney’s case highlights those complexities and the challenges educators face when thrust into these highly fraught interactions. 

Sheldon Greenberg, a former police officer and education professor at Johns Hopkins University, offered a different assessment of how the police interacted with Sydney. Good officers have “an incredible sixth sense about people’s behavior” and follow a “use-of-force spectrum” that begins with verbal persuasion and moves up to physical confrontation. Officers can generally de-escalate situations without physical force, Greenberg said, and in responding to Sydney, the officers “followed the spectrum beautifully.” 

“They were patient, there was gentle talk in the beginning,” he said. Ultimately, he said that officers must assess crisis situations and prevent them from escalating. 

Sydney, already debilitated by childhood trauma, said she tries hard to forget about the times school staff and campus cops grabbed her arms and legs and held her down — at times in violation of state education law. 

“I just feel comforted knowing that I’m out of that school,” said Sydney, who switched elementary schools just weeks after the incidents and is now in middle school. She reflected on the source of her outbursts, which have grown less frequent. “I feel unloved and stuff, and a lot of sad and dark feelings.” 

Thousands of students in Minnesota and across the country are physically restrained at school each year despite efforts to curtail a practice that’s led to injuries and, in rare cases, death. In Minnesota, state law only allows educators to restrain disabled children in emergency situations where someone is in imminent danger of physical harm. Experts questioned whether Sydney’s behavior had reached that threshold and said that school officials appeared more concerned with preventing property damage. 

During the part of the incident inside the special education classroom captured on video, officials didn’t use physical force until she stabbed at the costly SMART Board. The state banned student restraints to prevent property damage in 2013. 

Robert believes that physical restraints are necessary when children present imminent danger to themselves or others. But in their interactions with Sydney, he believes the adults responded excessively. Rather than protecting Sydney, the police and school staff assaulted her, Robert alleged, and falsely imprisoned her when they secluded her in the back of the squad car.

“It wasn’t just the police trying to force her into the back of a police car,” Robert said, adding that school staff were similarly at fault. “Why, in this case, are they saying to the school employees, ‘Yeah, let’s force her into the back of the car — you can help.’”

The South St. Paul Public Schools acknowledged that they changed their practices after the state Education Department found they violated the law in restraining Sydney. The district said student privacy rules prohibited them from discussing the case further. The South St. Paul Police Department cleared the officers of any wrongdoing, the police chief said.

‘Such an extreme’

Both of the officers had interacted with Sydney before and knew at least some of her history. One of them, Cavalier, was there on one of the worst days: When the little girl was placed into foster care. Yet in the footage, she dismisses the girl’s distress as a desire to stay home and watch movies. 

“That’s the whole thing,” Cavalier says while Sydney is locked in the car, “she doesn’t want to be in school today.” 

Sydney was born with fetal alcohol syndrome to a mother whose losing battle with addiction had forced the family into homelessness. A victim of physical abuse and neglect, she was placed with her adoptive family after school staff watched her biological mother hit Sydney with a belt during a February 2017 meeting on campus, according to police records. Though school officials called police — including Cavalier — to the scene, Robert said their failure to immediately intervene shattered his adopted daughter’s trust in them.

“Nobody in the room made attempts to stop that from happening,” he said. “The principal was there and didn’t stop it immediately.”

On the same day Sydney was beaten by her mother and humiliated at school, Robert and Julia, who had begun the process to become foster parents, got the call: Sydney was in need of emergency placement. The couple scrambled to open their home as refuge to a child they knew little about. They fed her McDonald’s, collected her belongings — a teddy bear, hair brushes and clothes that had grown too tight — in a small pink bin and introduced her to their dogs Lucy, Finley and Lola. Lucy, a Pomeranian seemingly aware of the girl’s recurring nightmares, slept in Sydney’s bedroom every night for a year. 

By that time, Sydney, then 6, already had a history of school suspensions for aggressive behavior. First-time parents, Robert and Julia learned almost immediately that Sydney was struggling to identify and control her emotions. 

“Her body doesn’t know what the emotion she’s feeling is,” Robert said. “If you’re having this emotion and you don’t know what it is, she would tend to panic and freak out. Instead of going, ‘I feel sad, I feel happy,’ she didn’t know what those emotions actually were.” 

In addition to fetal alcohol syndrome, Sydney was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, ADHD and reactive attachment disorder, a serious condition that results when children’s basic needs for comfort, affection and care are not met. She was placed in special education, but Sydney’s parents said that school staff failed to fully comprehend the root causes of her outbursts, and instead wrote them off as willful misbehavior. The symptoms of trauma can mimic misbehavior, and Tucker, of The Center for Learner Equity, said it’s critical for educators to recognize that such actions are a form of communication. 

“When they’re communicating that they’re struggling or they’re having a hard time, the worst thing that you can do is exacerbate that by physically holding them down and taking more control from them,” she said. 

Sydney, who attends myriad therapies, said she’s “just matured a little bit” since the incidents in the video. Her parents say she’s made significant progress and they are not aware of any restraints in school since then. To her, there was no confusion about the source of her meltdowns. 

“I guess some trauma,” the self-aware 11-year-old said in an interview, adding that her biological mother was frequently absent and in jail. “So I guess, kind of neglect.”

Once in her new home, Sydney’s outbursts continued and Robert and Julia were getting beaten up as they tried to calm her, including the time Julia had to get stitches after getting hit in the lip. Such scenes may have deterred others, but for the couple, who would adopt Sydney in 2018, the bond had already been forged.

“We fell in love with her the first week she was here,” Robert said. “It was ‘This kid is so cool, I love this kid.’ Part of me didn’t want her to ever leave.”

Still, her behaviors were a force to be reckoned with, so they signed up for a training program on crisis prevention, which included instruction on de-escalation and how to use physical restraints. Parents don’t generally enroll in the program, which is designed for special education teachers and emergency responders. The course, Robert said, was “one of the best things that we have done.”

Ironically, at the same time the couple was attending a December 2019 training session, school staff called to report that Sydney was in crisis. Once they obtained the police body-cam footage of her getting pinned to the floor in the special education classroom, Robert and Julia said it was their training that allowed them to conclude that the restraints placed on their daughter differed drastically from what they had been taught.

‘Nowhere in [the training course] does it say ‘hold down their kneecaps and their elbows and their wrists, and twist them up,’” Julia said. “You have four adults on her already. Why do they go to such an extreme?”

‘Do we need to handcuff you?’

On the day she would find herself locked in a cop car, Sydney had been struggling in math class, so she fled. Overwhelmed, she bolted from school and stood in a nearby street, where she attempted to get struck by oncoming traffic. 

Yet officials don’t use force until she throws what her suspension report describes as “landscaping blocks.” One block comes close to striking Phillips, the special education teacher. Another clobbers a parked pickup truck. 

That’s when officer Cavalier gives Sydney an ultimatum — go back to school or wait in the back of her squad car — before tugging on the girl by her arm. 

“We can’t damage people’s property and we can’t hurt anybody,” Cavalier says before the girl tries to kick free and drops to her knees in the middle of the street. Together, Cavalier, Boyden and four school employees grab her arms and legs and force her into the car, where she puts up a fight. As she tries to escape from the back seat, Sydney at one point reaches for Boyden’s gun. 

“Do we need to handcuff you?” Cavalier asks Sydney in response. “I don’t want to do that but you can’t just start grabbing things that don’t belong to you.” 

Greenberg, the Johns Hopkins professor, said the public generally sees police use-of-force during extreme, worst-case scenarios. Though he said the video footage involving Sydney provides a limited window into those incidents, he felt the officers “showed incredible restraint before applying restraint.” 

“You can tell when someone is reaching a point that harm to self or harm to others is about to occur,” he said. “You just know it, you feel it and you know you have to do something to minimize that harm.”

Police officers who are stationed inside schools full time generally are given much greater discretion than educators in how they respond to disruptive students. Just last year, efforts in Minnesota to adopt modest regulations to officers’ restraint practices in schools fell short. State legislation would have prohibited cops from placing students in the face-down “prone restraint,” — like the one used on George Floyd — and would have required them to receive the same training as school staff. The state education department, which endorsed the reforms, will continue to promote the changes, assistant commissioner Daron Korte, who oversees student support services, told The 74.

“We just wanted to make sure that there’s at least a minimum level of training,” that officers know how to use safe restraint techniques and understand “that this should be used in a last-ditch emergency situation,” he said. 

While some advocates oppose all forms of student restraints, Robert and Julia believe that physical holds are necessary in some emergency situations if done properly. When Sydney was in the street, for example, school staff could have used a brief hold to move her to the grass. They also could have moved her to a room in the school with a padded floor and a mini-trampoline. Instead, they dragged her by the limbs and locked her in the back of the police car.

“Why would you let a child who says ‘I’m going to kill myself’ and ‘I’m going to go sit in that street and I’m going to get hit by a car,’ why wouldn’t you restrain them at that point so they don’t commit suicide?” Julia asked. “We’re not necessarily against restraint, but you have to have trusted people who are well trained, who are doing it with dignity and have the right intentions.” 

Similar situations have come up in the past. In 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union sued a Kentucky sheriff’s deputy for handcuffing two elementary school students above the elbow who were acting out as a result of their disabilities. One incident was captured in a viral cell phone video. That case ended with a $337,000 settlement. In 2020, the city of Flint, Michigan, paid $40,000 to settle a lawsuit accusing an officer of excessive force when he handcuffed a disabled 7-year-old boy for roughly an hour after he ran around on school bleachers and kicked a supply cart during an afterschool program. 

In Sydney’s case, West Resendes, a legal fellow with the ACLU’s disability rights program, said school staff used improper restraint techniques in both incidents to control the girl’s disability-related behaviors and shouldn’t have called the police for help. In their interactions with Sydney, he said that officials treated her “not as a human being but as an object” and were unclear about why she was being restrained.

“Seeing the male officer egg her on about not having good aim or wasting crackers was really disturbing — and it predictably and directly led to an escalation of the situation,” Resendes said.

‘Make sure that this doesn’t happen again’

Sydney is Black and her adoptive parents are white — a reality the couple said gave them a new perspective on the police and racial bias. On multiple occasions, her outbursts have prompted aggressive police responses. 

During one episode at the Mall of America, officers accused Robert of trying to abduct his daughter, he said. On another occasion, Robert had a gun pulled on him by a cop who mistook an exchange in the family car between him and a distraught Sydney as an assault. 

Though officers backed off once they understood the context, Robert thought the cop might shoot him. In 2016, that same officer was involved in the fatal shooting of a man in crisis outside a McDonald’s restaurant. He was shot 15 times. 

Sydney’s parents and special education advocates said that race was a likely factor in how educators and police responded and believe she may have been treated differently if she were white. 

Dave Webb, the district superintendent, declined to be interviewed but said in an email that the district does not use physical restraints to discipline students. He acknowledged they had to update their restraint procedures to match state law after the two incidents with Sydney but said they had not been held liable for using the tactic in a way that is racially discriminatory. 

“The district takes its obligation to comply with the laws governing restrictive procedures very seriously and provides ongoing training to its staff to comply with those legal requirements,” Webb said. 

Years of federal education data have found that students of color — especially those with disabilities — are disproportionately restrained in schools. In Minnesota, Black students were 11.8 percent of students in special education during the 2019-20 school year but were subjected to 27 percent of the physical holds documented in schools, according to state data. 

That school year, the latest for which state data is available, student restraints dropped by 25 percent, a change officials attributed to the pandemic as students learned from home during the second half of the year.

Initially, educators’ responses “looked textbook” when they talked calmly and tried to comfort Sydney, said Joshua Ladd, a staff attorney at the Minnesota Disability Law Center, but he faulted school staff for allowing police officers to take the lead in both situations as if they “had given up and just decided to start watching.” Ladd said that school staff were clearly unable to support Sydney’s needs and that her behaviors — such as bolting from class — were a form of communication. 

“I would describe her communication as saying ‘I’m not safe here and I can’t trust adults because adults have let me down my entire life,’” he said. “‘I have learned to protect myself and take care of myself because the adults around me have failed me.’”

After acquiring the body-cam footage, Sydney’s parents filed a formal complaint and a state education department investigation found that school staff broke the law when they restrained the girl in “non-emergency” situations, among other violations. The officers never faced any repercussions. Both incidents were investigated but no disciplinary action was taken against the two school resource officers, South St. Paul Police Chief William Messerich wrote in an email. He declined to comment further.

District officials were required to undergo training and update school policy to make clear that staff could not restrain kids to “prevent serious property damage” consistent with state law. They also required school staff to reassess Sydney’s special education services. 

“It already happened, there’s nothing you can do to go back in time to stop that from happening,” Korte, the assistant commissioner, said of the incidents. But moving forward, district staff were required to develop a strategy “to make sure that this didn’t happen again.”

Sydney’s parents were left longing for more. The interventions did little to help their daughter’s suffering, they said, or to hold officials accountable for pinning her to the ground. Robert, a mechanic, and Julia, a teacher, considered suing the district and the police, but were discouraged by the cost of hiring an attorney. 

A student maltreatment investigation could result in educators losing their licenses. Robert said he filed multiple complaints against the educators who restrained Sydney but the state initially declined to open an inquiry. He said that changed just weeks ago after Sydney’s therapy team submitted a report stating that she suffered trauma directly related to the restraints at school. 

The investigation raises the possibility that Sydney’s parents may get confirmation of something they’ve long maintained — that their daughter was abused in a manner that went beyond poor training or outdated policy.

They realize ​​other parents of disabled children never get near that level of resolution — and believe they may not have either without video evidence.

“How many kids, how many nonverbal kids, does it happen to?” Robert asked. “Kids that can’t go home and tell their parents ‘Yeah, there were four adults pinning me to the ground today.’ They just come home and destroy the house and the parents are left wondering what is going on.”

As a talent show came to a close in the winter of 2007, hundreds of children and parents poured out of a Minneapolis high school only to be met by the piercing blast of gunfire. 

North High School students and their parents rushed back inside and police raced to investigate the commotion. But the guns and bullet shells were nowhere to be found. A campus security guard who helped in the search, they’d soon learn, had already stashed them in his pockets and, later, his wife’s purse. 

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The weapons turned up that evening outside a gas station a few blocks from the school where the security guard, Kelly Woods, got into a heated altercation with his ex-girlfriend. Police, who observed witnesses screaming “They’ve got a gun,” arrested Woods at gunpoint.

For Woods, the arrest added to a lengthy criminal record, including drug trafficking, auto theft, armed robbery and a federal firearms conviction, which didn’t stop him from becoming a security guard in charge of protecting students. For police officer Charles Adams III, the security guard’s colleague at North High, the ordeal became part of his internal disciplinary record. When officials pursued fresh criminal charges against Woods, Adams pressed them to “go easy” on a man he described as a “good guy,” according to police records obtained by The 74. The move infuriated the lead prosecutor on the case. Assistant County Attorney Diane Krenz said it was the first time in her decades-long career an officer had pressured her to go lenient on a suspect, according to the records. The last thing the community needed, she said, were “more guns on the North Side.” 

The incident linked to Adams — the decorated North High School football coach and now-former cop with a national reputation — is included among dozens of allegations and disciplinary findings against campus police officers recently stationed inside Minneapolis public schools that include claims of police brutality, racial discrimination and domestic violence. 

In one incident, officers were accused of beating and arresting a man for carrying a handgun despite having a concealed carry permit. In another, police were accused of pounding in a man’s face because he littered the crust from a slice of pizza. Both incidents ended with court settlements, a common outcome in police brutality lawsuits against Minneapolis officers that has cost taxpayers millions of dollars. The city paid $235,000 in 2010 to settle a lawsuit after a man said at least six officers punched, kicked and tasered him during a traffic stop. One of the accused officers became a school-based cop, a position he held until last year.

After George Floyd was murdered in 2020 at the hands of a Minneapolis officer, the city school board was quick to end its longstanding contract with the police department for campus cops, a move that some critics said was politically motivated. Floyd’s death put a national spotlight on police brutality and excessive force. The 74 obtained public officer misconduct records and court files to explore whether similar interactions between police and students had transpired in Minneapolis classrooms — and if such incidents may have contributed to the school board’s decision to cut ties with the department. Ultimately, few of the records involved on-campus incidents or youth, but the lengthy list of allegations and disciplinary findings — many alleging violence on the part of police — raised separate questions about how the officers wound up inside schools in the first place. They also offer new context for an ongoing national debate about the role police should play in schools and whether they’re best equipped to ensure students are safe. 

Ben Fisher, an assistant criminal justice professor at Florida State University whose research focuses on the efficacy of school-based police, said the Minneapolis officers’ disciplinary and court records “seemed quite problematic.”

“Schools contain some of our most vulnerable people in society,” Fisher said. “If we are putting officers in there who have abused their power in some way outside of the school, it’s a very scary proposition to imagine that track record following them into schools.”

Minneapolis Police Department spokesman Garrett Parten said officers’ disciplinary records were considered before they were stationed inside schools, but he declined to comment on specific allegations or findings against officers. School resource officers took the job to build trust between youth and police, serve as positive role models and ensure children could learn in a safe environment, he said in an email. Effects of the school board’s decision to end the school resource officer program, he said, “will become evident over time.”

Dozens of school districts across the country severed their ties with police after Floyd’s murder, but broader police reform efforts have so far faltered. In Washington, legislation that sought to improve transparency around officer misconduct and make it easier to prosecute bad cops, among other changes, failed as bipartisan negotiations broke down. 

Locally, Minneapolis voters will consider a ballot question next week that could remove from the city charter a police department that’s long been accused of sweeping officer misconduct under the rug. As the school district navigates its first year without a full-time police presence in classrooms, the unprecedented ballot measure would create instead a city Department of Public Safety that would use a “comprehensive public health approach” and employ police officers only “if necessary.”

National industry “best practices” recommend collaboration between police and education leaders when stationing officers inside schools, but researchers who study the efficacy of school resource officers said that little evidence exists about how such selection processes actually work. Anecdotally, the job is highly regarded in some districts and officers compete for the position, Fisher said. In other places, being stationed in schools is “a punishment where police are put there if they can’t cut it on the streets.”

‘Completely out of control’

The 74 obtained Minneapolis Police Department misconduct records for the 24 officers assigned to public schools for the five years prior to Floyd’s murder. Of those, 21 officers faced 105 internal complaints, 11 of which resulted in discipline of varying severity. Those records span the duration of officers’ employment with the department. Separately, the officers stationed in schools were named in federal lawsuits on at least two dozen occasions, according to an analysis of court records. 

The police disciplinary issues range in seriousness. One officer who worked in the schools was cited in 2019 for unintentionally firing his service rifle while responding to a call about a man with a gun, and another was given a letter of reprimand after getting arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. In two of the 11 cases which resulted in official department action, officers were disciplined for using excessive force. 

About half of the Minneapolis officers who were sued or disciplined remain on the force, according to a department spokesperson. 

Among them is Mukhtar Abdulkadir, who has faced 11 internal complaints — two that resulted in discipline — and two federal lawsuits. He reported to work as a school resource officer as recently as 2017, district records show. Records suggest the officer has a tendency to respond violently when under stress. 

In 2010, a young Ethiopian immigrant accused Abdulkadir of choking and punching him and calling him a racial slur after he was pulled over and cited for riding a bike at night without a light, a citation the man called “stupid.” A federal lawsuit following the incident was ultimately settled. Abdulkadir and his attorneys couldn’t be reached for comment. 

In 2011, Abdulkadir was arrested on assault and terroristic threat charges after his then-wife accused him of punching her in the ribs, smothering her face with a pillow and hitting her in the face with the butt of his service pistol. Abdulkadir was fired for the incident but was rehired with back pay after his former wife retracted her allegations. Yet according to his disciplinary file, internal investigators believed her decision to recant was obvious: “Only if he is reinstated will she obtain child support when they divorce.” Additionally, internal records note that domestic abuse victims often “take the blame” because their abusers maintain control over them. 

Abdulkadir was also accused of repeatedly punching a man outside a car wash in 2013. The man honked at the officer because he was next in line at the automatic car wash but hadn’t moved forward, according to a complaint in a federal lawsuit. In response, Abdulkadir was accused of punching the man repeatedly before charging him with disorderly conduct, according to the lawsuit that also ended with an undisclosed financial settlement. 

Then, in 2014, Abdulkadir was reprimanded for becoming irate after he failed firearms training. Officers who witnessed the outburst reported feeling afraid because he “was completely out of control” and had easy access to a gun. 

“That night I truly believed that at any time he could grab his weapon, load it and use it against officers,” a police sergeant told internal investigators. In a less controlled environment, the sergeant said he could see a situation where Abdulkadir would “completely lose control of everything and harm himself, other officers or the public.” 

District records show Abdulkadir was assigned to Minneapolis campuses a year later, including Andersen United Middle School and Seward Montessori School. 

When officers protect their own

The disciplinary findings against Adams put the storied coach and second-generation Minneapolis cop on defense, a position he isn’t used to playing. After the school board voted to break with the police department, some students at North High School, the predominantly Black school where Adams worked as a school resource officer, rallied to support him. So did the school’s principal. 

On two occasions after Floyd’s murder reinvigorated the Black Lives Matter movement, The New York Times examined how his roles as a football coach and a Black police officer placed him on both ends of the debate on policing in America. As Adams told a local newspaper, “I wear blue, but I’m Black.”

The records suggest that Adams, who left the police department last year and is now head of team security for the Minnesota Twins, was willing to go to great lengths for a colleague accused of a serious crime, a reality he acknowledged in an interview with The 74. Woods, the North High School security guard, and his attorney couldn’t be reached for comment. 

“I stood up for him as a character,” Adams said. “I never said that it was OK for what he did.”

North High School Principal Mauri Friestleben, who has been outspoken against the school board’s decision to cut ties with the police, similarly stood behind Adams. With officers in schools, she said she witnessed a “healthy discourse about what real protecting and serving looked like,” including situations where campus cops helped students avoid arrests. “I have no reservations about my public support” of Adams, she wrote in an email, and called the officer “a protector” who came to the job “with multiple dimensions and this may be just one of them.” 

Adams sought to downplay his own disciplinary record, arguing that police leaders and prosecutors overreacted to his intervening in Woods’s criminal case. Prior to becoming a school security guard, Woods was convicted of armed robbery in 1992 and became ineligible to possess a firearm. Six years later, police arrested Woods with a gun outside a Minneapolis Greyhound bus station. Woods, who is Black, unsuccessfully accused the officers of racial discrimination when they stopped him while investigating drug and gun trafficking, according to court records. 

Adams said that Woods was a positive force in the community and shouldn’t be defined by the years he spent in prison. After the shooting outside North High, Woods wasn’t trying to keep the guns for himself, Adams maintained. Instead, Woods knew the students involved in the shooting and didn’t want them to get arrested. Woods recognized them as gang members, according to court documents.

“I took it as him looking out for those two kids,” said Adams, who added that he didn’t observe the shooting himself. “He took [the guns] from them and said ‘Get out of here,’ one of those types of deals because that’s just the type of person that he is.” 

Adams scoffed at the suggestion from Krenz, the prosecutor, that his defense of Woods conflicted with his role in keeping the community safe. Krenz declined to comment for this article. Adams said she wouldn’t know where North High was if it “smacked her in her face.” 

“I don’t want to hear that,” Adams said. “I hear so many people talk about what should be good for our community. They have never stepped one foot inside of it.” 

‘Good ol’ boy network’

Internal police records obtained by The 74 likely offer a significant undercount of officer misconduct. Just 2.7 percent of complaints resulted in discipline between 2013 and 2019, according to a recent investigation by the Minnesota Reformer, a nonprofit news outlet. After lengthy investigations, disciplined officers often received letters of reprimand or brief suspensions. 

A pattern of officers protecting their peers allowed abuses to remain under the radar until it went to court, the investigation found. Three years before he murdered Floyd, for example, Derek Chauvin hit a 14-year-old boy with a flashlight and pinned him to the ground for 17 minutes. The incident, which could be seen as a precursor to Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, is excluded from his public records. 

The 74 sought comments from Minneapolis officers previously stationed inside schools, school board members, the city and state police unions, an attorney who represents many officers in misconduct litigation, the city and the county attorney’s office. Each declined to comment or didn’t respond to interview requests. 

Among the lawsuits against officers placed in schools, civil rights attorney Zorislav Leyderman represented the plaintiffs in six. Police misconduct incidents that occur outside schools, he said, should influence whether those involved are assigned as school resource officers. Leyderman cited the allegations as contributing to a larger culture in the city where many Minneapolis residents fear the police. 

“They don’t want to interact with law enforcement because they’re worried that if they do, they’re going to get injured,” he said. The allegations against the officers stationed in schools “should have been looked into, both the lawsuits and these internal complaints.” 

Oftentimes, he said police misconduct remains outside the public eye because officers are “coached” following incidents, a practice the department has maintained isn’t a form of official discipline. The department was sued and accused of illegally withholding misconduct records, including in cases of serious wrongdoing. In a 2015 U.S. Department of Justice report, investigators found that Minneapolis police used coaching to resolve more than a quarter of complaints over a six-year period.

Local parent advocate Khulia Pringle, who helped the school district hire security staff to replace sworn police last year, said that officers’ disciplinary records should be a major factor when placing them inside schools. However, that history only reinforced her belief that police have no place walking hallways. 

“In any other situation, when we need the cops, we call them,” said Pringle, a Minnesota-based representative of the National Parents Union. If they’re going to be there, there “should have been more protocols in place as to which officers are in schools,” she said. 

Adams said he was surprised to see the allegations against other police officers who worked in the schools, and although negative interactions between cops and youth have occurred, he couldn’t recall any recent instances that could’ve motivated the school board’s decision to end its police contract. Yet Adams, who said he can “speak freely” now because he’s no longer a cop, portrayed his former department as one where officer misconduct is routine. 

“It’s the good ol’ boy network,” he said. “You’ve got guys who are in the police department that treat people wrong on purpose and you can see it.” 

‘Part of the game’

As communities across the country grapple with the role police play in schools, new research serves to highlight the issue’s complexities. On one hand, the officers reduce some forms of violent crimes like fights, according to the research. At the same time, their presence prompts a dramatic uptick in suspensions and arrests — especially for students who are Black. Little academic research explores the types of officers who are more effective than others in schools.

But being named in a federal lawsuit shouldn’t be automatically disqualifying, said school safety consultant Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services in Cleveland. Filing civil rights lawsuits against an arresting officer is all “part of the game,” he said. Police misconduct suits often end in settlements, yet Trump said the final results should become part of the equation when making school resource officer assignments.

“If you’re a police officer and you’re doing your job on the streets, there’s a really good chance you’re going to get sued somewhere in your career,” said Trump, a proponent of school-based policing. “But there should be some sort of baseline criteria and screening set by your police administration before that pool of officers is ever presented at that next step to your school people.”

Parten, the Minneapolis police spokesman, said that all officers were eligible to apply for the school resource officer program and were interviewed by a panel of police department and school district officials. The police chief had the final say in hiring decisions. Parten said he collaborated with education officials when crafting a statement for this article, but Minneapolis school district spokeswoman Julie Schultz Brown didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. 

“Candidates were presented with scenario-based questions designed to evaluate critical thinking skills necessary for a school setting and further examined each individual’s understanding of the challenges and rewards associated with the position,” he said. 

Policing in Minneapolis remains contentious in the larger community, and voters will soon decide whether to go in a completely new direction. Ahead of next week’s election, a recent poll of likely voters suggests the question of whether to dismantle the traditional police department will be close. Black voters were less likely than white voters to support the idea. 

A similar course change — to remove cops from Minneapolis schools and replace them with district security staff — was ultimately detrimental, Adams maintains. “Crime is outrageous” at North High School, he said, and the security team hired to replace sworn officers is “stretched thin.” 

And even though he defended a security guard who he said sought to keep kids out of the criminal justice system, the former cop said stationing police in schools was an effective strategy to catch suspected criminals.

“A lot of kids would obviously show up to school and investigators and a lot of police knew the kid would be there,” Adams said. “That was a good way to get bad guys.” 

Lead Image: Former police officer Charles Adams III’s actions to intervene on behalf of a school security guard arrested on gun charges are among dozens of disciplinary findings and misconduct allegations involving campus police officers recently stationed inside Minneapolis public schools. (Andrea Ellen Reed / The New York Times / Redux)

For the 13-year-old from Minneapolis who lives close to where George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, the pandemic-induced isolation and social unrest amplifed his transgender dysphoria, emotional distress that occurs when someone’s gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth. His billowing depression landed him in the hospital after an attempt to die by suicide. During that dark stretch, he spent his days in an outpatient psychiatric facility, where therapists embraced music therapy. There, he listened to a punk song on loop that promised how things would soon “get better.” 

Eventually they did. 

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Logsdon-Wallace, a transgender eighth-grader who chose the name Teeth, has since “graduated” from weekly therapy sessions and has found a better headspace, but that didn’t stop school officials from springing into action after he wrote about his mental health. In a school assignment last month, he reflected on his suicide attempt and how the punk rock anthem by the band Ramshackle Glory helped him cope — intimate details that wound up in the hands of district security. 

The classroom assignment was one of thousands of Minneapolis student communications that got flagged by Gaggle, a digital surveillance company that saw rapid growth after the pandemic forced schools into remote learning. In an earlier investigation, The 74 analyzed nearly 1,300 public records from Minneapolis Public Schools to expose how Gaggle subjects students to relentless digital surveillance 24 hours a day, seven days a week, raising significant privacy concerns for more than 5 million young people across the country who are monitored by the company’s digital algorithm and human content moderators. 

But technology experts and families with first-hand experience with Gaggle’s surveillance dragnet have raised a separate issue: The service is not only invasive, it may also be ineffective. 

While the system flagged Logsdon-Wallace for referencing the word “suicide,” context was never part of the equation, he said. Two days later, in mid-September, a school counselor called his mom to let her know what officials had learned. The meaning of the classroom assignment — that his mental health had improved — was seemingly lost in the transaction between Gaggle and the school district. He felt betrayed. 

 “I was trying to be vulnerable with this teacher and be like, ‘Hey, here’s a thing that’s important to me because you asked,” Logsdon-Wallace said. “Now, when I’ve made it clear that I’m a lot better, the school is contacting my counselor and is freaking out.”

Jeff Patterson, Gaggle’s founder and CEO, said in a statement his company does not “make a judgement on that level of the context,” and while some districts have requested to be notified about references to previous suicide attempts, it’s ultimately up to administrators to “decide the proper response, if any.”  

‘A crisis on our hands’

Minneapolis Public Schools first contracted with Gaggle in the spring of 2020 as the pandemic forced students nationwide into remote learning. Through AI and the content moderator team, Gaggle tracks students’ online behavior everyday by analyzing materials on their school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts. The tool scans students’ emails, chat messages and other documents, including class assignments and personal files, in search of keywords, images or videos that could indicate self-harm, violence or sexual behavior. The remote moderators evaluate flagged materials and notify school officials about content they find troubling. 

In Minneapolis, Gaggle flagged students for keywords related to pornography, suicide and violence, according to six months of incident reports obtained by The 74 through a public records request. The private company also captured their journal entries, fictional stories and classroom assignments. 

Gaggle executives maintain that the system saves lives, including those of more than 1,400 youth during the 2020-21 school year. Those figures have not been independently verified. Minneapolis school officials make similar assertions. Though the pandemic’s effects on suicide rates remains fuzzy, suicide has been a leading cause of death among teenagers for years. Patterson, who has watched his business grow by more than 20 percent during COVID-19, said Gaggle could be part of the solution. Though not part of its contract with Minneapolis schools, the company recently launched a service that connects students flagged by the monitoring tool with teletherapists. 

“Before the pandemic, we had a crisis on our hands,” he said. “I believe there’s a tsunami of youth suicide headed our way that we are not prepared for.” 

Schools nationwide have increasingly relied on technological tools that purport to keep kids safe, yet there’s a dearth of independent research to back up their claims.

Like many parents, Logsdon-Wallace’s mother Alexis Logsdon didn’t know Gaggle existed until she got the call from his school counselor. Luckily, the counselor recognized that Logsdon-Wallace was discussing events from the past and offered a measured response. His mother was still left baffled. 

“That was an example of somebody describing really good coping mechanisms, you know, ‘I have music that is one of my soothing activities that helps me through a really hard mental health time,’” she said. “But that doesn’t matter because, obviously, this software is not that smart — it’s just like ‘Woop, we saw the word.’” 

‘Random and capricious’

Many students have accepted digital surveillance as an inevitable reality at school, according to a new survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology  in Washington, D.C. But some youth are fighting back, including Lucy Dockter, a 16-year-old junior from Westport, Connecticut. On multiple occasions over the last several years, Gaggle has flagged her communications — an experience she described as “really scary.”

“If it works, it could be extremely beneficial. But if it’s random, it’s completely useless.”
—Lucy Dockter, 16, Westport, Connecticut student mistakenly flagged by Gaggle

On one occasion, Gaggle sent her an email notification of “Inappropriate Use” while she was walking to her first high school biology midterm and her heart began to race as she worried what she had done wrong. Dockter is an editor of her high school’s literary journal and, according to her, Gaggle had ultimately flagged profanity in students’ fictional article submissions. 

“The link at the bottom of this email is for something that was identified as inappropriate,” Gaggle warned in its email while pointing to one of the fictional articles. “Please refrain from storing or sharing inappropriate content in your files.” 

But Gaggle doesn’t catch everything. Even as she got flagged when students shared documents with her, the articles’ authors weren’t receiving similar alerts, she said. And neither did Gaggle’s AI pick up when she wrote about the discrepancy in a student newspaper article where she included a four-letter swear word to make a point. In the article, which Dockter wrote with Google Docs, she argued that Gaggle’s monitoring system is “random and capricious,” and could be dangerous if school officials rely on its findings to protect students. 

Her experiences left the Connecticut teen questioning whether such tracking is even helpful. 

“With such a seemingly random service, that doesn’t seem to — in the end — have an impact on improving student health or actually taking action to prevent suicide and threats” she said in an interview. “If it works, it could be extremely beneficial. But if it’s random, it’s completely useless.”

Some schools have asked Gaggle to email students about the use of profanity, but Patterson said the system has an error that he blamed on the tech giant Google, which at times “does not properly indicate the author of a document and assigns a random collaborator.”

“We are hoping Google will improve this functionality so we can better protect students,” Patterson said. 

Back in Minneapolis, attorney Cate Long said she became upset when she learned that Gaggle was monitoring her daughter on her personal laptop, which 10-year-old Emmeleia used for remote learning. She grew angrier when she learned the district didn’t notify her that Gaggle had identified a threat. 

This spring, a classmate used Google Hangouts, the chat feature, to send Emmeleia a death threat, warning she’d shoot her “puny little brain with my grandpa’s rifle.”

When Long learned about the chat, she notified her daughter’s teacher but was never informed about whether Gaggle had picked up on the disturbing message as well. Missing warning signs could be detrimental to both students and school leaders; districts could be held liable if they fail to act on credible threats.

“I didn’t hear a word from Gaggle about it,” she said. “If I hadn’t brought it to the teacher’s attention, I don’t think that anything would have been done.” 

The incident, which occurred in April, fell outside the six-month period for which The 74 obtained records. A Gaggle spokesperson said the company picked up on the threat and notified district officials an hour and a half later but it “does not have any insight into the steps the district took to address this particular matter.” 

Julie Schultz Brown, the Minneapolis district spokeswoman, said that officials “would never discuss with a community member any communication flagged by Gaggle.” 

“That unrelated but concerned parent would not have been provided that information nor should she have been,” she wrote in an email. “That is private.” 

‘The big scary algorithm’

When identifying potential trouble, Gaggle’s algorithm relies on keyword matching that compares student communications against a dictionary of thousands of words the company believes could indicate potential issues. The company scans student emails before they’re delivered to their intended recipients, said Patterson, the CEO. Files within Google Drive, including Docs and Sheets, are scanned as students write in them, he said. In one instance, the technology led to the arrest of a 35-year-old Michigan man who tried to send pornography to an 11-year-old girl in New York, according to the company. Gaggle prevented the file from ever reaching its intended recipient.  

Though the company allows school districts to alter the keyword dictionary to reflect local contexts, less than 5 percent of districts customize the filter, Patterson said. 

That’s where potential problems could begin, said Sara Jordan, an expert on artificial intelligence and senior researcher at the Future of Privacy Forum in Washington. For example, language that students use to express suicidal ideation could vary between Manhattan and rural Appalachia, she said.

“We’re using the big scary algorithm term here when I don’t think it applies,” This is not Netflix’s recommendation engine. This is not Spotify.”
—Sara Jordan, AI expert and senior researcher, Future of Privacy Forum

On the other hand, she noted that false-positives are highly likely, especially when the system flags common swear words and fails to understand context. 

“You’re going to get 25,000 emails saying that a student dropped an F-bomb in a chat,” she said. “What’s the utility of that? That seems pretty low.” 

She said that Gaggle’s utility could be impaired because it doesn’t adjust to students’ behaviors over time, comparing it to Netflix, which recommends television shows based on users’ ever-evolving viewing patterns. “Something that doesn’t learn isn’t going to be accurate,” she said. For example, she said the program could be more useful if it learned to ignore the profane but harmless literary journal entries submitted to Dockter, the Connecticut student. Gaggle’s marketing materials appear to overhype the tool’s sophistication to schools, she said. 

“We’re using the big scary algorithm term here when I don’t think it applies,” she said. “This is not Netflix’s recommendation engine. This is not Spotify. This is not American Airlines serving you specific forms of flights based on your previous searches and your location.” 

“Artificial intelligence without human intelligence ain’t that smart.”
—Jeff Patterson, Gaggle founder and CEO

Patterson said Gaggle’s proprietary algorithm is updated regularly “to adjust to student behaviors over time and improve accuracy and speed.” The tool monitors “thousands of keywords, including misspellings, slang words, evolving trends and terminologies, all informed by insights gleaned over two decades of doing this work.” 

Ultimately, the algorithm to identify keywords is used to “narrow down the haystack as much as possible,” Patterson said, and Gaggle content moderators review materials to gauge their risk levels. 

“Artificial intelligence without human intelligence ain’t that smart,” he said. 

In Minneapolis, officials denied that Gaggle infringes on students’ privacy and noted that the tool only operates within school-issued accounts. The district’s internet use policy states that students should “expect only limited privacy,” and that the misuse of school equipment could result in discipline and “civil or criminal liability.” District leaders have also cited compliance with the Clinton-era Children’s Internet Protection Act, which became law in 2000 and requires schools to monitor “the online activities of minors.” 

Patterson suggested that teachers aren’t paying close enough attention to keep students safe on their own and “sometimes they forget that they’re mandated reporters.” On the Gaggle website, Patterson says he launched the company in 1999 to provide teachers with “an easy way to watch over their gaggle of students.” Legally, teachers are mandated to report suspected abuse and neglect, but Patterson broadens their sphere of responsibility and his company’s role in meeting it. As technology becomes a key facet of American education, Patterson said that schools “have a moral obligation to protect the kids on their digital playground.” 

But Elizabeth Laird, the director of equity in civic technology at the Center for Democracy and Technology, argued the federal law was never intended to mandate student “tracking” through artificial intelligence. In fact, the statute includes a disclaimer stating it shouldn’t be “construed to require the tracking of internet use by any identifiable minor or adult user.” In a recent letter to federal lawmakers, her group urged the government to clarify the Children’s Internet Protection Act’s requirements and distinguish monitoring from tracking individual student behaviors. 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, agrees. In recent letters to Gaggle and other education technology companies, Warren and other Democratic lawmakers said they’re concerned the tools “may extend beyond” the law’s intent “to surveil student activity or reinforce biases.” Around-the-clock surveillance, they wrote, demonstrates “a clear invasion of student privacy, particularly when students and families are unable to opt out.” 

“Escalations and mischaracterizations of crises may have long-lasting and harmful effects on students’ mental health due to stigmatization and differential treatment following even a false report,” the senators wrote. “Flagging students as ‘high-risk’ may put them at risk of biased treatment from physicians and educators in the future. In other extreme cases, these tools can become analogous to predictive policing, which are notoriously biased against communities of color.”

A new kind of policing

Shortly after the school district piloted Gaggle for distance learning, education leaders were met with an awkward dilemma. Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer prompted Minneapolis Public Schools to sever its ties with the police department for school-based officers and replace them with district security officers who lack the authority to make arrests. Gaggle flags district security when it identifies student communications the company believes could be harmful. 

Some critics have compared the surveillance tool to a new form of policing that, beyond broad efficacy concerns, could have a disparate impact on students of color, similar to traditional policing. Algorithms have long been found to suffer biases. 

Matt Shaver, who taught at a Minneapolis elementary school during the pandemic but no longer works for the district, said he was concerned that racial bias could be baked into Gaggle’s algorithm. Absent adequate context or nuance,  he worried the tool could lead to misunderstandings. 

Data obtained by The 74 offer a limited window into Gaggle’s potential effects on different student populations. Though the district withheld many details in the nearly 1,300 incident reports, just over 100 identified the campuses where the involved students attended school. An analysis of those reports failed to identify racial discrepancies. Specifically, Gaggle was about as likely to issue incident reports in schools where children of color were the majority as it was at campuses where most children were white. It remains possible that students of color in predominantly white schools may have been disproportionately flagged by Gaggle or faced disproportionate punishment once identified. Broadly speaking, Black students are far more likely to be suspended or arrested at school than their white classmates, according to federal education data. 

Gaggle and Minneapolis district leaders acknowledged that students’ digital communications are forwarded to police in rare circumstances. The Minneapolis district’s internet use policy explains that educators could contact the police if students use technology to break the law and a document given to teachers about the district’s Gaggle contract further highlights the possibility of law enforcement involvement. 

Jason Matlock, the Minneapolis district’s director of emergency management, safety and security, said that law enforcement is not a “regular partner,” when responding to incidents flagged by Gaggle. It doesn’t deploy Gaggle to get kids into trouble, he said, but to get them help. He said the district has interacted with law enforcement about student materials flagged by Gaggle on several occasions, but only in cases related to child pornography. Such cases, he said, often involve students sharing explicit photographs of themselves. During a six-month period from March to September 2020, Gaggle flagged Minneapolis students more than 120 times for incidents related to child pornography, according to records obtained by The 74.

“Even if a kid has put out an image of themselves, no one is trying to track them down to charge them or to do anything negative to them,” Matlock said, though it’s unclear if any students have faced legal consequences. “It’s the question as to why they’re doing it,” and to raise the issue with their parents.

Gaggle’s keywords could also have a disproportionate impact on LGBTQ children. In three-dozen incident reports, Gaggle flagged keywords related to sexual orientation including “gay, and “lesbian.” On at least one occasion, school officials outed an LGBTQ student to their parents, according to a Minneapolis high school student newspaper article. 

Logsdon-Wallace, the 13-year-old student, called the incident “disgusting and horribly messed up.” 

“They have gay flagged to stop people from looking at porn, but one, that is going to be mostly targeting people who are looking for gay porn and two, it’s going to be false-positive because they are acting as if the word gay is inherently sexual,” he said. “When people are just talking about being gay, anything they’re writing would be flagged.” 

The service could also have a heavier presence in the lives of low-income families, he added, who may end up being more surveilled than their affluent peers. Logsdon-Wallace said he knows students who rely on school devices for personal uses because they lack technology of their own. Among the 1,300 Minneapolis incidents contained in The 74’s data, only about a quarter were reported to district officials on school days between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.

“That’s definitely really messed up, especially when the school is like ‘Oh no, no, no, please keep these Chromebooks over the summer,’” an invitation that gave students “the go-ahead to use them” for personal reasons, he said.

“Especially when it’s during a pandemic when you can’t really go anywhere and the only way to talk to your friends is through the internet.”

In each instance, the emails warning Jason Matlock of “QUESTIONABLE CONTENT” pointed to a single culprit: Kids were watching cartoon porn.

Over the next six months, Matlock got nearly 1,300 similar emails from Gaggle, a surveillance company that monitors students’ school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts. Through artificial intelligence and a team of content moderators, Gaggle tracks the online behaviors of millions of students across the U.S. every day. The sheer volume of reports was overwhelming at first, Matlock acknowledged, and many incidents were utterly harmless. About 100 were related to animated pornography and, on one occasion, a member of Gaggle’s remote surveillance team flagged a fictional story that referenced “underwear.”

Hundreds of others, however, suggested imminent danger.

In emails and chat messages, students discussed violent impulses, eating disorders, abuse at home, bouts of depression and, as one student put it, “ending my life.” At a moment of heightened social isolation and elevated concern over students’ mental health, references to self-harm stood out, accounting for nearly a third of incident reports over a six-month period. In a document titled “My Educational Autobiography,” students at Roosevelt High School on the south side of Minneapolis discussed bullying, drug overdoses and suicide. “Kill me,” one student wrote in a document titled “goodbye.”

Nearly a year after The 74 submitted public records requests to understand the Minneapolis district’s use of Gaggle during the pandemic, a trove of documents offer an unprecedented look into how one school system deploys a controversial security tool that grew rapidly during COVID-19, but carries significant civil rights and privacy implications.

The data, gleaned from those 1,300 incident reports in the first six months of the crisis, highlight how Gaggle’s team of content moderators subject children to relentless digital surveillance long after classes end for the day, including on weekends, holidays, late at night and over the summer. In fact, only about a quarter of incidents were reported to district officials on school days between 8 a.m and 4 p.m., bringing into sharp relief how the service extends schools’ authority far beyond their traditional powers to regulate student speech and behavior, including at home.

Now, as COVID-era restrictions subside and Minneapolis students return to in-person learning this fall, a tool that was pitched as a remote learning necessity isn’t going away anytime soon. Minneapolis officials reacted swiftly when the pandemic engulfed the nation and forced students to learn from the confines of their bedrooms, paying more than $355,000 — including nearly $64,000 in federal emergency relief money — to partner with Gaggle until 2023. Faced with a public health emergency, the district circumvented normal procurement rules, a reality that prevented concerned parents from raising objections until after it was too late.

A mental health dilemma

With each alert, Matlock and other district officials were given a vivid look into students’ most intimate thoughts and online behaviors, raising significant privacy concerns. It’s unclear, however, if any of them made kids safer. Independent research on the efficacy of Gaggle and similar services is all but nonexistent.

When students’ mental health comes into play, a complicated equation emerges. In recent years, schools have ramped up efforts to identify and provide interventions to children at risk of harming themselves or others. Gaggle executives see their tool as a key to identify youth who are lamenting over hardships or discussing violent plans. On average, Gaggle notifies school officials within 17 minutes after zeroing in on student content related to suicide and self-harm, according to the company, and officials claim they saved more than 1,400 lives during the 2020-21 school year.

“As a parent you have no idea what’s going on in your kid’s head, but if you don’t know you can’t help them,” said Jeff Patterson, Gaggle’s founder and CEO. “And I would always want to err on trying to identify kids who need help.”

Critics, however, have questioned Gaggle’s effectiveness and worry that rummaging through students personal files and conversations — and in some cases outing students for exhibiting signs of mental health issues including depression — could backfire.

Using surveillance to identify children in distress could exacerbate feelings of stigma and shame and could ultimately make students less likely to ask for help, said Jennifer Mathis, the director of policy and legal advocacy at The Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law in Washington, D.C.

“Most kids in that situation are not going to share anything anymore and are going to suffer for that,” she said. “It suggests that anything you write or say or do in school — or out of school — may be found and held against you and used in ways that you had not envisioned.”

Minneapolis parent Holly Kragthorpe-Shirley had a similar concern and questioned whether kids “actually have a safe space to raise some of their issues in a safe way” if they’re stifled by surveillance.

In Minneapolis, for instance, Gaggle flagged the keywords “feel depressed” in a document titled “SEL Journal,” a reference to social-emotional learning. In another instance, Gaggle flagged “suicidal” in a document titled “mental health problems workbook.”

District officials acknowledged that Gaggle had captured student assignments and other personal files, an issue that civil rights groups have long been warning about. The documents obtained by The 74 put hard evidence behind those concerns, said Amelia Vance, the director of Youth and Education Privacy at The Future of Privacy Forum, a Washington-based think tank.

“The hypotheticals we’ve been talking about for a few years have come to fruition,” she said. “It is highly likely to undercut the trust of students not only in their school generally but in their teacher, in their counselor — in the mental health problems workbook.” 

Patterson shook off any privacy reservations, including those related to monitoring sensitive materials like journal entries, which he characterized as “cries for help.”

“Sometimes when we intervene we might cause some challenges, but more often than not the kids want to be helped,” he said. Though Gaggle only monitors student files tied to school accounts, he cited a middle school girl’s private journal in a success story. He said the girl wrote in a digital journal that she suffered with self esteem issues and guilt after getting raped.

“No one in her life knew about this incident and because she journaled about it,” Gaggle was able to notify school officials about what they’d learned, he said. “They were able to intervene and get this girl help for things that she couldn’t have dealt with on her own.”

‘Needles in haystacks’

Tools like Gaggle have become ubiquitous in classrooms across the country, according to forthcoming research by the D.C.-based Center for Democracy & Technology. In a recent survey, 81 percent of teachers reported having such software in place in their schools. Though most students said they’re comfortable being monitored, 58 percent said they don’t share their “true thoughts or ideas” as a result and 80 percent said they’re more careful about what they search online.

Such data suggest that youth are being primed to accept surveillance as an inevitable reality, said Elizabeth Laird, the center’s director of equity in civic technology. In return, she said, they’re giving up the ability to explore new ideas and learn from mistakes.

Gaggle, in business since 1999 and recently relocated to Dallas, monitors the digital files of more than 5 million students across the country each year with the pandemic being very good for its bottom line. Since the onset of the crisis, the number of students surveilled by the privately held company, which does not report its yearly revenue, has grown by more than 20 percent. Through artificial intelligence, Gaggle scans students’ emails, chat messages and other materials uploaded to students’ Google or Microsoft accounts in search of keywords, images or videos that could indicate self-harm, violence or sexual behavior. Moderators evaluate flagged material and notify school officials about content they find troubling — a bar that Matlock acknowledged is quite low as “the system is always going to err on the side of caution” and requires district administrators to evaluate materials’ context.

“We’re looking for needles in haystacks to basically save kids.”
—Jeff Patterson, founder and CEO of Gaggle, which analyzed more than 10 billion online student communications in the 2020-21 school year.

In Minneapolis, Gaggle officials discovered a majority of offenses in files within students’ Google Drive, including in word documents and spreadsheets. More than half of incidents originated on the Drive. Meanwhile, 22 percent originated in emails and 23 percent came from Google Hangouts, the chat feature.

School officials are alerted to only a tiny fraction of student communications caught up in Gaggle’s dragnet. Last school year, Gaggle collected more than 10 billion items nationally but just 360,000 incidents resulted in notifications to district officials, according to the company. Nationally, 41 percent of incidents during the 2020-21 school year related to suicide and self-harm, according to Gaggle, and a quarter centered on violence.

“We are looking for needles in haystacks to basically save kids,” Patterson said.

‘A really slippery slope’

It was Google Hangouts that had Matt Shaver on edge. When the pandemic hit, classrooms were replaced by video conferences and casual student interactions in hallways and cafeterias were relegated to Hangouts. For Shaver, who taught at a Minneapolis elementary school during the pandemic, students’ Hangouts use became overwhelming.

Students were so busy chatting with each other, he said, that many had lost focus on classroom instruction. So he proposed a blunt solution to district technology officials: Shut it down.

“The thing I wanted was ‘Take the temptation away, take the opportunity away for them to use that,’” said Shaver, who has since left teaching and is now policy director at the education reform group EdAllies. “And I actually got pushback from IT saying ‘No we’re not going to do that, this is a good social aspect that we’re trying to replicate.’”

But unlike those hallway interactions, nobody was watching. Matlock, the district’s security head, said he was initially in the market for a new anonymous reporting tool, which allows students to flag their friends for behaviors they find troubling. He turned to Gaggle, which operates the anonymous reporting system SpeakUp for Safety, and saw the company’s AI-powered digital surveillance tool, which goes well beyond SpeakUp’s powers to ferret out potentially alarming student behavior, as a possibility to “enhance the supports for students online.”

“We wanted to get something in place quickly, as we were moving quickly with the lockdown,” he said, adding that going through traditional procurement hoops could take months. “Gaggle had a strong national presence and a reputation.”

The district signed an initial six-month, $99,603 contract with Gaggle just a week after the virus shuttered schools in Minneapolis. Board of Education Chair Kim Ellison signed a second, three-year contract at an annual rate of $255,750 in September 2020.

The move came with steep consequences. Though SpeakUP was used just three times during the six-month window included in The 74’s data, Gaggle’s surveillance tool flagged students nearly 1,300 times.

During that time, which coincided with the switch to remote learning, the largest share of incidents — 38 percent — were pornographic or sexual in nature, including references to “sexual activity involving a student,” professional videos and explicit, student-produced selfies which trigger alerts to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

“I’m trying to imagine finding out about this as a high schooler, that every single word I’ve written on a Google Hangout or whatever is being monitored … we live in a country with laws around unreasonable search and seizure — and surveillance is just a really slippery slope.”
—Matt Shaver, former Minneapolis Public Schools teacher

An additional 30 percent were related to suicide and self-harm, including incidents that were triggered by keywords including “cutting,” “feeling depressed,” “want to die,” and “end it all.” an additional 18 percent were related to violence, including threats, physical altercations, references to weapons and suspected child abuse. Such incidents were triggered by keywords including “Bomb,” “Glock,” “going to fight,” and “beat her.” About a fifth of incidents were triggered by profanity.

Concerns over Gaggle’s reach during the pandemic weren’t limited to Minneapolis. In December 2020, a group of civil rights organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California argued in a letter that by using Gaggle, the Fresno Unified School District had violated the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which requires officials to obtain search warrants before accessing electronic information. Such monitoring, the groups contend, infringe on students’ free-speech and privacy rights with little ability to opt out.

Shaver, whose students used Google Hangouts to the point of it becoming a distraction, was alarmed to learn that those communications were being analyzed by artificial intelligence and poured over by a remote team of people he didn’t even know.

“I’m trying to imagine finding out about this as a high schooler, that every single word I’ve written on a Google Hangout or whatever is being monitored,” he said. “There is, of course, some lesson in this, obviously like, ‘Be careful of what you put online.’ But we live in a country with laws around unreasonable search and seizure — and surveillance is just a really slippery slope.”

The potential to save lives

To Matlock, Gaggle is a lifesaver — literally. When the tool flagged a Minneapolis student’s suicide note in the middle of the night, Matlock said he rushed to intervene. In a late-night phone call, the security chief said he warned the unnamed parents, who knew their child was struggling but didn’t fully recognize how bad things had become. Because of Gaggle, school officials were able to get the student help. To Matlock, the possibility that he saved a student’s life offers a feeling he “can’t even measure in words.”

“If it saved one kid, if it supported one caregiver, if it supported one family, I’ll take it,” he said. “That’s the bottom line.”

Despite heightened concern over youth mental health issues during the pandemic, its effect on youth suicide rates remains fuzzy. Preliminary data from the Minnesota health department show a significant decline in suicides statewide during the pandemic. Between 2019 and 2020, suicides among people 24 years old and younger decreased by more than 20 percent statewide. Nationally, the proportion of youth emergency room visits related to suspected suicide attempts has surged during the pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but preliminary mortality data for people of all ages show a 5.6 percent decline in self-inflicted fatalities in 2020 compared to 2019.

Meanwhile, Gaggle reported that it identified a significant increase of threats related to suicide, self-harm and violence nationwide between March 2020 and March 2021. During that period, Gaggle observed a 31 percent increase in flagged content overall, including a 35 percent increase in materials related to suicide and self-harm. Gaggle officials said the data highlight a mental health crisis among youth during the pandemic. But other factors could be at play. Among them is a 50 percent surge in students’ screen-time during the pandemic, creating additional opportunities for Gaggle to tag youth behavior. Meanwhile, the number of students monitored by Gaggle nationally grew markedly during the pandemic.

But that hasn’t stopped Gaggle from citing pandemic-era mental illness in sales pitches as it markets a new service: Gaggle Therapy. In school districts that sign up for the service, students who are flagged by Gaggle’s digital monitoring tool are matched with counselors for weekly teletherapy sessions. Therapists available through the service are independent contractors for Gaggle and districts can either pay Gaggle for “blanket coverage,” which makes all students eligible, or a “retainer” fee, which allows them to “use the service as you need it,” according to the company. Under the second scenario, Gaggle would have a financial incentive to identify more students in need of teletherapy.

In Minneapolis, Matlock said that school-based social workers and counselors lead intervention efforts when students are identified for materials related to self-harm. “The initial moment may be a shock” when students are confronted by school staff about their online behaviors, he said, but providing them with help “is much better in the long run.”

As the district rolled out the service, many parents and students were out of the loop. Among them was Nathaniel Genene, a recent graduate who served as the Minneapolis school board’s student representative at the time. He said that classmates contacted him after initial news of the Gaggle contract was released.

“I had a couple of friends texting me like ‘Nathaniel, is this true?’” he said. “It was kind of interesting because I had no idea it was even a thing.”

Yet as students gained a greater awareness that their communications were being monitored, Matlock said they began to test Gaggle’s parameters using potential keywords “and then say ‘Hi’ to us while they put it in there.”

As students became conditioned to Gaggle, “the shock is probably a little bit less,” said Rochelle Cox, an associate superintendent at the Minneapolis school district. Now, she said students have an outlet to get help without having to explicitly ask. Instead, they can express their concerns online with an understanding that school officials are listening. As a result, school-based mental health professionals are able to provide the care students need, she said.

Mathis, with The Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, called that argument “ridiculous.” Officials should make sure that students know about available mental health services and ensure that they feel comfortable reaching out for help, she said.

“That’s very different than deciding that we’re going to catch people by having them write into the ether and that’s how we’re going to find the students who need help,” she said. “We can be a lot more direct in communicating than that, and we should be a lot more direct and a lot more positive.”

In fact, subjecting students to surveillance could push them further into isolation and condition them to lie when officials reach out to inquire about their digital communications, argued Vance of the Future of Privacy Forum.

“Effective interventions are rarely going to be built on that, you know, ‘I saw what you were typing into a Google search last night’ or ‘writing a journal entry for your English class,’” Vance said. “That doesn’t feel like it builds a trusting relationship. It feels creepy.”

Updated, Jan. 29

Five days after extremists used the fringe video gaming platform Dlive to livestream a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol, a youthful white nationalist logged onto the site and offered his take about the future of a movement he helped create.

In a drawn-out rant, the alt-right provocateur Patrick Casey downplayed the Capitol insurrection while deriding social media platforms for cracking down on hate speech supporting an overthrow of the U.S. government. As he spoke, he was rewarded with a barrage of animated lemons — the website’s digital currency that’s netted white nationalists tens of thousands of dollars in real-world cash donations — from a supporter with the username “PropagandaDepartment.”

“Our days on Dlive seem to be numbered,” said Casey, referring to the youth-focused social media platform that’s become popular among white supremacists and alt-right personalities, many of whom have been banned on mainstream platforms like YouTube and Twitch, its Amazon-owned competitor. Yet, after a pro-Trump mob of militiamen, conspiracy theorists and white nationalists stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, leaving five people dead, even Dlive began to expel prominent streamers — several of whom, like Casey, were among the site’s highest-earning personalities, according to research by Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University and senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The violent insurrection at the Capitol reawakened many Americans to the persistent reality of white supremacists among us and how far they’re willing to go to exert their ideologies. Last week, the Biden administration directed federal law enforcement agencies  to conduct a “comprehensive threat assessment” into “domestic violent extremism,” calling it “a serious and growing national security threat.” Then, on Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security published a terrorism advisory alert warning that “ideologically-motivated violent extremists” present a heightened threat across the U.S. But even as political leaders vow to root them out, extremists are busy doing what they have done for decades: Recruiting the next generation of hate-filled zealots.

Now, Squire and other experts on extremism are sounding the alarm about the ways alt-right groups weaponize video games and streaming platforms like Dlive, which is owned by the peer-to-peer file sharing service BitTorrent, to radicalize and recruit teens. While they said the current political climate presents a wide opening for youth to fall down a dystopian rabbit hole, experts recommended a range of strategies that parents and educators can use to identify warning signs and intervene.

At a moment of social unrest where baseless conspiracy theories have been peddled by prominent government leaders, the pandemic has forced millions of students to learn from computer screens all day, away from a support network of teachers and other adults. Even on the most mainstream online platforms, conspiracy theories are just a few clicks away.

“A lot of it is happening in plain sight,” said Jinnie Spiegler, the director of curriculum and training at the Anti-Defamation League, who oversaw a surge in interest during the Trump administration for classroom materials about youth radicalization after teachers observed troubling behaviors in their own classrooms. “There’s the concern on a personal level that young people are getting sucked into it, frankly,” she said, adding that a growing proliferation of hate speech online “sets the stage for that next level of literal white supremacist ideology.”

Squire uses her expertise in data mining to understand online extremism, including the way white nationalists became Dlive’s top earners, raking in tens of thousands of dollars in recent months playing video games while espousing disinformation and chatting with fans. Among those identified are white nationalists who’ve idolized Adolf Hitler and another with ties to the gunman convicted of killing 51 people in 2019 at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Casey and Dlive didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Many of the site’s top streamers, including Casey, are figures in the “Groyper” movement, a loose network of white nationalists who experts say tend to skew young. In one recent stream, for example, a prominent white nationalist boasted about how “young zoomers” — a reference to Generation Z — could find his videos on the site’s homepage “because I’m their number-one earner now.” Meanwhile, the editor of a prominent neo-Nazi website has discussed candidly that his site is “mainly designed to target children” as young as 11 years old.

Knock, knock: it starts with a joke

Casey, whose group has focused on recruiting college students and helped plan the fatal 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, doesn’t resemble the neo-Nazi archetype. If anything, his clean-shaved face and black polo shirt would allow the 31-year-old to blend in with Best Buy’s GeekSquad.

Likewise, the Dlive website doesn’t look anything like a rickety, dark-web outpost for the Ku Klux Klan. It embraces childish imagery, like animated ninjas and ice cream cones, and allows people to play and discuss mainstream video games like The Division 2 and Minecraft. Yet the website also hosts streamers who deny the Holocaust ever happened and fantasize about the murder of Black Lives Matter protesters, relying on the same racist tropes as yesteryear. As Casey spoke, his fans flooded the comments with animated gifs of former President Donald Trump, gorillas and Pepe the Frog, a cartoon that’s been co-opted by racist trolls.

Alt-right streamers use “a three-pronged approach,” Squire said, in their bid to reach younger audiences online: They disseminate their message on leading social media platforms like YouTube, mainstream video games and on platforms like Dlive and Twitch where people livestream videos of themselves playing video games to build a fanbase. The last prong, she acknowledged, is foreign to many adults.

“People of my demographic look at that and they’re like, ‘Wait, people would watch another person play video games for 10 hours at a time and then give them money for it?’ she said. But many alt-right provocateurs are well-versed in the gaming culture — and have long used strategies to appeal to a younger crowd.

“They want to look and appear hip, popular with the young kids,” she said. “The biggest thing they like about [Casey] is the gaming. He’ll game sometimes all night. He’ll game six or eight hours at a time,” while simultaneously engaging with fans in the chatroom and touting disinformation. When he’s not gaming, he offers political commentary in a format that resembles a cable news segment. Along the way, he scores donations — in the form of lemons — from a captive audience.

In some cases, extremists on fringe websites have organized to target the users of mainstream platforms, Squire said. She pointed to Casey’s embrace of “Discord raiding,” in which communities from fringe sites bombard groups on the messaging platform Discord “full of people they don’t like and just harass them.”

Though it’s a jump to claim that “video games are radicalizing our children,” they’ve long failed to combat harassment, said Daniel Kelley, associate director of the Center for Technology and Society at the Anti-Defamation League. “On the road to radicalization, these are spaces where kids can be inoculated to the fact that hate — specifically against people based on their identity — is not a transgressive thing,” adding that streaming sites like Twitch and Dlive are “an outgrowth of the game community where hate is normalized.”

That process, experts said, often begins with a callous joke. In the modern era, such jokes are often distributed as memes. What may begin with a crude “dead baby joke” can eventually be weaponized as propaganda, including posts pronouncing the Holocaust was a hoax.

Steph Loehr, a performer on the video game streaming platform Twitch who goes by the online moniker “FerociouslySteph,” has been subjected to the strategy firsthand. Defining hate speech as a joke shields people from accountability, she said. As long as the speaker is able to establish their rhetoric as humor, they’re rewarded with protection from those who aren’t laughing.

“Especially if your joke is well-crafted, you can get people on your side saying that person is overreacting or they’re losing their minds because they thought this was terrible,” said Loehr. “Whereas the sensitive person is getting pushed out, alienated, attacked for reacting at all.”

On numerous occasions, the long-term outcome has been real-world violence and fear. In an effort to stamp out abusive behaviors on its platform, Twitch appointed Loehr to a new Safety Advisory Council last year — but the move quickly fell victim to controversy. After Loehr said during a livestream that “a lot of you gamers are actually white supremacists,” many in the community erupted in outrage. Loehr, who is transgender, was subjected to a barrage of harassing memes and death threats. She was also “doxxed,” with her home address and other personal information shared online. Though less pervasive than on Dlive, a review of Twitch livestreams quickly turned up imagery popular among alt-right personalities.

Yet Loehr still has faith in the Twitch platform, and said it’s making strides in addressing abuse. But she acknowledged its darkest tendencies could be harmful to children.

“There’s a joke that being a Twitch streamer is being a babysitter, but it really is a lot of the time,” the 27-year-old said. “It’s disturbing to me when big content creators don’t moderate their spaces and aren’t being good role models for the kids that are watching them — because there are a lot of kids watching.”

In an email, a Twitch spokeswoman shared the company policies that prohibit “behavior that is motivated by hatred, prejudice or intolerance.” The policy specifically prohibits content that “encourages or supports the political or economic dominance of any race, ethnicity, or religious group, including support for white supremacist/nationalist ideologies.”

While Dlive, Twitch and other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have taken unprecedented steps since the Capitol siege to remove posts or accounts that violate their terms of use, Kelley, of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Technology and Society, blasted the company for being reactive. Rather than taking a proactive approach, he blamed them for doing far too little before “bodies hit the ground.”

Brotherhood in disguise

Though the Capitol insurrection has set a new spotlight on the persistent presence of white supremacy in American politics, recruitment efforts aimed at teens have been in place for decades. Their tactics left an impression on criminologist Shannon Reid, who was part of the punk rock scene in the 1990s. At the time, she recalled the scene had two competing factions: The neo-Nazi skinheads and the anti-racist skinheads. For neo-Nazis, concerts and live music venues were what the digital space is today: Places where they appealed to young people and enticed them to join the movement.

“We have been ignoring them, especially that middle school, high school group. Everybody is thinking about the old guy with the beard and ignoring the younger group who are actually much more violence-prone.” —Shannon Reid, professor who researches youth in the white power movement

Today, Reid is an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, where she researches youth involvement in the white power movement. Yet despite the recruitment efforts’ established history, many questions remain unanswered. While opinion polling has long found that young people are overwhelmingly left-leaning, for example, it remains unclear how many children and teens espouse far-right, extremist ideologies beyond worrying anecdotes. Part of the problem, Reid argues, comes down to priorities. She argues that American researchers and policymakers have failed to acknowledge youth in white-power groups for what they are: Members of street gangs.

“We have been ignoring them, especially that middle school, high school group,” she said. “Everybody is thinking about the old guy with the beard and ignoring the younger group who are actually much more violence-prone.”

Still, Reid noted several risk factors that are identifiable by parents and educators and “overlap very strongly with the gang literature,” including incarcerated parents and poor school performance.

Brad Galloway, who previously led a chapter of a Portland-based neo-Nazi group with ties to organized crime, is now a research analyst and case manager at Life After Hate, a nonprofit that’s helped hundreds of people disengage from hate groups. As a teen in the late 1990s, he was recruited by a friend who leveraged Galloway’s affinity for music and history and led him down a dark path.

“A lot of people that report being involved in the violent far-right say that they had past trauma or some tough things happen throughout their life” like adverse childhood experiences, he said. After identifying a person’s interests and vulnerabilities, he said that recruiters play on that while offering a sense of purpose and belonging.

“Camaraderie and brotherhood was very important to making a person feel comfortable with those groups,” Galloway told The 74. “It wasn’t necessarily just ideology.”

A recent guide from American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab outlines a range of risk factors that could lead youth to accept a white nationalist ideology in which conflict is resolved through dominance and violence. “This frequently leads to anti-democratic opinions and goals, such as a desire for dictatorship, civil war or an end to the rule of law,” according to the guide. Drivers to radicalization can include trauma, a feeling of social isolation and — as Galloway pointed out — a desire for love and friendship. Red flags include statements about a “great replacement” or a “white genocide” in which a white minority becomes politically oppressed, and a belief that a second American civil war is necessary.

The deadly pandemic, the guide warns, could make things worse as extremists exploit its profound disruptions to spread conspiracy theories. Among them are beliefs that ethnic or religious groups are “super spreaders,” that COVID-19 is part of a “Jewish master plan conspiracy,” and that the vaccine is part of a sinister plan by “elites” to control people.

“Extremists offer simple, false solutions to complex problems, while conspiracy theories offer a sense of control when we feel otherwise powerless,” according to the guide.

Yet as mainstream platforms like Twitter crack down on disinformation, they’re creating a new hurdle, said Brian Hughes, the research lab’s associate director. People “on the cusp of radicalization” are migrating to alternative platforms like Telegram, a social media platform that’s been popular among extremists for years.

Such a reality, he said, is “Causing a chain reaction that’s leading what you might call the MAGA rank-and-file to platforms where extremists are waiting for them — and are waiting to recruit them.” 

Give ’em the boot

Casey, the clean-cut, alt-right gamer, predicted the end of an era. After facing years of backlash, the insurrection forced social media companies to take unprecedented action — with Twitter commencing perhaps the most consequential and controversial by banning Trump, who had some 88 million followers, for potentially inciting further violence. On Dlive, the profiles of top-earning streamers vanished.

In a message posted after the Capitol siege, Dlive announced the suspension of several accounts after the site got shoved “under the spotlight due to some content streamed on our platform,” a subtle acknowledgment that alt-right provocateurs had used the platform just days earlier to livestream the mayhem. It was clear, however, that it didn’t take the move lightly.

“While we strongly advocate for the empowerment of our content creators,” the company noted, “we also have zero tolerance towards any forms of violence and illegal activities.”

Casey acknowledged what he had to lose. Not only did Dlive provide a revenue stream for the movement to fund real-world demonstrations, it gave him a platform to communicate directly with his most ardent followers. But in the aftermath, Casey sees a silver lining: People have flocked to fringe, “more resilient” platforms like Telegram.

“That, in its own, is somewhat of a plus,” he said. While their presence on platforms like YouTube is beneficial to reach a wide audience, he said a mass migration to fringe channels could elevate their goal of “reshaping the GOP.”

“We want these people to be on our side,” he said. “We want them to look at us instead of the Republican Party, instead of Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro and all of the others,” referring to the president of the conservative Turning Point USA and the editor emeritus of the right-wing news website The Daily Wire.

Still, researchers said that “deplatforming” abusive accounts is critical. Loehr, the Twitch livestreamer, agrees.

“Maybe people will find other places to speak, but I don’t think you’re emboldening them,” she said. “Violence is a response to losing power for these people so it’s not a surprise that things can get ugly,” but deplatforming is critical to disrupt their access to impressionable minds, she said. “It just becomes harder for them to radicalize people and reach people, and that’s a good thing.”

Schools and parents can also play a role in keeping children safe from online extremist materials, experts said, and should begin with open communication. By understanding teens’ point of view, caring adults have a chance to spot red flags and an opportunity to present them with accurate information.

“A punishment is an easy fix, but if you’re not really understanding what’s going on with that young person or that group of young people, you’re not solving the problem.” —Jinnie Spiegler, of the Anti-Defamation League on countering white supremacist recruiting 

Spiegler of the Anti-Defamation League suggested that schools teach students about the power of propaganda — and ways to fight back.

“In some ways, there’s nothing teenagers hate more than feeling like they’re being manipulated and used,” she said, so deconstructing the goals of propaganda could be useful in curtailing its stronghold.

Each year, more than 2,000 schools nationwide use the Anti-Defamation League’s instructional materials in the classroom, including resources and training on preventing cyberbullying and combating anti-Semitism.

But one thing adults should avoid, she said, is a punitive approach unless a teen’s behavior violates school rules or becomes illegal.

“A punishment is an easy fix, but if you’re not really understanding what’s going on with that young person or that group of young people, you’re not solving the problem,” she said. In fact, punishment could make the situation worse by reinforcing a belief that “We’re so marginalized, we’re so oppressed, and that’s why we have to show our power and fight these people.”

Beyond Trump

After years in which alt-right groups idolized Trump, President Joe Biden’s inauguration presented a major turning point in white nationalists’ grip. Though “unity” was the central theme to his inaugural address, he offered a sharp rebuke to political extremism and white supremacy — “domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.”

“Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path,” Biden said. “Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war. And we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.”

But the vision of unity that Biden offers won’t be easily won. Before Trump departed on Air Force One for the last time, he offered a promise to his most hardcore supporters gathered on the tarmac of Joint Base Andrews to wave goodbye: “We will be back in some form.” But by that point, Casey and others had already moved on.

In his Dlive rant, Casey said that Trump was “the closest we have to a sympathetic elite,” but criticized his failure “to support people getting a little rowdy at the Capitol.”

“It’s a tough pill to swallow, but Donald Trump is not our Caesar,” he said. Even though Trump was banned from Twitter and impeached for the second time, Casey said he failed to complete the job — offering lessons to future “right-wing strongmen” who “try to do what Donald Trump did only better,” highlighting the reality that hate groups, too, are also vying for a comeback.

“The narrative here is that Donald Trump tried to stage a coup and overthrow the government,” Casey said. “At that point, if you’re going to be treated as if you did it, well, I’m not going to say it but, ya. Either you go all the way or you don’t do it at all.”

Correction: The messaging platform Discord is independently owned. An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that is was owned by Microsoft.

Betsy DeVos is the most-sued secretary in the 41-year history of the U.S. Department of Education.

In less than four years, DeVos and her department have been the target of more than 455 lawsuits — equivalent to being sued once every three days of her tenure, a 74 analysis has found.

By comparison, the review turned up 356 lawsuits against the department in the entire eight years Barack Obama was president.

The suits reflect the extent to which DeVos’s core agenda — including issues related to civil rights, special education and for-profit colleges — has played out in the courtroom.

“I’ve never seen or read about anything like this in my career,” said Phil Catanzano, an education attorney with the international law firm Holland and Knight. His knowledge comes firsthand: A veteran of the department’s Office for Civil Rights under Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, Catanzano has 18 active cases against the department.

When it comes to her education agenda, the record shows DeVos has racked up more losses than wins. Just last week, a federal judge in California rejected a proposed settlement in a suit brought against the department by student loan borrowers who claimed they were defrauded by predatory and often for-profit colleges. The case pointed to the secretary’s move to scale back Obama policies designed to protect those who were misled. In a scathing ruling, the judge said her mass denials of loan forgiveness applications could cause students “irreparable harm.”

But there have been key exceptions. Also last week, a federal judge in Maryland dismissed a suit challenging revisions DeVos made to federal Title IX law designed to protect the rights of students accused of sexual misconduct.

The sheer volume of litigation is such that Jason Botel, a high-ranking administrator for DeVos until 2018, remembers that staff meetings frequently began with “a list of the latest lawsuits that had been filed against the department.”

The result is perhaps not surprising for a secretary who took office charged with erasing many aspects of Obama’s footprint in education, and one uniquely reviled by the nation’s powerful teachers unions and members of Washington’s advocacy class.

The analysis — which has been culled from court documents found on legal websites Law360, PACER and Courthouse News and converted into this searchable database — reflects the extreme divisiveness that has marked the Trump years. Many parties, from education organizations to states and school districts, say mistrust toward the department has grown far worse than it was under Obama and Bush.

One measure is the degree to which states have taken DeVos to court. Eight multistate lawsuits against the Trump administration have been related to education, compared with none during the Obama years, and 15 states have sued the department individually.

“That’s actually pretty significant, looking historically,” said Paul Nolette, a political science professor at Marquette University who tracks state litigation against the federal government.

Notably, the attorneys general behind those suits are Democrats, with Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York and California leading the way.

“Litigation is just becoming a more entrenched part of the whole policy process,” Nolette said. “States are just challenging everything.”

The department declined to answer questions from The 74 about the funds and staff time consumed by litigation.

In a statement released after this story published online, department press secretary Angela Morabito wrote: “The radical left and education establishment have done everything they could think of to try and stop Secretary DeVos’ student-first agenda, which threatens their grip of power. They also haven’t successfully stopped the Department from putting students first, returning power to local educators and families, and shrinking Washington’s control over education in America.”

At a speech last week at Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian school in her home state of Michigan, DeVos offered a spirited defense of her record of loosening federal control over education, particularly in the area for which she has become most closely identified: school choice.

“At the end of the day we want parents to have the freedom, the choice, and the funds to make the best decisions for their children,” she said. “The ‘Washington knows best’ crowd really loses their minds over that.”

That passion has landed DeVos in legal hot water. Most recently, three federal judges, including one appointed by President Donald Trump, shot down her plans to rewrite a federal funding formula so private schools could receive millions more in pandemic relief than the law allows.

“She’s done quite a bit to poke the bear. And when you poke the bear, it tends to get angry.” —Ben DeGrow, the director of education policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy

Supporters say they are not surprised at how much of her agenda has ended up in court, given her drive to take on powerful interest groups.

“She’s done quite a bit to poke the bear. And when you poke the bear, it tends to get angry,” said Ben DeGrow, director of education policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free market-oriented, Michigan-based think tank that has received funding from the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation. Because of DeVos’s past support of anti-union candidates in Michigan, he added, “the teachers unions had their sights set on her from the beginning.”

Erasing the Obama footprint

In many ways, the hyperlitigation can be seen as a direct reaction to DeVos’s attempts to scale back the department’s expansive role under Obama. During those eight years, it linked millions in federal grants to states and districts adopting policies such as the Common Core standards and using student test scores to evaluate teacher performance. At the same time, it bypassed Congress and issued a host of guidance and regulations that expanded civil rights protections for minorities and students with disabilities.

When attorney Shiwali Patel joined the department’s civil rights office in early 2016, she felt she was doing “exciting and important work” to help students who are often marginalized.

She started right before the department directed schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms that match their gender identity. Though DeVos reportedly opposed the move initially, the Trump administration withdrew the guidance a month after he took office in 2017.

For Patel, it was a sign of things to come.

“From there, it was pretty clear they were not in the business of protecting civil rights,” said Patel, who left the department about a year later. Now senior counsel and director of Justice for Student Survivors at the National Women’s Law Center, she’s one of at least 10 staff members working on litigation against DeVos. The center currently has a lawsuit against the department over the new Title IX regulations, which she said weaken protections for victims of sexual violence.

The suit is among at least 36 brought against DeVos or her administration stemming from her attempts to undo Obama-era actions, The 74 found.

Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the libertarian Cato Institute, said DeVos has “managed to stop a lot of the things that the Obama administration was doing that they didn’t like.”

One clear example was the 2018 removal of Obama-era discipline guidance intended to reduce racial disparities in suspensions and expulsions. Data shows that Black students are suspended at three times the rate of white students and that Black and Hispanic students make up over half of those involved in school-related arrests. But critics said the guidance hampered schools’ ability to effectively respond to crime, and DeVos cited it as another example of federal meddling.

The secretary also removed Obama’s 2014 policy, known as the gainful employment rule, requiring career training programs to prove their graduates would be able to find jobs and earn enough to pay back their student loans. Dropping the rule allows for-profit colleges — to which DeVos has had financial ties — to get billions in student aid funding even if their graduates are unemployed and saddled with debt. DeVos, who has also appointed former officials from the for-profit sector to positions in the department, said removing the rule was an effort to treat all postsecondary programs, including for-profits, the same.

Cited for contempt

Student loans have proven to be a particularly nettlesome issue for DeVos.

Loan disputes have historically formed the bulk of lawsuits against the department, and it has been no different during her tenure. What is new, experts said, is the large number of students filing for loan forgiveness because their schools misled them.

Last fall, DeVos earned the distinction of becoming the first education secretary to be held in contempt of court and was ordered to pay a $100,000 fine for continuing to collect loan payments from former students of a defunct for-profit chain of colleges. And it took a class-action lawsuit to force the department to temporarily stop garnishing the wages of student loan borrowers — as required by the pandemic relief bill Congress passed in March.

DeVos also put off implementation of Obama-era regulations requiring online higher education programs to disclose whether they meet state licensing requirements. Scheduled to go into effect in July 2017, the regulation was delayed by DeVos for three years — until the National Education Association and the California Teachers Association sued and won in federal court last year.

“Courts are ruling against her all over the country,” said Aaron Ament, president and cofounder of the National Student Legal Defense Network, which has been involved in 12 higher education cases against DeVos and the department.

DeVos similarly postponed a rule meant to ensure that nonwhite students and those with disabilities are not overrepresented in special education or are unfairly punished in school. In 2016, data showed 12 percent of Black students were referred for special education services, compared with 8.5 percent of white students.

That deferral marked the first time the Council of Parent Advocates and Attorneys, an advocacy and legal organization representing families of students with special needs, sued the department. Ultimately, a federal judge ordered the administration to implement the rule after an eight-month delay.

“We have never in our 22-year history sued an administration and we’ve done so now multiple times,” said CEO Denise Stile Marshall.The litigation is just the most visible symptom of her organization’s strained relationship with the department. Under previous secretaries, including Margaret Spellings, who led the agency in Bush’s second term, the advocacy community “felt more of a partnership with the department,” Marshall said. Staff members would share relevant documents in advance of their official release, for example.

Now, she added, “we have no idea what’s coming.”

‘They cut corners’

A key reason for the breakdown is that there is simply less staff at the department to do the sharing. In keeping with Trump’s frequent promise to “drain the swamp,” it lost more employees than any other agency during his first year in office — 550, or roughly 13 percent of its workforce.

The biggest losses came from the two units responsible for the lion’s share of litigation against DeVos: the Office for Civil Rights and the Office of Federal Student Aid.

“They want to get these quick political wins, but they’re being held up by the courts.” —Phil Catanzano, attorney

The result, said Ament of the National Student Legal Defense Network, is that the department is responding to lawsuits with a staff that “has been gutted.”

“I think they cut corners procedurally,” he said. “You’ll see consistently Trump and DeVos really failing to consider research and studies in a way that’s required.”

That’s what Judge Edward Davila of the Northern District of California wrote Sept. 3 when he partially denied DeVos’s request to dismiss a lawsuit over her rollback of the gainful employment rule.

In his opinion, he referred to a talk by DeVos, noting that “nowhere in this speech can the court locate an analysis” that explains why she eliminated the rule. Elsewhere, Davila, an Obama appointee, reprimanded the department for leaving out research to support its decision. “Of course, these references were not identified. In other places, the [department] cites … its own ‘analysis,’ but never clarifies what that analysis entails.”

Such thoughts are not confined to liberal members of the bench. In a higher education case, a three-judge panel for the conservative 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, led by George W. Bush appointee Chief Judge William H. Pryor Jr., ruled that a student loan servicer was misleading those in public service jobs into believing their loans were being forgiven. The company had said “an interpretation” DeVos issued protected it from lawsuits alleging deceptive conduct. But the judges’ unanimous opinion deemed the secretary’s notice “not particularly thorough.”

In September, a Trump judicial appointee weighed in against DeVos, siding with plaintiffs over her controversial policy to distribute millions in federal pandemic relief funds to private schools. Judge Dabney Friedrich of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia became the third federal judge to rule against DeVos over the plan, saying the bill passed by Congress “left no gaps for the agency to fill and thus delegated no implicit authority to the department.”

“They want to get these quick political wins, but they’re being held up by the courts,” Catanzano said.

Jay Urwitz, a senior fellow at the American Council on Education, served as deputy general counsel in the department during the Obama administration. When someone sues the federal government, he explained, the plaintiff has to prove that the agency’s action was “arbitrary and capricious” — a very high bar.

It’s like facing an opponent who “starts from the 20-yard line or starts with a 6-0 lead in the seventh inning,” he said, adding that despite the advantage, DeVos’s department has still “managed to mess it up.”

Bypassing Congress

Experts say DeVos’s legal battles also reflect the large degree to which she has failed to push her agenda through Congress.

For example, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, chairman of the education committee, wanted to address the gainful employment issue through a reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

But that was almost two years ago. In the meantime, progress on the legislation has ground to a halt. Instead, DeVos withdrew the rule, and more than a third of the states sued her.

“The American system is such that if one area is not doing anything, it will move somewhere else,” Nolette said. But, as Obama learned as well, executive actions leave officials “legally vulnerable.”

DeVos’s attempt to get relief funds to private schools is another example of using executive rules to go places Congress chose not to. Early last year, the administration began pushing a $5 billion Education Freedom Scholarships bill to give tax breaks in exchange for donations to private school scholarship programs for poor students. But it wasn’t until the recent negotiations over another pandemic relief bill that the majority of Republicans gave the proposal much attention.

Leslie Hiner, vice president of programs for EdChoice, a school choice advocacy organization, defended DeVos for trying to give flexibility during the pandemic to desperate parents trying “to make this work.”

“She has taken more slings and arrows than any of us will ever take in our lives,” she said.

Meanwhile, with the nation a week away from an election that could bring DeVos’s tenure to a close, some of the more explosive cases against her have yet to be heard. Three suits are still pending, for example, seeking to throw out her revisions to Title IX, an item the secretary clearly sees as part of her legacy.

At her recent Hillsdale appearance, DeVos cited the change as an example of how the department has been “very methodical about our rule making and regulatory moves to do everything according to law.”

With roughly 125,000 public comments on the rule and overwhelming opposition to the changes, Catanzano speculated that DeVos likely knew the result would spark litigation. So, unlike its approach to rules on for-profit colleges or transgender students’ bathroom use, the department took its time, spending more than two years to craft the new regulation.

“A Biden administration would have a tough time pulling it down,” he said.

Lead Image: DeVos photo illustration (Getty Images / Meghan Gallagher / The 74)

The district terminated its longstanding relationship with the city’s police department after George Floyd died at the hands of a Minneapolis officer in May. But since the pandemic closed campuses in March and required students to attend online classes from home, the district has shelled out more than $355,000 for a digital surveillance tool called Gaggle, according to contracts obtained by The 74 through a public records request.

Gaggle is currently used in hundreds of districts across the U.S., relying on artificial intelligence and a team of moderators paid as little as $10 an hour to scan billions of student emails, chat messages and files each year in search of references to sex, drugs and violence.

Even while the police-free schools movement has garnered momentum in the wake of Floyd’s death, with districts nationwide reexamining the role of cops on campus, it has not appeared to slow the recent growth of the nearly $3 billion-a-year school security industry. A Gaggle executive said their service is key to student safety, and the company saw a sales surge with more than 100 school districts becoming new customers since schools went virtual in March.

“With school now taking place in our students’ living rooms and bedrooms, safety is more important than ever,” Jeff Patterson, Gaggle’s founder and CEO, said in the media release. “Many educators are concerned that without in-person school, they may not be able to identify students in abusive situations or those suffering from mental illness.”

But there’s little research to back up the company’s claims and critics argue that Gaggle and similar products could be detrimental to child development and amount to pervasive government surveillance. Civil rights groups and racial justice advocates are especially concerned about online surveillance tools during the pandemic as students across the country spend the majority of their academic lives in front of screens.

In Minneapolis, the latest revelation further outraged activists who cheered the district’s decision to terminate the police contract but grew wary after officials sought to substitute campus cops with “public safety support specialists” with law enforcement backgrounds.

“My concern was that they would replace physical policing with technological policing, which appears to be something like Gaggle,” said Marika Pfefferkorn, executive director of the Midwest Center for School Transformation and a proponent of the police-free schools movement. Pfefferkorn pushed the district to split with the cops but said the move was just the first step in curtailing the policing and surveillance of students — particularly those of color. Instead, Gaggle “has the potential to further criminalize students.”

No such thing as confidentiality online

An initial six-month district contract with Gaggle, signed by Chief Operations Officer Karen DeVet just a week after the virus shuttered city schools, totaled $99,603 and was in place through the end of September. A second, three-year contract was signed months after Floyd’s death and went into effect this month at an annual rate of $255,750. School Board Chair Kim Ellison signed the second contract on Sept. 18. District and school board officials didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

In the contract, Gaggle notes that it “cannot guarantee security and confidentiality through its services” and “may choose to turn over” student messages to the police. However, the company said it “shall not be responsible for contacting, notifying or alerting” law enforcement and cannot guarantee that “all unsafe communications can or will be detected while monitoring your student communications or website content.”

Through the contracts, Gaggle helps the district monitor student activities on a range of Google services, including email, Docs, a video platform, the chat service Google Hangouts and other Google Classroom tools. Through artificial intelligence, the company scans students’ emails, chat messages and other materials for specific words and phrases that may indicate harm. Moderators evaluate flagged content and notify school officials about references to self-harm, depression, drug use and violent threats. Gaggle’s algorithm scans student content for trigger words including “bomb,” “drunk,” “gun” and “kill me,” according to a 2019 Buzzfeed News investigation. But it also scans for LGBTQ-specific words like “gay” and “lesbian,” which are often flagged as potential bullying.

Such keywords could lead Gaggle to disproportionately subject LGBTQ students to school surveillance, Pfefferkorn said.

“Over and over again, we continue to see with algorithms that bias is often baked in,” she said.

“Any time you have a service turned on, you see pornography, you can see drugs and alcohol use or use being talked about. You, of course, have anxiety, depression and suicide being talked about.” —Bill McCullough, Gaggle’s vice president of sales. 

In a brief message buried on one Minneapolis high school’s website — with the headline “Don’t Get Gaggled” — district staff noted that distance learning presents new challenges in supporting students’ mental and emotional health needs and offers a reminder that “there is no such thing as confidentiality online.” The webpage links to a video featuring counseling services manager Derek Francis, who notes that the district “will be monitoring chats and postings for inappropriate content and will follow up as is appropriate.”

“Make sure you’re not saying things online that you would never say to someone’s face,” Francis warns students. “We don’t want you to end up regretting something that you post.”

Prior to the pandemic, the Minneapolis district didn’t believe Gaggle’s services were necessary, said Bill McCullough, the company’s vice president of sales. But when the virus closed buildings, “they wanted us to start the service as quickly as possible,” he said. After an initial six-month pilot, the district “realized that this service is extremely valuable and moved to a full contract this fall.”

“Any time you have a service turned on, you see pornography, you can see drugs and alcohol use or use being talked about,” he said. “You, of course, have anxiety, depression and suicide being talked about.”

Ben Feist, the chief programs officer at the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, has urged the state to adopt student data privacy protections for years, due in part to surveillance concerns with companies like Gaggle. In an interview, he said the Minneapolis district’s partnership with Gaggle is “massively intrusive” at a time when students’ use of technology for school has reached “complete saturation.”

“As far as I can tell, nobody has really thought this through, at least from any type of privacy lens. It’s hugely troubling.” —Ben Feist, chief program officer for ACLU of Minnesota

By terminating the police contract, district leaders have said they’re working to dismantle what they called a “white supremacist culture.” But Feist said that Gaggle could perpetuate racial disparities in student discipline. The Minneapolis district educates about 35,000 students, roughly 65 percent of whom are youth of color.

“There’s every reason to believe that the implementation of this type of surveillance is going to have a disproportionate impact on students of color and bring more people into a surveillance net that could have been avoided,” he said. “As far as I can tell, nobody has really thought this through, at least from any type of privacy lens. It’s hugely troubling.”

Searching for ‘sad kids’

Gaggle and similar student surveillance platforms have long marketed themselves as crucial to preventing school violence. After the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, for example, companies bombarded education leaders with sales pitches touting their wares as the key ingredient to precluding more carnage. In the pandemic era, Gaggle is marketing itself as a tool for mental health intervention.

“People are using our product to identify, largely, who the sad kids are in the school district,” said McCullough, who noted concerns that the pandemic has taken a toll on students’ emotional wellbeing and could lead to a spike in youth suicides. Such a trend has emerged in students’ emails and other digital communications, he said, with an uptick in student comments about depression, suicide and domestic abuse. “But thankfully kids are still talking about it and we’re able to go and identify those kids who are in crisis” to connect them with mental health services. McCullough declined to detail how his service has been used in Minneapolis, citing student privacy concerns.

Last school year, Gaggle monitored more than 4.5 million students’ online activities across the U.S., efforts it claims saved 927 lives, according to a company media release. In total, the company scanned 6.25 billion items within school accounts for content deemed harmful, including 64,000 references to suicide or self harm, 38,000 references of violence toward others and 18,000 instances of nudity or sexual content.

School surveillance doesn’t stop when classes end for the day. Prior to the pandemic, about 40 percent of incidents occurred after school hours, according to company data. But since March, incidents happening after hours increased to 55 percent. While threats of violence decreased by 43 percent after the pandemic closed campuses, the platform observed an uptick in students sending each other nude selfies.

Several years ago, concerning material was most often found in student emails, McCullough said. But now, messages are most often flagged in Google Docs, which students have used as makeshift chat rooms. In this context, students are often “their most authentic self” and typically share documents “with just a few friends,” he said.

Minneapolis and other districts have also paid Gaggle to monitor student communications in the chat tool Google Hangouts, which has taken on a new role in education during the pandemic. Without face-to-face interaction between students, they’re using Hangouts to collaborate on science projects and other assignments, McCullough said.

But critics argue that schools’ use of tools like Gaggle could discourage students from expressing themselves. Elizabeth Laird, the senior fellow of student privacy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, questioned whether such surveillance runs counter to schools’ mission of providing supportive environments where students can speak freely and learn from mistakes.

“When people are surveilled in this way, it really limits that kind of free expression and can have a chilling effect on what they’re comfortable saying and doing,” she said. Laird also raised concerns about the accuracy of algorithms, which often struggle to decipher true threats from slang or humor. Such noisy data could flag some students unnecessarily and miss signs that are genuinely concerning, she said.

School interactions with police are also a concern. In a recent parent survey, the Center for Democracy and Technology found that while most parents support the use of education technology, they’re also concerned about protecting their children’s digital privacy from vulnerabilities like hacks. Of the 1,200 participants who completed the online survey in May and June, 55 percent of parents — and 61 percent of those who are Black — said they’re concerned that student data could be shared with the police.

Though Gaggle rarely contacts the police directly, McCullough said, the district hasn’t said how it’s responding to tips generated from the surveillance service.

The district completed a chaotic candidate search last month and hired 11 “public safety support specialists” to replace the school-based police. The district has refused to disclose the names and qualifications of the 11 people who filled the openings, but documents obtained by The 74 suggest that more than half bring experience in policing, security or corrections — bolstering critics’ fears that the district ended the police contract but created an internal security force. According to an August school board agenda, the specialists training is supposed to encompass “school security 101,” de-escalating conflicts, dismantling the “school-to-prison pipeline” — and Gaggle.

Pfefferkorn, the local activist, blasted Minneapolis schools for a lack of transparency in its student surveillance practices and demanded that officials answer hard questions.

“It’s an opportunity for the district to hold a meeting where they share” how they’re using Gaggle to monitor students, she said. “Although you’re in a contract, contracts have been broken.”

Among them is the co-owner of a private security firm who previously worked in policing at the Minneapolis airport. Another worked for more than a decade as a police officer in Wisconsin, while several others offer experience from the juvenile justice system. Meanwhile, a larger share bring experience in education, including as special education assistants and deans in charge of student discipline. However, the number with law enforcement credentials has alarmed activists and several job applicants, both intent on breaking from what they called the district’s pervasive policing and surveillance of students — particularly those of color.

“It’s almost like they wanted police officers, but technically not police officers,” said one finalist who didn’t get the job but spoke on the condition of anonymity because they hope to work for the district in the future. The applicant offered years of experience in both education and criminal justice but left with an impression that district officials were unsure how the new hires would function day-to-day. “It was kind of weird.”

The move comes just months after the school board voted unanimously to terminate its contract with the Minneapolis Police Department in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a local officer in May, setting off a wave of unprecedented national protests over racial injustice. The Minneapolis district became one of the first in the country to sever ties with its police department, a decision education leaders said was part of a bigger effort to dismantle what they called a “white supremacist culture” in the school system and improve campus climate for youth of color.

In place of school police, the district hired 11 “public safety support specialists” it touted as a “bridge between in-school intervention and law enforcement.” Though the specialists will serve a security function, the district said they’ll be trained to build relationships with students and defuse conflicts before they become violent and demand a police response. The specialists, whose salaries were advertised at $65,000 to $86,000 a year, begin training Wednesday, the district said in a statement.

Their training “will continue to clarify the focus for these staff is not behavior enforcement,” the statement continued. “Rather, they are critical incident support staff who connect students and other staff to the many resources available to support them,” such as counseling.

Yet many in the community remain skeptical and have accused Minneapolis schools of replacing campus police with “rent-a-cops.” Floyd’s death prompted districts across the country to re-examine the role officers play in schools, and activists fear that the high-profile district’s actions could set back progress in the larger “police-free schools” movement.

Though school leaders rushed to interview, hire and train the support specialists before classes resumed this month, the district failed to meet its self-imposed deadline, and applicants who were ultimately turned down painted a process in disarray. One disgruntled finalist, who currently works for the district but said they applied with ambitions of reforming the school security apparatus, called the lengthy interview process a “sham.” The switch from school-based police to support specialists is simply “cosmetic” and isn’t likely to result in substantive changes in a school system where educators are quick to suspend students, said the finalist.

“It’s fake,” said the applicant, who asked not to be identified because of their current job.

The district stirred controversy this summer when it sought applicants for support specialists with backgrounds in criminal justice. Then it backtracked, claiming that the policing prerequisite was an error and that candidates’ ability to build positive relationships with students was most important. Community activists who oppose school policing said that misstep should have prompted the district to restart the selection process, especially since the delay to a return to in-person learning caused by the pandemic gave them additional time.

In August, The 74 obtained copies of the 24 finalists’ résumés, and at least 14 had experience as police officers, corrections officials or private security guards. Finalist Mohamed Ali, a former dean at the Minneapolis district in charge of student discipline, received an offer, he told The 74, but had to turn it down because he had already accepted another job at a charter school. The hiring process dragged on far longer than he anticipated, Ali said.

“I just felt like I didn’t have time to wait,” he said. “I just made the best decision for me and my family.”

The delayed process put finalist Alfred Harris in a bind. Harris worked as a correctional officer for more than a decade before becoming a paraprofessional at a suburban Minneapolis school district. He got laid off from his most recent job as a gym manager when the pandemic hit. Because he got so far into the hiring process with Minneapolis schools, he thought he had the safety support specialist job lined up and stopped applying elsewhere, he said. Then, last week, he learned otherwise.

The district put Harris and 11 others all on the same rejection email — a move that infuriated multiple finalists. After several replied to the email and accused district officials of acting unprofessionally, the district followed up and apologized for compromising their personal information due to the “unauthorized public dissemination” of the rejection letter.

Among those who blasted the error was finalist Micheal Delgado, previously the head of security at a suburban Minneapolis school district who most recently worked in security for a Fortune 500 company. Delgado was furloughed because of the pandemic.

“Usually that’s done on an individual basis, I would assume, so I thought that was pretty tactless,” Delgado said. “I just kind of shook my head and was like, ‘Well, maybe it’s a blessing in disguise that I’m not working for an organization that would do something like that.’”

Of the 24 finalists, 12 were rejected and one — Ali — turned down the job. That would leave 11 remaining, the same number as the available positions. A district spokesman declined to disclose whether the 11 remaining finalists were ultimately hired. An official previously told The 74 they plan to station a specialist at each of the district’s seven comprehensive high schools while the other four will support emergency response across the city. The 74 reached out to each of the 11 remaining finalists; two declined to comment and the others didn’t respond to voicemails.

The district said they “understand people’s concerns with the process — especially its length,” but it was delayed because of an “unprecedented amount of transparency and community involvement.”

About more than removing cops from schools

As the Minneapolis district charts a new path without school-based police, it has promoted the support specialists as a group of racially diverse role models who are supposed to form positive relationships with students. A desire to build strong bonds with teens was a common thread among the finalists.

“I have a passion for helping to rehabilitate our youth of tomorrow,” one noted in a cover letter. “My passion is showing youths another way of dealing with their anger and pain.” The cover letter for another finalist, who offered experience leading youth theater programs, touted a career “dedicated to fostering strong social and emotional skills amongst youth.”

The police contract the board recently dissolved set similar priorities, noting a mission to “support a safe and welcoming environment while acting as a positive role model/informal mentor for students.” Officers were not supposed to engage in school discipline, according to the contract, but were instead directed to perform youth engagement activities, craft safety plans, defuse conflicts and “utilize reasonable discretion in enforcing laws” in schools. The contract required officers to be trained in adolescent development, restorative justice and “bias-free policing.”

SImilarly, the new support specialists aren’t supposed to engage in routine student discipline, according to the district, and are there to help create safety plans, respond to crises and connect with students. Their training is supposed to encompass de-escalating conflicts, restorative justice, dismantling the “school-to-prison pipeline,” “school security 101” and how to restrain children, according to a school board agenda from August. The district document also noted training in Gaggle, a tool that allows schools to surveil students’ online behaviors.

Student activists’ push for police-free schools is about more than removing officers from campuses, said Maria Fernandez, senior campaign strategist at the Advancement Project, a national racial-justice group. It’s about ending a culture of policing and surveillance that she said is pervasive in many schools, especially those where Black and brown students make up the majority.

“This public safety support specialists’ use of surveillance technology like Gaggle,” she said, “continues to perpetuate policing and criminalization.” How Minneapolis responds to the imperative to change student policing is “shaping fights across the country,” she said.

The Minneapolis school district serves about 35,000 students, roughly 65 percent of whom are youth of color. Meanwhile, more than two-thirds of school staff are white, according to district data. But staff of color often serve in school support roles like special education assistants and deans, one finalist said. To improve conditions for youth of color, the district must do more to diversify teachers and administrators, according to the finalist.

Harris, the finalist who is an ex-corrections officer, questioned the district’s decision to terminate its police contract in the first place. Clearly the district felt its schools could be dangerous if it saw the need to station armed police in the buildings, he said. But those threats “didn’t disappear just because there was social injustice with George Floyd.” He worried that community pushback prompted school officials to hire support specialists without law enforcement experience even though they could be “just as authoritative as a police officer” but without adequate experience in confronting dangerous situations.

“A social worker is not going to break up a fight — they’re just not,” he said. “I’ve been in schools for many years, and they’re not. They may know how to de-escalate one, but once it gets to an area of unsafe environment, they’re not paid to do that, they don’t even have that type of training.”

But Ali, the finalist who turned down the job offer, said he supported the school board’s decision to terminate the police contract because students made their opposition loud and clear. He said he felt the support specialist position would be a marked improvement. Deans and other support staff know what students experience at home and know how to create positive relationships, he said.

Rather than serving as a “person of authority,” the support specialists will offer students someone they “can go to for help and seek out advice,” he said. “It’s more of a person you can see as a mentor, a role model, someone you can get support from.”

Even though the lengthy hiring process led Ali to leave his job with the Minneapolis district, he has just one regret: leaving behind the students he got to know as a dean.

“I just hope whoever got the position that I declined is there for the kids and is there for the staff and the parents,” he said. “I know it’s not an easy job.”

The move has already angered racial justice activists who cheered the district’s swift decision to terminate its police contract after George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis officer. Floyd’s May death led educators across the country to remove police from their campuses, but the Minneapolis district’s plan to replace officers with 11 “public safety support specialists” — touted as a “bridge between in-school intervention and law enforcement” — has activists worried about undoing progress made in the wake of recent protests.

“I’m afraid that they’re going to set a dangerous trend nationally, and that all these districts that have been ending contracts are going to look to Minneapolis and say, ‘Oh, we’ll just create our own internal security force,’ that will continue to perpetuate policing and criminalization,” said Maria Fernandez, senior campaign strategist at the Advancement Project, a national racial justice organization.

Among the district’s 24 finalists, at least 14 have experience as police officers, corrections officials or private security guards, according to the candidates’ résumés, which a source provided to The 74 on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to share the documents.

Six finalists have some policing experience and at least one currently works as an officer — in suburban Minneapolis. Six have served as security guards. Another eight have experience in corrections, including five who worked in the juvenile justice system and a former sheriff’s department officer who listed jailhouse weapon “shakedowns” as experience.

At the same time, more than half of the finalists currently work for the district in capacities that include special education and student discipline. The 74 is withholding the applicants’ names to protect their privacy during the interview process.

Education activist Kenneth Eban, who has worked for years to remove officers from Minneapolis schools, said he was alarmed by the share of finalists with law enforcement backgrounds.

“This is just another way of being able to police and surveil students, especially students of color,” he said. The “oversurveillance of students of color” and an adversarial campus climate would still be a problem in the district if none of the support specialists had policing backgrounds, he said, but the finalists suggest that school leaders aren’t fully committed to less punitive approaches to campus safety. “When I think about a corrections officer, I think about the terrible conditions that people who are in prison experience and how corrections officers uphold that system and that environment.”

Karen DeVet, the district’s chief operations officer, said it was important for the district to have an emergency response and security plan in place before the upcoming school year begins September 8. Despite the national uprising following Floyd’s death, she said the district is “not going to compromise on protecting our students and our staff.” However, she sought to allay fears that the district simply plans to replace school-based police with more of the same.

“These are not licensed law enforcement officials who carry guns and a toolbelt” but instead will be specialists trained to defuse conflicts before they become violent, she said. While they serve an immediate need, they’re part of a larger district effort to improve school climate. “To address those root causes of why our students and our families don’t always feel welcome, heard or seen in our schools is going to take time,” DeVet said.

The specialist position began generating controversy last month after the district released a job posting seeking applicants with degrees and experience in criminal justice capable of breaking up fights, providing security at district events and fostering “trusting, nurturing and learning environments.” The posting listed a salary range of $65,695 to $85,790. Following the community uproar, the district backtracked and said the law enforcement prerequisite was an error — and that candidates’ ability to build relationships with students was paramount.

In a Facebook post, the district said an “accelerated schedule” to ensure that the specialists are hired and receive special training before the start of the new school year “did not allow for creation of a perfect job description.”

“We did consider restarting” the hiring process, DeVet said, but after looking at applications, the district “felt like we had a really strong pool,” including educators with master’s degrees and others from the law enforcement realm with crisis experience.

The 11 specialist roles are the first part of the district’s new campus safety strategy, which officials plan to unveil at a school board meeting next week. Once hired, officials plan to station specialists at the district’s seven comprehensive high schools while the other four will support emergency response across the city. After receiving more than 100 applications and conducting interviews with more than 50 candidates, district officials, prioritizing internal candidates, settled on a top tier of two dozen finalists they said were racially diverse.

One applicant leads a youth mentorship program. Another is a military veteran who currently works at a high school where he helps teachers interact with families who have limited English speaking skills. In a cover letter, one applicant noted a career “dedicated to fostering strong social and emotional skills” among students as a key attribute and said that positive relationships are key to generating “a truly safe, inclusive and supportive school environment.”

Many of the internal candidates already work as deans assisting administrators with student discipline and campus security. Yet Marika Pfefferkorn, executive director of the Midwest Center for School Transformation and an advocate against police in Minneapolis schools, said the deans would be given more responsibilities as support specialists, including the authority to call police for backup. She accused the district of creating the positions without offering to receive community input and missing an opportunity to reimagine its approach to school safety.

“If you don’t actually change the culture of the system, you just replace who’s doing it,” she said.

The teachers union has made a similar argument. Greta Callahan, the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers president, has likened the specialists to “rent-a-cops.”

When the union called for police-free campuses, “we did not mean, ‘Hire a bunch of private security officers and put them in our buildings,’” Callahan told City Pages, a local news outlet. “Let me ask you a question. If I order a sandwich, and I say, ‘Hold the mayo,’ does that mean put a bunch of Miracle Whip all over it?’ They’re missing the point.”

One applicant, who is currently the head of security at a suburban school district, is a military police veteran who served combat missions in Iraq. Another works for a private security firm at an Amazon distribution center. A third finalist currently is employed as a corrections officer at a suburban jail where responsibilities include mediating disputes, enforcing rules and checking cells “for contraband and signs of security breaches,” according to the candidate’s résumé, which also notes training on “the impacts of trauma and institutional racism.”

Rashad Turner, executive director of the Minnesota Parent Union, said he was happy that so many of the applicants already work in education, but he also sees value in candidates with law enforcement experience coming to work for the district.

“Having that familiarity with the law enforcement system, but leaving it to serve students, I’d say that could be a good thing,” said Turner, who went to college for criminal justice before losing faith in policing as a career. “To have that understanding of the injustices in the law enforcement system, I could see that being valuable” in a role centered on student discipline. He said the district’s plan to begin the upcoming academic year remotely because of the pandemic could allow additional time for the specialists to receive training that ensures that they’re “serving students’ best interests” rather than working as a “souped-up hall monitor that is targeting the students.”

Eban, the community activist, took a more aggressive stance. He said the district should restart the hiring process altogether because the job posting that sought applicants with criminal justice experience could have prompted some qualified applicants to opt out of the process.

“I don’t understand — now knowing that we’re also going into distance learning to start the year — why this process cannot be restarted to get a better pool of applicants, to get a better pool of finalists that could help support students in our communities in a different way,” Eban said.

“If you think this cannot happen to you, I’m here to tell you I used to think the same exact thing,” said Noel Glacer, a Florida-based security professional. The message — belied by the statistical rarity of school shootings — was part cautionary tale, part call to action.  

Glacer is no dispassionate observer. In February, his son, Jake, was in a psychology class at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a gunman opened fire, killing 17. Glacer urged people in the room to donate to SOS Parkland, a nonprofit that’s raising money to equip the city’s schools with additional security.

“It was horrible,” he said, recalling the Valentine’s Day shooting. “It can happen to you. It can.”

Glacer spoke at a roundtable in Washington in late June, part of the annual conference of the Security Industry Association, a trade group. Attendees included Trump administration officials, legislators from both parties, security-company executives, and industry lobbyists.

Security officials in the room hawked a range of products that could have been ripped from a James Bond movie: surveillance cameras with facial recognition capability, automated door locks, gunshot detection sensors, and software that scans social media platforms in search of the next shooter. If schools across the country put a larger emphasis on securing their buildings, they said, educators could prevent shootings or, at the very least, mitigate the bloodshed.

Each major school shooting — Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland — has added fuel to a multibillion-dollar industry encompassing everything from sophisticated surveillance technology to high-priced consultants to explain it all to anxious educators.

The recent tragedies are pumping new energy — not to mention funds — into strategies to keep children safe, including millions of dollars in federal money from the STOP School Violence Act.

As each tragedy stokes fresh outrage from parents, education leaders say they’re inundated with sales pitches from security companies, each with the same basic message: You could be next.

Such a climate is “ripe for exploitation,” argues Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, which consults districts on school safety planning. The result, according to many critics, is that the security industry has dominated the policy response to school shootings, drowning out subtler conversations about issues ranging from mental health to gun control in favor of a rush to adopt costly, and largely unproven, methods to harden schools.

“It’s not that they’re villains and they don’t care and they don’t want safe schools — I’m not trying to send that message,” said Trump, who has no relation to the president. “But they’re certainly opportunistic. At the end of the day, they’re looking for new revenue streams.”

The Columbine ‘Wake-up Call’

It began with Columbine.

Before that, Guy Grace said, security efforts in his Colorado school district centered on kids with spray paint cans, not guns. For Grace, director of security and emergency preparedness at Littleton Public Schools, the shift was instantaneous.

On the morning of April 20, 1999, he was lifting weights at the gym when his pager went off. Two students had walked into Columbine High School in a neighboring school district and killed 15 people, including themselves. After that, his job was never the same.

“It was a complete change, just a wake-up call for us all,” he said. “It certainly has shaped a lot of what we do across the country in regards to school safety.”

Before Columbine, Littleton didn’t have any security cameras at its schools, Grace said. The district has since installed more than a thousand cameras, some with analytics capabilities that can alert authorities to unusual activity, such as someone walking onto school grounds in the middle of the night. The cameras are part of the comprehensive school security equipment the district installed after the community approved a bond in 2013 providing more than $7.5 million for the upgrades. Just last year, he said, a gunshot detection sensor, which can recognize the audio signatures of gunfire, alerted officials when a student committed suicide on a school playground.

The growth in Littleton’s school security infrastructure is mirrored in districts across the country. During the 1999-2000 school year, 19 percent of schools were equipped with security cameras, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. By the 2015-16 school year, 81 percent of schools had video surveillance. The percentage of schools reporting that they control access to their buildings has also spiked, from 75 percent to 94 percent, during the same time period.

Fear Factor

The surge in school surveillance has been a boon for companies that make and install the products. In 2017, security equipment and services generated $2.7 billion in revenue, according to an analysis by IHS Markit, a market-research firm. Each mass school shooting heightens the profile of school security products, said Jim Dearing, a senior analyst there.

The market analysis underscores what any salesman knows: Anxiety can be good for business.

“For anyone to say, ‘It’s not going to happen here,’ all they’re doing is playing the law of large numbers and assuming that they’re going to get lucky,” said Harry Rhulen, co-founder of Firestorm Solutions, a crisis-and-risk-management firm that contracts with school districts.

To pitch his company’s violence-prevention program, Rhulen laid out a chilling scenario: Every school in America, he said, has students, teachers, or staff members who are “sitting on the fence.” Maybe they’re dealing with mental health issues. Maybe they’re experiencing spousal abuse or are dependent on drugs or alcohol. “Something may push them off the fence.”

The upshot: One of them could become the next shooter, he said, “and there’s just no way to know which school is next.”

Among the company’s school safety recommendations is an anonymous reporting tool, which allows students to report troubling behaviors they observe in peers, and social media monitoring systems that crawl through platforms like Facebook to identify threats.

But is Rhulen framing the danger fairly?

David Ropeik, a consultant on the psychology of risk perception, has written that the odds that a K-12 student will be shot and killed at a public school are roughly 1 in 614 million. According to the most recent federal education statistics, between 1992 and 2015, fewer than 3 percent of murders in which the victims were children and fewer than 1 percent of youth suicides occurred at schools. The data showed that reported incidents of violent crimes in schools has declined over the same time period.

Still, a third of parents say they fear for their child’s safety at school, according to a recent poll by Phi Delta Kappa International, a professional association for educators. That poll found widespread support for school security measures like armed school police and metal detectors.

Marketing Tragedy

Recognizing the heightened concern, officials at the security industry conference seized the moment. Inside the Independence Ballroom at the Grand Hyatt Washington, salesmen touted some of their latest wares: door locks that open with a smartphone app, motion detectors that notify staff before a visitor reaches the building, and cameras that track guests as they walk around campus.

There’s a larger force motivating these new offerings. The school security industry will experience slower growth in the coming years, Dearing of IHS Markit predicts. Since a majority of schools now have surveillance equipment, fewer districts are entering the market for the first time. In response, he said, companies are marketing the next generation of school safety products, like scanners that track license plates in the parking lot and high-security classroom doors.

Salespeople argue, and they hope schools agree, that as older products become obsolete, schools install the newest ones to stay safe. In order to persuade educators, security companies are making in-person sales pitches and building pop-up displays at education conferences. Some companies hold their own events to promote the importance of heavily outfitted campuses.

For example, Axis Communications, a company that sells surveillance cameras and other hardware, hosts school-safety symposiums several times a year in cities across the country. Scott Dunn, the company’s senior director of business development solutions and services, said the symposiums aren’t designed as marketing pitches but rather serve as opportunities to inform educators about the need for security plans and technology to keep kids safe.

But interactions with security companies have left a bad taste in the mouths of some district leaders.

After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, Connecticut awarded the Newtown district $50 million to build a new, state-of-the-art campus. Now-retired superintendent Joseph Erardi quipped that after the tragedy, he made “dozens of immediate new best friends” from the ranks of security companies looking to get their products inside the school.

“In some cases, they were sincere,” said Erardi, who retired in 2017 and now consults districts on school safety planning. “In other cases, it was all about branding and marketing Newtown.”

Grace, the director of security and emergency preparedness in Littleton, had a similar experience. In 2013, a nightmare unfolded in his district. In a shooting that lasted less than 80 seconds, a senior at Arapahoe High School walked into the school and killed a classmate before taking his own life.

For security companies, Grace’s reality became a sales pitch.

“They start pounding all the school districts across the country and then they say, ‘Don’t be like Arapahoe High School,’” Grace said. “You sit there and go, ‘Who is this idiot? He’s trying to capitalize on a tragedy that we just had in our school district.’ I just despise that with a passion.”

‘How Many More Kids Have to Die?’

As industry leaders sipped cocktails at the security-conference reception, Representative John Rutherford, Republican of Florida, acknowledged he owed a recent legislative success to people in the room. Just weeks before the February shooting in Parkland, Rutherford had introduced the STOP School Violence Act, a law that directs hundreds of millions of dollars over a decade toward school security and will thus be a boon for security companies. (Every year, districts spend far more than that on such companies’ products and services.)

“The STOP School Violence Act could not have gotten across the finish line as quickly as it did without the support of this group, as well as the school safety caucus and the advocacy from the Partner Alliance for Safer Schools,” Rutherford said.

Much of the conference’s discussions around campus security were led by the Secure Schools Alliance and the Partner Alliance for Safer Schools, two advocacy groups that urge schools to take more measures to prevent shootings and other threats. Secure Schools is funded by security companies, and the Partner Alliance is a joint venture of the Security Industry Association and the National Systems Contractors Association, both trade groups. The Partner Alliance and Secure Schools maintain advisory boards staffed largely by officials from security companies; for example, the public affairs director of Allegion, a security company that focuses on door locks and other entry technology, serves on the boards of both groups.

Robert Boyd, executive director of the Secure Schools Alliance, says his group is funded solely by security companies because “they get it.” (He added that the group plans to add officials who represent school police and fire marshals to their board.)

He said leading companies like Allegion aren’t investing in school security efforts to sell more locks. Instead, the company recognizes a dire need.

“They look at it and they say, ‘You know, we understand what happened in Sandy Hook was a facilities failure,’” Boyd said. “Folks in the security industry, we understand how to keep intruders out of a building.”

But that’s not to say they don’t make a profit. In 2017, Allegion reported $2.4 billion in net revenue, and Timothy Eckersley, president of Allegion’s Americas region, said school security is a “significant” part of its business.

Beyond the STOP Act, security companies and partner advocacy groups have also worked to ensure that conversations around hardened campuses continue in Washington. In 2016, Rep. Susan Brooks, Republican of Indiana, and Rep. Rick Larsen, Democrat of Washington, teamed up to form the Congressional School Safety Caucus. Brooks acknowledged that the caucus was formed after executives at security companies with offices in her district, including Allegion, urged the move.

In order to advance federal policies like the STOP legislation, Boyd said, advocates with his group “hit the pavement” on Capitol Hill. “You go office to office, staff to staff, committee to committee.”  

The group also advocates at the state level for specific school safety laws, including ones that establish security standards (which can require, as more than a dozen states’ do, technology like surveillance systems and bullet-resistant entryways), allot funding for hardware upgrades, and mandate frequent facility assessments. Boyd is also a co-chair of the homeland security task force at the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a national nonprofit that drafts state-level legislation for use by conservative legislators across the U.S. After highlighting states with school security laws at the group’s annual meeting earlier this week, he said, he hopes additional state lawmakers get on board.

Trump, the safety consultant, said he is concerned about the influence that security companies, and the advocacy partners they fund, wield over lawmakers.

“While physical security has a piece in the puzzle, the concerning part is when big business in the security industry is trying to single-handedly have laws changed and rewrite codes, which at no coincidence benefit their business interests,” he said.

Boyd pushed back on this argument. He maintains that school security should be decided at the district level but that the state guidelines his association works on help ensure that schools aren’t “throwing money at the problem.”

He said he’s simply frustrated with the level of security deemed acceptable at schools. In the interests of student safety, he’s of the opinion that “school security needs to be a little bit more inconvenient,” like it is in other government buildings such as federal courthouses.

“When you go to that courthouse, if they tell you, ‘Drop your pants,’ you’re going to drop your pants or you’re not getting into the building,” he said. “They’re going to inspect you thoroughly because we’ve had our share of courthouse shootings, and they stopped them. At what point does the collective outrage say, ‘Enough’? How many more kids have to die?”

The State of Research

Indeed, Boyd and others in the security industry say their products save lives. “No shooter has ever breached a locked classroom door,” he said, pointing to the example of the shooting at Sandy Hook.

In fact, the school’s front door was locked, but that didn’t stop the gunman. He shot through a window near the front entrance to get in. In the part of the building where the shooting unfolded, classroom doors only locked with a key — from the outside. More could have been done to protect students, he said.

“If you had a ballistic-graded entrance and you had lockable classroom doors, that death toll comes way down — if he even gets in,” he said.

Superintendents and state schools chiefs acknowledged in interviews that physical security is crucial to maintaining safe schools.

But in some cases, tech-driven school security mechanisms have been plagued by human error. In Parkland, for example, emergency personnel didn’t realize the school’s surveillance cameras were operating on a 20-minute delay, complicating the police response.

In fact, aside from anecdotes, little academic research exists on whether security technology actually works. In 2016, Heather Schwartz, associate director of RAND Education, released a study of school districts that deployed sophisticated security technology. From entry control equipment to video surveillance to violence prediction technology and software that scans students’ social media profiles, she found, independent research was surprisingly scarce on products’ ability to prevent tragedies or mitigate risk. Ironically, when lawmakers approved the STOP Act, they reappropriated funds from a post-Sandy Hook grant program that financed research on school safety.

“I thought it was concerning there was such a lack of evidence about forms of technology that seem to be widely used,” Schwartz said.

Despite the dearth of research, critics say efforts to harden schools are driving attention away from other interventions like mental health screenings, behavioral supports, or even gun control. In fact, some research has found heightened surveillance instills in students a feeling that their schools are unsafe, and that students in schools with several forms of visible surveillance, like cameras and metal detectors, had greater exposure to drugs and fighting.

Meanwhile, civil rights groups and other critics have raised concerns about pervasive surveillance, which is deployed disproportionately to schools that serve high populations of students of color. The American Civil Liberties Union argues that facial recognition technology is “notoriously inaccurate” and could lead to students being punished for offenses they didn’t commit.

Security as ‘a Way of Life’

As school leaders across the country explore available security options, Dale Marsden, superintendent in San Bernardino, California, said the benefits of hardened schools are clear. But, he added, security equipment has its limits.

Safety efforts in San Bernardino intensified after a shooting at North Park Elementary School last year, when a man went to his estranged wife’s special education classroom, killing her and a student before taking his own life. After the incident, the district sought input from parents, North Park teachers, emergency responders, security companies, and safety consultants that cost the district more than $100,000, Marsden said. The district spent more than $1 million to redesign the school and implement new security measures. Among the upgrades, he said, is a buzzer system that allows access to different parts of the building and a campus entry process that runs background checks on visitors. Nonetheless, he said, there’s no such thing as “absolute safety.”

“If a shooter is intent on coming into a campus and you have a visitor control system, it sounds harsh, but someone can take out the visitor control system,” said Marsden, an Air Force veteran who specialized in security. “Can some of those things slow down or prevent? Yes. Can you have absolute safety? No.”

Although Marsden said cost is a major roadblock for districts considering new security initiatives, Eckersley of Allegion said educators get too “wrapped up about the money.” He pointed to the Partner Alliance’s “tiered” guidelines that encourage districts to start with basic infrastructure and work their way up to the Cadillac of school safety plans. Though the recommendations don’t push specific brands, districts that opt to implement the guidelines would be in for a major monetary investment.

Relying on costs from the recent security upgrades in Littleton, the Partner Alliance estimates it would cost a district about $170,000 per high school to implement the most basic tier, bringing the price tag to an estimated $11 billion for all campuses across the country. For a district to implement the most sophisticated security systems outlined by the group, it’d cost an estimated $540,000 per high school, or nearly $36 billion at all schools nationwide.

Once schools reach that top level — with electronic gates, technology that scans license plates, bullet-resistant glass, and other equipment — a Partner Alliance PowerPoint slide said that “security is no longer a project — it is a way of life.”