Former Lawrence High School students say school board members ignored their concerns with privacy, free speech and intellectual property rights by extending the district’s contract with AI surveillance company Gaggle.

The former students, who initiated meetings with school board members earlier this year while serving as editors of the student newspaper, also question whether board members fully understand the implications of spying on students.

Natasha Torkzaban, one of the former editors, says their fight is “definitely not done.”

“We’re hopefully going to find a solution to this,” she said.

Lawrence schools implemented Gaggle’s spyware on district-owned devices last November to flag “possible student situations,” which involve the intervention of a mental health coordinator, the district said. The board voted 6-1 last week to renew Gaggle’s contract for the next school year at a cost of $53,000.

But the vote did not deter the former students’ interest in making their voices heard.

Torkzaban, Morgan Salisbury, Jack Tell and Maya Smith, all former editors of Lawrence High School’s student newspaper, The Budget, had presented concerns about Gaggle to some board members in a meeting in April.

The editors’ concerns centered around constitutional protections for freedom of speech, specifically school newspapers, and from unreasonable searches and seizures for all students. In their presentation, the editors said constant monitoring from Gaggle would prevent them from providing “honest, uncensored reporting.”

During the July 8 school board meeting, superintendent Anthony Lewis said the board had been working with student journalists to protect their “journalistic integrity” by no longer monitoring their devices.

“He said it in a way that was like, ‘We worked with our journalism students and reached a solution,’ kind of glossing over the fact that it was only after six or seven months of consistently, weekly pushing them that they were actually willing to talk,” Tell said. “And then another couple months of discussion and arguments after that to get them to work toward a solution that would work for us too.”

The district removed Gaggle from approximately 160 devices used by journalism students after the students met with board members in April. This decision allowed senior student journalists like Salisbury, Torkzaban, Smith and Tell to have Gaggle-free devices for about a month until their last day of school in mid-May. The board subsequently declared the issue of free press resolved.

“That issue wasn’t solved,” Torkzaban said. “Because on the last day of school, one of my admin walked in and gave me a piece of paper that I wrote freshman year, four years ago, and said it had been Gaggled.”

“Gaggled” is a new verb in the Lawrence school district, meaning a student’s work has been flagged by Gaggle’s software and administrators have been notified. Student journalists tested what gets “Gaggled” and discovered significant issues. For instance, when a student emailed a teacher in crisis and used the word “suicide,” the email never reached the teacher. The AI software flagged the email and sent it to a Gaggle representative for analysis, who then forwarded it to the school administration. The student was never informed that the teacher did not receive the email.

This issue — among others involving innocuous student artwork getting flagged and removed from students’ devices — was brought up at the board meeting as another issue that had been “solved.” Again, the board credited their “work” with the student journalists to resolve the issue.

In reality, Tell said, administrators told the editors to stop testing the software. 

“They didn’t like us testing the product they had put on us unwillingly, but then they get to use it when we do find something that’s severe or needs to be fixed and useful — they get to use it as brownie points to say, ‘Look at us, working with students.’ ”

The editors said there were moments where they would inform the school board of their findings, and it was a shock to board members. Editors worried that board members still don’t understand the scope and implications of Gaggle.

In an interview, school board president Kelly Jones said the district formed a generative AI committee that will go into practice by September.

“Any time you use these monitoring devices there is a Big Brother component,” Jones said. “I’m not going to ignore that.” 

Another problem the editors cited was a lack of communication about Gaggle. Students and parents received an email about Gaggle in December, a month after Gaggle’s implementation.

The editors say students often are confused about how Gaggle works. Students were frequently called into the office to discuss their “Gaggled” work and, at times, were even escorted by school security officers. Oftentimes these visits were for inconsequential things, like a student having a PDF copy of “Romeo and Juliet.”

Because of a lack of understanding, some students believe that Gaggle can see everything, the editors said. According to the district, Gaggle does not monitor personal devices. Torkzaban said when some students receive concerning messages, they think, “Well, I don’t have to report this because a teacher can already see that a kid texted me this.”

“We need students to communicate openly with us. That saves lives,” said Barbara Tholen, The Budget’s adviser, while addressing the board during the July 8 meeting.

The editors said some board members have framed their concerns as if they don’t care about their peers’ mental health, which isn’t true.

According to Lewis, the superintendent, since Gaggle’s implementation, the software has flagged 260,000 items. Of those, the district acted on 1,000 of them, and 28 were “possible student situations.”

“I think you have to look at things holistically,” Salisbury said. “It’s very clearly not that simple. And when there’s so much harm, like noticeable, recordable harm that Gaggle has done, it’s really difficult to see the board ignore it or never address it and just say that Gaggle is benefiting students when there’s been no real evidence of that.”

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.

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