The school day generally ends around 3pm but the Glendale Unified School District keeps their eyes on its students well after they exit their classrooms. The school district keeps tabs on all public posts made by students on social media outlets.

Seems like a bit much to do, especially after teaching hundreds of children daily but Glendale Unified isn’t watching the kid’s online activity themselves. They actually hired an outside company who speacilize in following Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube feeds of students.

The school district is not Big Brother and snooping on children for its own leisure, “The whole purpose is student safety,” said district superintendent Richard Sheehan to CBS.

Sheehan continued: “We do monitor on and off campus, but we do pay attention during school hours. We do pay more attention to the school computers.” The tracking company looks out for certain keywords to track troubled students. These keywords can then give the educators insight on potentially suicidal kids for example and the proper interventions can be put into place.

Legally the school district has the right to monitor its students being the social network posts are public. The district’s tracking company, Geo Listening explains, it purpose on its website: “The students we can help are already made public by the students themselves. Therefore, no privacy is violated.”

Do you think the extra steps on monitoring are necessary to protect students? Couldn’t a record of online activity as a youth potentially be harmful to a child’s future?

-Dru Ashe (@ShottaDru)

Source: CNET