In the News: School Mental Health Surveillance Technologies Raise Privacy Concerns
April 21, 2025
Recently in the news, we learned that schools are beginning to adopt surveillance technologies to monitor what students search on school-issued laptops. While these tools are intended to alert staff to potential threats, prevent harm, and keep students safe, many students are raising concerns about their privacy. Our #GoodforMEdia youth leaders took a deep dive into this topic—check out their reactions!
What you need to know:
School district surveillance technologies use machine learning algorithms to scan what students search for or write using a school-issued laptop or tablet at any time day or night. How does it work? The algorithm flags indications of potential risk for things like bullying, self-harm, suicide or school violence and then sends a screenshot to human reviewers who will alert the school or law enforcement if the issue seems serious enough.
The surveillance shows that students write about depression, heartbreak, suicide, addiction, bullying and eating disorders and have role-play sessions with AI chatbots.
The goal is to keep students safe and intervene to prevent harm, but raises serious questions about privacy.
Reporters were able to access nearly 3,500 sensitive student records related to this technology when investigating this story.
Our gut reactions:
Many of us were shocked by the fact that schools have access to everything students are doing on their school devices.
Students don’t want teachers to know personal details about them that are not related to their learning. This information should be restricted to certain adults like counselors and not available to all staff. It feels very invasive.
Exposing personal information without clear, explicit consent builds fear and damages trust.
We wonder about joking or common slang terms and how those might flag things that are not legitimate risks.
It’s interesting how these software seem to be a widely-adopted approach to improving youth mental health in schools as opposed to providing students with education or counseling about navigating the online world in safer ways.
We think it’s headed in the…
Right direction
Wrong direction
Too soon to tell
What to look out for:
Will this become common in more and more school districts?
How can privacy protections be improved before expanding this?
Should more transparency be offered to students about what is monitored?
The intention to keep students safe is valid, but does this go too far?
We want to hear from you!
Do you feel school surveillance technology is going too far to keep students safe? Comment on our Instagram post.