MONDAY, OCTOBER 25 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE B5
BY LIZ BOWIEThe Baltimore City school
system is monitoring its laptops
with software that alerts offi-
cials when a s tudent might be
considering suicide, a contro-
versial innovation that came
about during the coronavirus
pandemic after the system
loaned families tens of thou-
sands of the computers for use
at home.
Since March, nine students
have been identified through
GoGuardian’s Beacon software
as having severe mental health
crises and were taken to an
emergency room, according to
Stacey Davis, the city schools
coordinator of media and in-
structional technology. In at
least two of those cases, the
students had never had any
mental health care.
Two reports released in the
past month question the use of
such technology across the
country to track students, warn-
ing that it might be used for
disciplinary purposes, uninten-
tionally out LGBTQ students or
squash student expression. The
studies also point out that the
behavior of economically disad-
vantaged students may be
tracked more frequently than
wealthier students because the
school-owned laptop is their
only device.
“Privacy and equity was not
being considered as much as it
needs to be,” said Elizabeth
Laird, director of equity in civic
technology at the Center for
Democracy and Technology in
Washington and co-author of
one of the reports. “Student
activity monitoring is quite
wid espread.”
Baltimore County uses Go-
Guardian software for other
purposes but does not monitor
for self-harm. School officials
said their approach to suicide
prevention focuses on building
relationships between students
and school staff members.
Harford, Howard and Carroll
counties said they do not moni-
tor student devices for warning
signs of self-injury. Anne Arun-
del County did not respond to
questions about any monitor-
ing.
In Baltimore City, on week-
ends and at night when school
psychologists or social workers
aren’t available, school police
officers have been sent to stu-
dents’ homes to check on them
after alerts from the software, as
first reported by The Real News
Network.
GoGuardian did not respond
to questions about what key-
words its software uses to iden-
tify students who might be plan-
ning suicide.
Davis said when a message
comes in to school police, the
agency’s dispatcher first tries to
call a family. If they don’t get an
answer, a school police officer is
sent to the home to talk to the
family in what’s known as a
“wellness check.”
School Police Chief Akil
Hamm said his of ficers go to the
door of a home, show the par-
ents a c opy of the alert and what
their child typed. Then, he said,
“we ask the parents if we can lay
eyes on the student.”
School police are trained in
trauma-informed care and be-
havioral crisis response and to
recognize signs of mental health
crisis and how to respond.
Hamm said parents usually
are grateful to have been alert-
ed.
“As they talk, they work with
the guardian to determine if the
alert is serious enough to re-
quire the student be taken for a
mental health evaluation at
Hopkins” Davis said. “If not,
they will leave information
abo ut MD 211’s crisis line or
recommend a visit with the
family doctor or a walk-in clin-
ic.”
Police only took a student to
the emergency room once, and
it was at the request of the
parents, Hamm said. Students
are not handcuffed, Hamm said,
and officers don’t demand to
enter the homes.The information is passed on
to the principal of the student’s
school, but school police don’t
keep a record of it and it’s not
entered into a student’s file.
Having school police involved
concerns Larry Simmons, head
of the city school system’s Par-
ent Community Advisory Board.
Having a school police officer
arrive at the door may look
punitive, not supportive. The
officers carry firearms when
they are off school grounds.
“School police are not social
workers,” he said.
In general, Simmons said, “I
would say that this is really
disturbing. You have not only
monitored the kid, but the fam-
ily as well.”
The monitoring comes out of
a need for systems to protect
students from inappropriate
material on the Internet, such as
pornography.
Inside schools, districts also
have firewalls that prevent stu-
dents from using sites such asTwitter, Facebook and YouTube.
When the coronavirus pan-
demic hit the United States,
many school systems supplied
laptops so students could study
at home.
To make sure they focused on
their work, districts purchased
Web-filtering and -monitoring
software.
In some cases, such as tc
Baltimore City, the systems
didn ’t set policies on how much
of a student’s work could be
seen and monitored.
Davis said the city purchased
GoGuardian software, which al-
lows teachers to watch what
students are doing on their
laptops while they are teaching
remotely.
GoGuardian, as well as Gag-
gle, another software company,
sells an additional service that
uses artificial intelligence to
monitor student searches —
and, in some cases, their writing
— for evidence that they may
harm themselves. Gaggle also
provides teletherapy for stu-
dents by counselors.
Since March, the city schools
have gotten 786 alerts from
Beacon. Of those, clinicians re-
sponded 401 times, while school
police went to homes 12 times.
In addition to the nine students
referred to an emergency room,
12 students were referred to a
crisis response center. The races
and ages of the affected children
were unavailable.
“Through the expansion of
virtual learning, a lot of things
have to be rolled out very quick-
ly, some have unintended conse-
quences,” said Zach Taylor, a
representative of the Baltimore
Teachers Union. “Good inten-
tions and policies can have
adverse effects.”
He said the school system
should have an open discussion
about the use of the technology.
Holly Wilcox, a professor at
the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg
School of Public Health whoseresearch focuses on suicide, said
Hopkins emergency room doc-
tors became interested in the
tool when, in a short period of
time, three students arrived inthe emergency room needing
mental health care.
Wilcox said the doctors con-
tacted her, and she began check-
ing whether the use of Beacon is
finding children who might not
have been treated otherwise.
She said she is in the early
stages of looking into the matter
and has contacted other hospi-
tals in the region.
“I see the risks and the poten-
tial privacy concerns people
have,” she said. But, “if it is
going to save someone’s life and
get them the help they need,” it
is important to have in place.
Wilcox said she wants to
determine whether students get
the help they need, if their
problems can be spotted before
they reach a c risis and which
professionals will follow up
with their care.
Deborah Demery, president
of the Baltimore City Council of
PTAs, said she is not concerned
by the monitoring.
“As far as being concernedpersonally,” Demery said, “I feel
much better they are monitor-
ing and they are able to get
those kids the help. It is a
safeguard and it is working.”
Sharon A. Hoover, co-director
of the National Center for
School Mental Health, would
agree, but she believes there
should be guardrails on the
technology’s use.
“There is some good inten-
tions behind the technology
and, at the same time, they are
raising questions and concerns
around privacy,” said Hoover,
who is also a professor of child
and adolescent psychiatry at the
University of Maryland School
of Medicine.
Society must balance the
risk s of invading privacy and
the loss of that for the common
good, she said.
“Do I think there is some
positive potential in protecting
students from suicide? Yes, I
do.”
— Baltimore SunMARYLAND
Privacy concerns raised over monitoring of Baltimore school-issued laptops
AMY DAVIS/BALTIMORE SUN
The Baltimore City Public Schools system headquarters on Nort h
Avenue. The system loaned families laptops for remote learning.“You have not only
monitored the kid,
but the family as well.”
Larry Simmons, head of the
Baltimore City Public Schools’
Parent Community Advisory Boardplayer at Riverside High School
in Leesburg beloved by his
fr iends and teammates.Thomas turned away from the
crowd and hid her face behind
the back of her husband, Delroy.
Privately, she cried.
[email protected]of the real work, credible work,
justifiable work that we’re doing
here for some false narrative,”
she said about the view among
some parents — including in
Loudoun — that policies to pro-
mote racial equity in schools
were damaging to White chil-
dren. “It dishonors our ances-
tors, and it dishonors the experi-
ences of children today.”
When it came time to lay the
wreaths, Thomas led the way,
pausing first at a s ign that indi-
cated where the enslaved had
been buried. She opened her
arms and prayed, thinking about
the children buried under her
feet, about the children in the
procession who were learning
about this part of Loudoun’s
history and finally about her
own children — about Fitz. Be-
fore he died, he was a f ootballreconciliation.”
People in the audience on
Sunday nodded.
Before the speeches began,
some audience members had
been discussing the acerbic dis-
cussions over race and gender
that recently thrust Loudoun’s
school board meetings into the
national spotlight, dividing seg-
ments of the county’s 420,000
residents against one another.
Thomas, who serves as president
of the Loudoun chapter of the
NAACP, said she has not received
any pushback against what the
Freedom Center teaches during
its heritage tours of the burial
site — and that she wouldn’t
entertain them even if she had.
“I certainly will not abate anythe center, which will be used to
re-create schoolhouses and other
structures used by enslaved peo-
ple. Space also is being carved
out to build a columbarium and
a scatter garden, where people
can distribute ashes of their
loved ones, Thomas said. By
opening up the site to new
burials, advocates hope they can
secure committed caretakers of
the grounds well into the future.
“Reconciliation and restora-
tion cannot happen unless peo-
ple decide to sit at the table and
have a conversation,” Thomas
said about the recent deal with
Toll Brothers. “There are plenty
of places for division — we don’t
even have to look for that. Wh at I
want you to look out for ising greater attention to the work
of historians, archivists and ad-
vocates who have been fighting
to preserve burial sites. In Mont-
gomery County, a j udge tempo-
rarily blocked the sale of a histor-
ic burial ground following a
lawsuit from community activ-
ists. In the District, local officials
were pressured to reevaluate
construction plans when a w om-
an found workers digging up
ground near the remnants of two
of the city’s oldest Black cemeter-
ies.
Requests for tours have
surged at the Belmont burial site,
Thomas said. And plans are
underway to expand it.
Toll Brothers recently agreed
to transfer another four acres tothe burial site. “But look where
we are.”
In 2017, after years of activism,
the real estate firm Toll Brothers
donated the 2.75 acres w here the
cemetery is situated to the Free-
dom Center. The group cleaned
up the place with help from
community members, including
a local Boy Scout, Mikaeel Marti-
nez Jaka, who in 2018 and 2019
led volunteers to pave a gravel
path that led through the woods
and past the sites with notice-
able grave markers.
Over time, more people came.
Teachers brought their classes;
parents brought their children;
and members of the local Black
community brought one an-
other.
Sandra Lindsay, who is Black,
said she never knew about the
burial site until Thomas, an old
friend, became involved in trying
to preserve it. She has come to
almost every wreath-laying cer-
emony, she said, and this year
brought another friend, Kimber-
ly Speed, to see the site for the
first time.
“It carries so much weight for
us, not just individually but as a
colle ctive,” Lindsay said. “It’s
something I look forward to
every year.”
Virginia state Sen. Jennifer B.
Boysko (D-Fairfax), who attend-
ed the ceremony, said Gov. Ralph
Northam (D) wanted to person-
ally thank Thomas for her contri-
butions. “Your advocacy ha s in-
spired people across Virginia
and the nation to protect histori-
cal burial grounds,” she said,
reading a l etter from Northam.
“This ceremony... engenders
hope.”
Protests of racial injustice
have pushed communities across
the country to revisit their en-
tanglements with slavery, draw-
CEMETERY FROM B1
W reath-laying honors bonds at cemetery for the enslaved
PHOTOS BY CRAIG HUDSON FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTLEFT: The Re v. Michelle Thomas watches her daughter Anna
Thomas, left, and Christian Yohannes set up wreaths at the
gravesite o f her son, Fitz Alexander Campbell Thomas, at the
African American Burial Ground for the Enslaved in Ashburn on
Sunday. ABOVE: Thomas comforts Yohannes, who was her son’s
best friend before the 16-year-old drowned last year.“Your advocacy has
inspired people across
Virginia and the nation
to protect historical
burial grounds.”
Gov. Ralph Northam (D), in a letter
thanking the Rev. Michelle Thomas