Modern technology, including AI, have allowed schools to increase the amount of surveillance over students. Previous surveillance in schools only consisted of security cameras and other methods of monitoring students’ physical location or behavior. However, now, schools often impose extreme digital surveillance systems on students, that constantly monitor all of their internet activity on school devices, school wifi, and even their own social media accounts. These systems may constantly scan emails, chat messages, searches and even private creative works such as google docs and other documents. Constant surveillance of students in schools from AI systems and other monitoring software can harm students in many ways. These systems violate student privacy, expose them to unfair punishments based on false positives, expose them to unnecessary intervention, and often forcefully out them to their parents on important issues.
This is especially harmful to youth in vulnerable situations such as low-income households or with restrictive parents, who rely on school devices in order to access the internet in their everyday lives. There have been many cases and stories of young people being punished unfairly for false positives of AI surveillance, or punished by schools for personal information about their lives discovered through surveillance—such as their sexual orientation. Constant surveillance in schools also opens students up to many risks, especially in private schools which have broader authority to punish students—and may give them consequences for violating “moral standards”, or attempting to organize political activity.
In the following video, NYRA members Zane Miller and Hailey Lyu explain the harms of AI surveillance in schools, and how this may violate students’ constitutional rights and privacy.
Students deserve the right to not have their activity at school, on school devices, and on social media, be constantly monitored at all times in order to punish them or force school interventions. In the following webpage, the National Youth Rights Association explains surveillance in schools, the various forms it can take, the harms it has on students, how it intersects with student privacy rights, and cases of surveillance in schools being used to harm students and violate their privacy.
Table of Contents
- Types of Surveillance in Schools
- Harms of Surveillance in Schools on Students
- Common School Surveillance Software
- The Constitutional Questions of Constant Surveillance in Schools
- Do Private Schools Have Greater Authority to Surveil and Punish Students?
- Cases and Stories of Harmful Surveillance in Schools
- Cases and Stories of Students being Punished from School Surveilling their Social Media Posts
The National Youth Rights Association
If you’re interested in Youth Rights, consider volunteering with us. We are always looking for new members and would love to have you on board. If you have a personal story to share, of experiencing the harms of surveillance in schools, or about a general youth rights violation, consider sending us an email at nyra@youthrights.org. We’d love to help get your story out to the world.
Types of Surveillance in Schools
School surveillance can take many different forms, ranging from traditional security cameras to artificial intelligence systems capable of continuously scanning students’ digital activity. Some surveillance systems can follow students onto their devices and continue monitoring them after they leave campus. Modern surveillance tools can therefore collect information about what students search for, write, read, communicate, and express at all times.
AI-Powered Device Monitoring – AI surveillance software can continuously scan students’ activity on school-issued laptops and Chromebooks for words, phrases, images, or patterns that the software considers potentially concerning. These programs may look for signs of violence, self-harm, bullying, drug use, sexual content, or other behavior and automatically send alerts to administrators. The article describes tools capable of scanning emails, Google Docs, internet searches, chat messages, and other digital activity.
Internet Search and Browsing History Monitoring – Schools can track websites students visit and searches they perform on school networks or managed devices. Monitoring systems may record browsing histories, block particular websites, categorize students’ internet activity, or flag searches containing certain words. Although this can be used to enforce acceptable-use policies or identify threats, it also gives schools visibility into students’ private research and interests.
Google Docs and Cloud Document Scanning – Some digital monitoring systems can scan text contained within Google Docs and other cloud-based documents rather than limiting monitoring to websites. This means that personal journals, creative writing, notes, drafts, or conversations occurring within shared documents can potentially be analyzed even when they were never submitted as school assignments. The article specifically discusses the privacy implications of monitoring students who use Google Docs to vent, communicate with friends, or work on personal creative projects.
Email Monitoring – School-issued email accounts can be monitored for messages containing certain keywords, attachments, links, or behavioral indicators. AI systems can automatically scan messages and flag communications considered indicative of self-harm, violence, bullying, substance use, or other concerns. Because students may use school accounts for both academic and personal communication, this can expose private conversations to school officials.
Chat and Messaging Surveillance – Schools may monitor messages sent through educational platforms, school accounts, shared documents, or other communication tools available on managed devices. Automated systems may examine conversations between students and flag statements that appear threatening or concerning, even when the students intended them as jokes, sarcasm, or ordinary peer conversation.
Keyword and Behavior Flagging Systems – Many modern surveillance systems rely on predefined keywords, categories, or machine-learning models to identify potentially dangerous behavior. Words associated with suicide, guns, drugs, violence, bullying, or sexual content may generate an alert for human review. This allows schools to monitor enormous amounts of student communication simultaneously, but it also creates a risk that innocent uses of the same language will be interpreted as dangerous.
Continuous Monitoring Outside School Hours – Digital surveillance does not necessarily stop when students leave campus. If monitoring software operates on a school-issued device, activity may continue to be scanned while the student uses the computer at home, during evenings, weekends, or school breaks. The article emphasizes that students who take Chromebooks home can therefore remain subject to school surveillance even while using the device privately outside school.
School Network and Wi-Fi Monitoring – Schools can monitor traffic moving through their Wi-Fi networks, including websites visited, devices connected, network usage, and attempts to access blocked services. In some environments, this can give administrators detailed information about when students are online and what services they are accessing, even when the activity is not occurring through a school assignment.
Web Filtering and Content-Blocking Systems – Web filters are generally presented as tools for restricting inappropriate material, but they can also function as surveillance systems by recording attempts to visit prohibited websites. Students may therefore generate records or alerts simply by searching for information that falls within blocked categories, including information about mental health, sexuality, drugs, violence, or politically controversial subjects.
Security Camera Surveillance – Traditional CCTV cameras remain one of the most common forms of school surveillance. Cameras may monitor hallways, entrances, cafeterias, parking lots, buses, athletic areas, and other shared spaces. Some schools retain footage for later disciplinary investigations, while newer camera systems can incorporate automated analytics.
Facial Recognition and AI Video Analytics – Some surveillance systems go beyond ordinary cameras by using artificial intelligence to identify faces, recognize objects, detect unusual movement, or alert staff to possible weapons or other perceived threats. These technologies can transform ordinary security cameras into automated systems capable of tracking or categorizing student behavior.
Attendance and Location Tracking – Digital attendance systems can be combined with ID scans, classroom applications, GPS-equipped school devices, bus tracking, or wireless-network records to monitor students’ locations. These systems may identify when students enter or leave campus, whether they attend specific classes, or where school-owned devices are located.
School Bus Surveillance – School buses may contain video cameras, audio recording systems, GPS tracking, and electronic student check-in systems. These tools allow schools to monitor student behavior during transportation and can be used in disciplinary investigations.
Social Media Monitoring – Schools or outside contractors may monitor publicly available student social-media posts for threats, bullying, references to drugs, planned fights, or other content administrators consider concerning. This expands school surveillance beyond school-owned technology and can place students’ off-campus expression under administrative scrutiny.
Monitoring of Student-Created Online Content – Schools may investigate websites, videos, blogs, shared documents, digital artwork, or other content created by students outside ordinary assignments. In some cases, administrators may treat fictional or creative expression as evidence of danger. The article discusses a Connecticut honors student who was suspended and removed from a specialized program after administrators interpreted a fictional horror story as threatening, despite a later mental-health evaluation finding no evidence that he posed a danger.
Vape, Smoke, and Environmental Sensors – Some schools install sensors in bathrooms and other areas where cameras are inappropriate. These devices can detect vaping particles, smoke, unusual noise levels, or other environmental changes and alert staff. Although they do not necessarily identify a particular student by themselves, the alerts can trigger investigations or additional surveillance.
School Police and Security Monitoring – School resource officers, private security personnel, metal detectors, bag searches, camera rooms, and entry checkpoints are also forms of student surveillance. These systems place students under physical observation and can turn ordinary school-rule violations into law-enforcement encounters.
Threat-Assessment Surveillance Systems – Schools increasingly combine reports from teachers, students, digital-monitoring software, security cameras, disciplinary records, and other data into formal threat-assessment processes. These systems are intended to identify potential violence before it occurs, but they can also create extensive records about students based on speech or behavior that may ultimately prove harmless.
Harms of Surveillance in Schools on Students
Digital monitoring programs can continuously scan students’ searches, emails, documents, messages, and other activity on school-issued devices, sometimes even while those devices are being used at home. AI systems can intensify this surveillance by automatically identifying words, phrases, or behavior that they classify as potentially related to violence, self-harm, bullying, drugs, or other concerns. While these systems are often introduced in the name of safety, constant surveillance can create serious privacy, emotional, educational, and safety concerns for students.
Violating Students’ Privacy – Constant surveillance can eliminate much of the privacy students would otherwise have when using technology. Students may have their searches, documents, emails, messages, browsing activity, and other digital behavior monitored without anyone specifically suspecting them of misconduct. Instead of surveillance being triggered by a particular concern, every student can effectively be treated as someone whose private activity must continually be inspected.
False Positives Leading to Unnecessary Intervention – AI surveillance systems can mistake harmless activity for evidence of danger because they frequently rely on keywords, patterns, and automated classifications rather than understanding the full context of what a student is doing. A student researching suicide for a debate assignment, writing fiction involving violence, quoting song lyrics, or joking with friends can potentially trigger the same type of alert as a genuine threat. One 16-year-old student was pulled from calculus after surveillance software interpreted research she was conducting about teen anxiety and suicide for a debate competition as evidence that she might be suicidal.
Unfair Punishment From Misinterpreted Digital Activity – A surveillance alert can escalate from automated monitoring into serious disciplinary consequences. Students may be questioned, searched, suspended, removed from programs, referred to police, or otherwise punished based on communications that were taken out of context. In Tennessee, a 13-year-old student’s messages triggered an AI monitoring alert even though investigators ultimately determined that there was no credible threat; the student was nevertheless interrogated, strip-searched, and placed under house arrest.
Discouraging Students From Expressing Themselves Honestly – Students who know that everything they type may be scanned can begin censoring themselves even when they are doing nothing wrong. They may avoid writing honestly about frustration, sadness, anger, family problems, relationships, identity, or other sensitive subjects because they fear that certain words could trigger an alert. Surveillance can therefore change not only what schools know about students, but what students feel safe expressing at all.
Taking Away Private Ways to Vent and Cope With Stress – Some students use digital writing as a private way to organize their thoughts, vent about stressful situations, or calm themselves when they feel overwhelmed. A personal Google Doc, note, journal, or message thread can function much like a private diary. If students know that these spaces may be scanned by school software, they can lose an accessible coping mechanism during a school day when other private outlets may already be limited.
Creating Fear Around Creative Writing and Personal Projects – Surveillance can make students afraid to work on fiction, art, research, or other creative projects that contain mature or controversial subjects. A novel involving guns, crime, bullying, drugs, suicide, or violence can contain the same keywords surveillance programs are designed to flag even though the student has no intention of engaging in any of those behaviors. Students may consequently avoid certain topics entirely because they do not want a fictional story or personal project to be mistaken for evidence that they pose a danger.
Empowering Schools to Punish Students for Political Activity – Digital surveillance can make it easier for schools to identify and punish students for political expression that would otherwise remain private. Searches about protests, messages organizing walkouts, documents criticizing school policies, political group chats, or social-media activity can all become visible to administrators when students use school-managed devices or accounts. This creates a risk that surveillance intended for safety or discipline will also be used to monitor dissent, discourage organizing, or impose consequences on students for participating in controversial political activity. Even when the activity is peaceful and lawful, students may self-censor if they believe administrators can watch their organizing in real time and later use it against them.
Monitoring Students Outside of School Hours – Digital surveillance does not necessarily stop when a student leaves school. Monitoring software installed on school-issued laptops or Chromebooks can continue operating while students use those devices at home. This allows a school to potentially observe a student’s digital behavior at night, on weekends, or from inside their own home, greatly expanding school authority beyond the physical school environment.
Disproportionately Affecting Low-Income Students – Students who have their own personal computer can avoid some school surveillance simply by switching devices after school. Students from lower-income households may not have that option. A school-issued Chromebook may be their primary or only computer for homework, entertainment, communication, reading, research, and other personal activities. As a result, students with fewer financial resources can effectively receive less digital privacy than wealthier classmates simply because they depend more heavily on school technology.
Preventing Vulnerable Students From Privately Seeking Support – For some young people, school devices provide one of their only ways to communicate privately with friends, support communities, or trusted people outside their household. This can be particularly important for students living with highly controlling or abusive parents who monitor their personal devices. School surveillance can eliminate this alternative source of privacy by making those communications visible to another authority as well.
Forced Disclosure of Mental Health Struggles – Monitoring systems designed to detect self-harm or suicidal language can cause students’ private mental health struggles to be disclosed to counselors, administrators, parents, police, or other authorities without the student’s consent. Although intervention may sometimes be necessary to prevent an immediate danger, automated monitoring can make disclosure occur without first determining whether the student is actually in danger or whether disclosure itself could create additional harm.
Putting Students at Risk of Harmful Parental Reactions – Automatically informing parents about a student’s private struggles can be dangerous when the student’s home environment is itself harmful. Some parents respond to mental health concerns with ridicule, anger, punishment, increased surveillance, restrictions, or other harmful behavior. Research has shown that adolescents who had disclosed suicidal thoughts or self-harm sometimes described parental responses as punitive or damaging, with some subsequently becoming less willing to disclose future struggles. Surveillance can therefore expose information that a student deliberately kept private because they understood the risks of their parents finding out.
Making Students Less Likely to Seek Mental Health Help – If students learn that certain searches, writings, or conversations automatically trigger interventions, they may avoid discussing mental health altogether. Someone struggling with depression may become afraid to search for information about suicide, write privately about their feelings, or tell friends what they are experiencing because they do not want to be flagged. A system designed to identify struggling students can therefore unintentionally teach some students to conceal their struggles more carefully.
Turning Mental Health Concerns Into Police or Institutional Responses – Surveillance alerts can result in responses that feel more punitive than supportive. Students experiencing distress may encounter police, involuntary psychiatric evaluations, searches, or other coercive interventions. One 10-year-old boy was involuntarily taken for psychiatric evaluation after saying he wanted to hurt himself following teasing at school; his family said he was handcuffed, placed in a facility with much older patients, and afterward experienced nightmares and anxiety about being detained again.
Profiling LGBTQ Students – Surveillance technology can potentially identify searches, messages, documents, or conversations associated with sexual orientation or gender identity. Even when such information has nothing to do with school safety, the same infrastructure that scans for violence or self-harm could be used to identify other categories of student behavior or expression. This creates particular dangers for LGBTQ students in schools or states where their identities are treated as controversial or where parental-notification policies already require disclosure of certain identity-related information.
Forcibly Outing Students to Their Families – An LGBTQ student may privately research their identity, communicate with supportive friends, or write about feelings they have not disclosed to their family. If school surveillance identifies that information and administrators share it with parents, the student can effectively be outed without consent. For students with rejecting or hostile families, this can expose them to severe conflict, restrictions, isolation, abuse, or loss of housing and financial support.
Enabling Discriminatory Enforcement by Schools – Surveillance systems do not determine on their own what behavior is considered unacceptable. Schools decide what they want to monitor and what should trigger intervention. This creates the possibility that surveillance will reinforce discriminatory rules, particularly in private or religious schools with restrictive policies regarding sexuality, gender, relationships, religion, or personal expression. A surveillance system can make rules that were already oppressive significantly easier to enforce by allowing administrators to search enormous amounts of students’ private digital activity automatically.
Increasing the Power of Zero-Tolerance Discipline – Surveillance substantially expands the amount of student behavior that administrators can discover. When this monitoring is combined with rigid disciplinary systems, harmless jokes, fictional writing, searches, or conversations can become disciplinary incidents that otherwise would never have occurred. The more student activity a school monitors, the more opportunities administrators have to identify behavior that technically violates a rule and impose punishment without fully considering context.
Creating Constant Anxiety About Being Watched – Knowing that software may be continuously scanning everything on a device can create a sense that any innocent action might be misunderstood. Students may begin thinking about whether a search term looks suspicious, whether a joke sounds threatening without context, or whether a private document contains words that could trigger an alert. This can turn ordinary technology use into an activity accompanied by continual self-monitoring and anxiety.
Limiting Students’ Ability to Explore Sensitive Topics – Adolescents often privately research subjects they are uncomfortable discussing with adults, including sexuality, relationships, mental health, family problems, abuse, religion, drugs, or identity. Surveillance can discourage this independent exploration because searching for information itself may reveal sensitive interests or concerns to school authorities. Students may therefore lose access to information precisely when privacy is necessary for them to feel comfortable seeking it.
Punishing Jokes and Normal Teenage Communication – Teenagers frequently communicate through exaggeration, sarcasm, dark humor, slang, and jokes that make little sense when separated from the relationship between the people involved. Automated systems cannot reliably understand every friendship, inside joke, or conversational context. A joking statement such as “I’m going to kill you” between close friends can appear identical to an actual threat when analyzed primarily through words on a screen.
Giving Schools Access to Information Unrelated to Education – Students use computers for much more than assignments. Their devices can contain personal writing, conversations with friends, creative projects, searches about family problems, private identity questions, hobbies, and other activities that have little or nothing to do with school. Broad surveillance allows schools to collect or review information simply because it happened to pass through a school-owned device rather than because it had any legitimate connection to education or safety.
Creating a Surveillance System That Can Expand Beyond Its Original Purpose – A monitoring program introduced to identify threats or self-harm does not have to remain limited to those purposes. Once schools have technology capable of scanning millions of messages, documents, and searches, new categories of monitoring can be added relatively easily. Systems originally justified as safety tools could later be expanded to detect rule violations, political activity, sexuality, profanity, criticism of the school, or other behavior administrators decide they want to identify.
Making Vulnerable Students Bear the Greatest Risks – The harms of school surveillance are not distributed equally. Students who are low-income, LGBTQ, experiencing mental health difficulties, living in controlling households, socially isolated, or dependent on school technology have more sensitive information at risk and fewer alternatives for private communication. For these students, surveillance can interfere not only with privacy but with access to friendships, emotional support, coping mechanisms, identity exploration, and potentially essential outside help.
Common School Surveillance Software
Schools use a range of software platforms to monitor students’ internet activity, school-issued devices, online documents, messages, and classroom computer use. Some products primarily function as web filters or classroom-management tools, while others use artificial intelligence and automated threat detection to flag students’ digital activity for possible self-harm, violence, bullying, drug use, or other concerns. Many platforms combine several of these functions into one system.
GoGuardian – GoGuardian is one of the most widely used school device-management and surveillance platforms in the United States. Its products combine web filtering, browsing monitoring, classroom-management tools, and AI-powered student-safety features. GoGuardian Teacher allows educators to view and manage students’ browser activity during class, while GoGuardian Beacon analyzes student activity for possible signs of self-harm or other safety concerns. In practice, a district using GoGuardian may be able to monitor browsing, restrict websites, observe student screens, and receive automated alerts about concerning activity through the same broader platform.
LanSchool – LanSchool is a classroom-management and student device-monitoring platform used by schools to give teachers direct visibility into students’ computer activity. Depending on the version and configuration, teachers can view student screens, see which applications or websites are open, remotely blank screens, limit web access, send messages, and guide students to specific websites or applications. LanSchool Air provides many of these functions through a cloud-based system, while LanSchool Classic is designed for locally managed school networks. Although its primary purpose is classroom management rather than AI threat detection, it functions as a form of digital surveillance by allowing teachers to observe and control students’ device activity in real time.
Gaggle Safety Management – Gaggle is built specifically around monitoring students for potential safety and mental-health concerns. Its machine-learning systems can analyze content from school-managed email, Google Drive, Google Chat, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Canvas, web activity, attachments, images, and other digital sources. Potentially concerning material is flagged for human review, and serious alerts can be escalated to school officials. Gaggle therefore functions as a broad content-surveillance system rather than simply a web filter.
Securly – Securly combines several types of student monitoring within one product ecosystem. Securly Classroom allows teachers to view student screens, monitor open tabs, inspect browsing activity, close tabs, block websites, and remotely restrict devices during class. Securly Filter controls and records internet access, while the company’s student-safety products can identify potentially concerning online behavior. Together, these tools can give schools both real-time classroom visibility and broader monitoring of students’ internet activity.
Bark for Schools – Bark for Schools monitors activity within school-managed Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 accounts. Its system looks for possible signs of bullying, suicidal ideation, sexual exploitation, violence, school-shooting threats, and other safety concerns and can alert school officials when potentially dangerous content is detected. Bark also provides web-filtering tools, allowing schools to combine content monitoring with restrictions on the websites and online services students can access.
Linewize Monitor – Linewize Monitor analyzes student activity across Google services, Microsoft 365, offline documents, web chats, cloud storage, and other digital environments. The system looks for categories such as self-harm, suicide, violence, bullying, drugs, grooming, gangs, and radicalization. Automated detection is combined with human moderation, and some configurations can monitor selected students outside normal school hours. Linewize can also scan files and images stored in school-managed cloud accounts, extending monitoring beyond live browser activity.
iboss Student Safety and Classroom Management – iboss provides a broader K–12 cybersecurity and device-management system that includes student surveillance features. Its student-safety tools can analyze searches, messages, AI chats, keystrokes, and other online activity for possible signs of self-harm, bullying, or threats. Its classroom-management tools can also display automatically refreshing images of student screens, restrict websites and applications, and apply different internet-access rules to individual students or classes. This allows districts to combine automated threat detection with direct teacher control over devices.
These products illustrate several major categories of school surveillance. GoGuardian, Securly, and iboss combine classroom screen monitoring with filtering and other device controls. Gaggle, Bark, Linewize, and GoGuardian’s safety tools focus more heavily on scanning digital content for possible mental-health, behavioral, or security concerns. Most of these platforms overlap significantly, and schools may use more than one at the same time. As a result, a single student can potentially have their web traffic filtered, browsing history recorded, screen activity visible to teachers, documents and messages automatically scanned, cloud files analyzed, and certain words or behaviors flagged for administrative review, all through one or several interconnected surveillance systems.
The Constitutional Questions of Constant Surveillance in Schools
The Fourth Amendment does not disappear at the schoolhouse door, even though schools are given more flexibility than police. In New Jersey v. T.L.O., the Supreme Court held that school searches generally do not require a warrant or probable cause, but they still must be justified by reasonable suspicion that a particular search will uncover evidence of a rule or law violation. That framework creates a serious constitutional question for modern AI surveillance, because continuous monitoring works in the opposite direction: instead of beginning with a specific concern about a specific student, software can scan every student’s searches, emails, Google Docs, chats, and browsing activity all the time, including when no one has any individualized reason to suspect wrongdoing.
That difference matters because constant surveillance can effectively turn the search itself into the mechanism for generating suspicion. If an AI system first examines thousands of students’ private digital activity and only afterward flags words or patterns as suspicious, the school did not necessarily possess reasonable suspicion before the monitoring occurred. The software may instead be conducting broad, suspicionless searches in hopes of discovering something that creates suspicion later. This becomes even more constitutionally significant when monitoring continues on school-issued devices after students go home, or when automated systems misinterpret academic research, jokes, or fictional writing and trigger interrogations, searches, or discipline.
Existing Supreme Court precedent does not definitively resolve whether this kind of continuous digital monitoring is permissible, but it raises a fundamental Fourth Amendment question: if schools ordinarily need some individualized justification to search a student, can they constitutionally monitor every student’s digital activity continuously in order to find that justification in the first place?
Do Private Schools Have Greater Authority to Surveil and Punish Students?
Private schools generally have substantially more freedom than public schools to monitor students’ behavior and punish them for information discovered through surveillance. Public schools are government institutions, meaning their disciplinary and surveillance practices can be challenged under constitutional protections such as the First and Fourth Amendments. Private schools, by contrast, are usually private actors. Under the state-action doctrine, constitutional protections such as the First Amendment generally restrict government action rather than the conduct of private organizations. As a result, a private K–12 school ordinarily does not have to satisfy the same constitutional standards that apply when a public school searches a student’s device, monitors expression, or punishes off-campus speech.
This distinction is particularly important for digital surveillance. A public school that continuously scans students’ private documents, messages, searches, or social-media activity can face questions about unreasonable searches and constitutional limits on regulating off-campus speech. A private school generally faces no direct Fourth Amendment requirement comparable to the reasonable-suspicion rule established for public schools in New Jersey v. T.L.O., because the Fourth Amendment ordinarily regulates government searches rather than searches performed by private institutions. Similarly, the First Amendment restrictions placed on public schools when disciplining students for off-campus social-media speech generally do not apply in the same way to private schools.
Private Schools Can Establish Much Broader Codes of Conduct
Private schools commonly establish enrollment contracts, student handbooks, honor codes, religious standards, or behavioral agreements that students and parents agree to follow as a condition of attendance. These rules can extend beyond conduct occurring during the school day and may cover off-campus behavior, social-media activity, relationships, alcohol or drug use, sexual behavior, language, religious conduct, or behavior that the school believes conflicts with its values.
This can give private schools considerably more authority to punish students for information discovered online. If a private school’s handbook states that students can be disciplined for off-campus behavior that reflects poorly on the institution or violates its moral standards, administrators may be able to use a social-media post as the basis for suspension or expulsion even where a public school would encounter significant First Amendment problems for imposing the same punishment.
A Texas case involving St. Thomas High School illustrates how private-school discipline can be grounded primarily in the enrollment agreement and student handbook. The school’s handbook explicitly described the relationship between the parents and private school as contractual, and the family signed an agreement accepting the handbook’s disciplinary rules. Private-school disputes therefore frequently center on whether the school followed its own contract and policies rather than whether the Constitution would have permitted the punishment in a public school.
Students Can Be Punished for Social-Media Accounts Discovered Outside School
A particularly direct example occurred in Illinois in Uzubell v. Mount Carmel High School. Two students at the private Catholic high school were linked by a police investigation to Instagram accounts containing offensive posts involving race, sexual orientation, gender, and religion. The principal gave the students the option of withdrawing or being expelled. Their family sued for breach of contract, but the Illinois appellate court upheld the school’s decision, concluding that the expulsions were not arbitrary or capricious under the applicable private-school standards.
The case highlights an important difference from public-school social-media cases. When public schools punish students for off-campus expression, courts may examine whether the speech substantially disrupted school or fell within another constitutionally permissible category. In a private school, the central question may instead be whether the school’s handbook gave administrators authority to impose the discipline and whether the school followed the procedures it promised.
Religious Schools Can Enforce Ideological or Moral Standards Through Online Surveillance
The difference can become even more significant at religious schools, which may condition enrollment on compliance with religious beliefs or morality codes. A school that prohibits certain relationships, identities, advocacy, language, or behaviors can potentially use students’ websites or social-media posts as evidence that those rules have been violated.
A striking example involved James Barnett at Trinity Christian Academy in Texas. Barnett was an 18-year-old senior and longtime student when administrators discovered that he operated a website providing an online community for LGBTQ young people. According to Barnett, school administrators initially suggested that he remove the website, describe himself as confused, and attend counseling. When he refused, the school moved toward expelling him and disclosed his sexuality to his parents without his consent. His father ultimately withdrew him from the school so that an expulsion would not appear on his academic record.
The consequences extended well beyond school. Barnett said the disclosure created major conflict with his parents and threatened both his housing and financial support for college. The case demonstrates how a private school’s ability to investigate students’ online expression can allow information discovered outside school to become the basis for discipline and involuntary disclosure to family members.
Even Innocent Social-Media Posts Can Trigger Private-School Discipline
Private schools can also interpret social-media activity according to their own institutional standards even where the underlying behavior appears harmless. In Kentucky, Whitefield Academy expelled 15-year-old Kayla Kenney after administrators obtained a social-media photograph of her wearing a rainbow sweater beside a rainbow birthday cake. Her mother said the photograph simply came from her birthday celebration, but the private Christian school terminated her enrollment after the image appeared online.
Cases like this illustrate why social-media surveillance can carry different risks in private schools. Public-school administrators would generally need to consider constitutional limitations before punishing a student merely because they disliked the message associated with an off-campus photograph. A private school may instead rely on its own behavioral or religious expectations, giving administrators much broader discretion over the consequences of personal online expression.
Private Schools May Also Have Fewer Federal Privacy Restrictions
Private K–12 schools can also operate under a different federal privacy framework. According to the U.S. Department of Education, FERPA generally does not apply to private and parochial elementary and secondary schools because they ordinarily do not receive funds directly from Department of Education programs. FERPA does apply when an educational institution actually receives covered federal funding, so the applicability depends on the institution’s funding situation.
This does not mean private schools have no privacy obligations. State privacy laws, contractual promises, data-protection laws, tort law, and other statutes can still restrict how schools obtain, use, or disclose information. Nevertheless, the absence of both ordinary constitutional restraints and, for many private K–12 schools, FERPA coverage can leave students with fewer legal protections against institutional surveillance.
Private Schools Are Still Not Completely Unrestricted
Greater authority does not mean unlimited authority. Private schools can still be constrained by state statutes, contractual obligations, accreditation requirements, consumer-protection laws, privacy laws, discrimination statutes that apply to the particular institution, and the school’s own published policies. If a handbook promises students a particular disciplinary process or limits what conduct can result in expulsion, a school may face a breach-of-contract claim if it ignores those promises.
Courts may also intervene where private-school discipline violates applicable law or, depending on state law, is arbitrary, capricious, or contrary to the contractual relationship between the school and family. Religious schools can have additional constitutional protections of their own when disputes would require courts to interfere with religious doctrine or internal religious decision-making. These issues can therefore vary substantially from state to state and from one private school to another.
Surveillance Can Give Private Schools Greater Control Over Students’ Lives Outside School
The broader concern is that modern surveillance technology can dramatically expand the practical reach of rules private schools already have broad authority to enforce. A morality clause that once depended largely on a teacher personally discovering misconduct can become much more powerful when administrators can review social-media accounts, monitor school-issued devices, scan communications, or receive automated alerts about students’ online behavior.
This can allow private schools to discipline students not merely for what they do in class, but for political expression, relationships, sexuality, religious beliefs, personal writing, online communities, photographs, or other conduct occurring away from campus. Because students at private schools generally cannot invoke the First and Fourth Amendments against the school in the same way public-school students can, surveillance can give private institutions an especially powerful mechanism for enforcing rules over students’ private lives. The central legal limitations are more likely to come from the school’s contract, applicable state and federal statutes, and other private-law protections than from the constitutional reasonable-suspicion and free-speech standards that restrain public schools.
Cases and Stories of Harmful Surveillance in Schools
School surveillance systems have produced a number of documented cases in which students were unnecessarily questioned, punished, exposed, or made afraid to use school technology normally. These cases range from AI systems misreading harmless activity to school districts secretly activating webcams inside students’ homes. They illustrate how surveillance can create consequences far beyond simply recording student behavior.
The Tennessee 13-Year-Old Arrested After an AI Alert – A 13-year-old student at Fairview Middle School in Tennessee was chatting with classmates through a school-linked account when friends teased her about her tan complexion and jokingly called her Mexican. When another student asked what she was doing later in the week, she responded with an offensive joke saying that “on Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s.” The school’s Gaggle monitoring software flagged the message as a possible threat and school officials reported it under Tennessee’s strict school-threat laws. Although the student’s mother acknowledged that the comment was inappropriate, she argued that the surrounding conversation made clear that it was not a genuine plan for violence. The student was nevertheless arrested before the school day was over, interrogated, strip-searched, held overnight in a jail cell, and later placed under house arrest. Her family subsequently filed a lawsuit against the school system. The case became one of the clearest examples of how an automated surveillance alert can turn an immature joke into a serious law-enforcement response.
Anvika Jain – Flagged as Suicidal for Debate Research – In 2025, 16-year-old Dripping Springs High School student Anvika Jain was sitting in calculus when a counselor unexpectedly called her out of class and began asking questions about her mental health. Jain initially had no idea what had prompted the meeting. She eventually realized that Lightspeed surveillance software had flagged material she had accessed while researching teen anxiety and suicide for a debate competition. She had also opened an old Google Doc containing poems about anxiety that she used as research examples. The software interpreted the academic material as evidence that Jain herself might be suicidal. Even after she explained the misunderstanding, school staff told her that they still had to contact her parents. Jain later described the experience as stressful and embarrassing and said students at her school had become afraid that innocent searches could result in being called into the office.
Bryn – Called to the Principal Over a Fictional Story – A student named Bryn at the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics in Washington was called into the principal’s office after school surveillance software flagged a short fictional story she had written. The story contained mildly violent imagery, which was enough for Gaggle to classify the writing as potentially concerning. There was no indication that Bryn intended to harm anyone; the flagged material was creative writing. Her case occurred within a district where around 2,200 students—roughly 10% of enrollment—were the subject of Gaggle alerts during a one-year period, and about one in four students at Bryn’s school generated an alert. The incident shows how surveillance can transform ordinary creative expression into a disciplinary or mental-health concern simply because software detects violent language without fully understanding its context.
Zoe Reiland – Becoming Afraid to Search Personal Questions – Zoe Reiland attended school in Owasso, Oklahoma, where the district used Gaggle to monitor students’ activity. Her father said he had not initially known that the surveillance software was operating on school devices and later asked whether Zoe could use a personal laptop instead because of privacy concerns. The district refused. Once Zoe learned how closely her school Chromebook was monitored, she said she became afraid to use it for personal questions, including searches about her own menstrual period. She described becoming “too scared to be curious,” fearing that searching certain subjects could get her called into a school office. Her experience illustrates the chilling effect surveillance can have even when a student is never formally disciplined: awareness of monitoring can be enough to make students stop privately researching normal health and personal-development questions.
The Durham Student Whose Private Mental-Health Disclosure Was Exposed – When Durham Public Schools in North Carolina piloted Gaggle, one teacher gave students an assignment involving mental health and reportedly assured them that their responses would remain confidential. According to former Durham School of the Arts student Glenn Thompson, one of his classmates then disclosed something deeply private in the assignment and was blindsided when Gaggle automatically alerted school officials. Neither the student nor even the teacher apparently realized the district’s monitoring system was scanning the assignment. Thompson later spoke publicly against the program, arguing that students could not meaningfully trust teachers when private assignments were being secretly monitored by software. Durham’s school board eventually voted to stop using Gaggle in 2023, in part because of concerns about student privacy, forced disclosures, and damage to trust.
A Durham Student Reportedly Outed to Unsupportive Parents – During Durham Public Schools’ Gaggle pilot, an LGBTQ advocate reported to the school board that a surveillance alert concerning self-harm had resulted in a student being involuntarily outed to their family. The student’s family was reportedly not supportive of their LGBTQ identity. The surveillance system had been intended to detect a possible mental-health risk, but the intervention also exposed private information that the student had not chosen to share at home. Concerns about situations like this helped persuade the district to discontinue the program. The case illustrates how monitoring intended to protect students can reveal unrelated sensitive information and place vulnerable students in danger when schools notify families without fully understanding the home environment.
Vancouver Public Schools – Thousands of Sensitive Student Documents Accidentally Exposed – Vancouver Public Schools in Washington used Gaggle to continuously monitor students’ school accounts and devices, generating screenshots whenever potentially concerning activity was detected. During a public-records investigation, the district accidentally provided reporters with links giving access to nearly 3,500 unredacted student documents and surveillance records. The files were not protected by passwords and contained student names alongside highly sensitive material involving depression, suicide, addiction, eating disorders, bullying, relationships, LGBTQ identity, and private creative writing. At least six students appeared to have been potentially outed to school officials through material contained in the records. The incident demonstrated a major secondary danger of mass surveillance: once schools collect large amounts of intimate information about students, a mistake in handling that information can expose material that would never have existed in a centralized school database without the surveillance system.
Blake Robbins – Secretly Photographed in His Bedroom Through a School Laptop – One of the most notorious school-surveillance scandals involved 15-year-old Blake Robbins and the Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania. In 2009, Robbins was called into an administrator’s office and shown what school officials believed was photographic evidence of drug use. Robbins was shocked because the image had been taken inside his bedroom. School officials had remotely activated tracking software on his school-issued MacBook that could secretly turn on its webcam and capture both photographs and screenshots while the laptop was being used at home. Robbins’ family said the alleged “drug” seen in the photograph was actually candy. The resulting lawsuit exposed that the district’s tracking system had secretly captured tens of thousands of webcam images and screenshots from school laptops. The district ultimately agreed to a $610,000 settlement in litigation brought by Robbins and another student. The case became an extreme example of school surveillance crossing the boundary between campus oversight and intrusion into students’ private homes.
Lower Merion Students Discovered Their School Could Watch Them at Home – The broader Lower Merion scandal affected more than Blake Robbins. Students learned that district-issued laptops contained software capable of remotely activating their webcams without their knowledge. Some students told reporters that they normally left the laptops open in their bedrooms and realized the cameras potentially could have captured them while changing clothes or returning from the shower. Students began covering laptop cameras with tape after learning about the surveillance. The district later acknowledged that its tracking system had captured tens of thousands of photographs and screenshots while trying to locate supposedly missing computers. The incident showed how a system introduced for device security could create an extraordinary invasion of privacy when surveillance capabilities were activated without meaningful notice or consent.
Lake Travis ISD – More Than 900 Innocent Web Pages Flagged for the Word “Colon” – At Lake Travis Independent School District in Texas, GoGuardian automatically flagged more than 900 website visits during a roughly two-month period because the pages contained the term “colon.” Many of the flagged pages had nothing remotely dangerous about them. Students were accessing material about human anatomy, Christopher Columbus, punctuation involving colons and semicolons, and mathematical formulas. The district said it had not enabled notifications for those particular alerts and had not punished students because of them, but the records demonstrated the enormous number of meaningless false positives that automated surveillance can generate. The case shows how keyword-based monitoring can categorize completely ordinary educational activity as potentially problematic before any human even evaluates what the student was actually doing.
Students Flagged for Private Writing About Abuse, Depression, and Relationships – Records from Vancouver Public Schools showed how deeply surveillance software could reach into students’ private lives. Among the activities automatically reported to school staff were a student searching “Why does my boyfriend hit me?”, a student writing about an unrequited relationship and suicide, and a gay teenager using an online diary to describe difficulties with homophobic parents. Students also wrote privately about depression, eating disorders, addiction, bullying, heartbreak, and gender identity. These examples did not all result in punishment, but they demonstrate that school surveillance can capture some of the most sensitive thoughts and experiences young people have, including information involving abuse or family conflict that students may have deliberately chosen not to share with adults.
Students Changing Their Behavior After Learning They Were Being Watched – The Center for Democracy & Technology interviewed parents whose children had been directly affected by school activity-monitoring software and found that surveillance frequently changed how students used technology. Families described children becoming more cautious about what they searched, wrote, and communicated because they feared being flagged or misunderstood. CDT found that monitoring could produce a chilling effect on student speech and internet use, including uses connected to learning. The interviews also found disproportionate concerns among Black, Hispanic, and LGBTQ students. These experiences show that the harm of surveillance is not limited to students who are formally disciplined; students can lose privacy and freedom of expression simply because they know school authorities may be examining what they do online.
A System Intended for Safety Becoming a Source of Distrust – Glenn Thompson’s experience in Durham illustrates a broader consequence of school surveillance: students may lose trust in the adults who are supposed to support them. After seeing a classmate’s supposedly confidential mental-health disclosure trigger an automated alert, Thompson argued that students could no longer know when schoolwork or conversations were actually private. Durham eventually abandoned Gaggle after community members raised concerns that the system could out students and undermine relationships between young people and trusted adults. The episode demonstrates how a safety system can become counterproductive when students respond to surveillance by withholding information from teachers, counselors, and other adults who might otherwise be able to help them.
Cases and Stories of Students being Punished from School Surveiling their Social Media Posts
Huntsville City Schools – Social-Media Surveillance Led to Mostly Black Students Being Expelled – Huntsville City Schools in Alabama hired a private security consultant to help monitor students’ social-media accounts for possible evidence of weapons, gangs, or other misconduct. According to records obtained by reporters, the district investigated hundreds of students and ultimately expelled 14 students based on information uncovered through the social-media surveillance program. 12 of the 14 students were Black, even though Black students represented a much smaller share of the district’s overall enrollment. The disparity prompted concerns that surveillance was being used disproportionately against Black youth. The ACLU of Alabama also raised concerns about the district’s systematic monitoring of student speech and sought public records about the program. The case illustrates how school surveillance can move beyond identifying immediate safety threats and become a mechanism for investigating students’ off-campus expression and imposing severe discipline.
Brandi Levy – Removed From Cheerleading for an Off-Campus Snapchat
Brandi Levy was a Pennsylvania high school student who became frustrated after failing to make her school’s varsity cheerleading squad. While at a convenience store on a weekend, away from school, she posted a Snapchat showing herself and a friend raising their middle fingers with a profane caption criticizing school, cheerleading, and softball. Another student took a screenshot and eventually showed it to a cheerleading coach. School officials responded by suspending Levy from the junior varsity cheerleading squad for an entire year. Levy challenged the punishment, and the case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2021, the Court ruled 8–1 that the school had violated her First Amendment rights, emphasizing that the post was made off campus, outside school hours, through her personal phone, and to her private Snapchat audience. The case became one of the most important examples of schools attempting to punish students for personal social-media expression that occurs outside school.
Justin Layshock – Suspended, Sent to Alternative School, and Barred From Graduation Over a MySpace Parody – Justin Layshock, a 17-year-old senior at Hickory High School in Pennsylvania, created a fake MySpace profile parodying his principal while using a computer at his grandmother’s house. The profile included crude jokes and insulting answers pretending to come from the principal. After school officials discovered it, Layshock received a 10-day suspension, was ordered to finish the school year in an alternative education program, was barred from extracurricular activities, and was prohibited from attending his graduation ceremony. The punishment was especially severe considering the profile had been created entirely off campus using a private computer. Layshock sued, and the Third Circuit ultimately ruled that the school’s response violated his First Amendment rights.
T.V. and M.K. – Girls Punished for Personal MySpace Photos Taken at a Sleepover – Two sophomores at Churubusco High School in Indiana, identified as T.V. and M.K., attended a private sleepover during summer vacation and took suggestive joke photographs involving a novelty phallic-shaped lollipop. They later posted some of the photos to their personal MySpace pages. Someone printed the photos and gave them to the school principal before the next school year began. The principal responded by suspending both girls from all extracurricular activities for the entire school year, even though the photographs had been taken off campus, outside school time, and did not involve school activities. The principal later offered to shorten the suspension to one quarter of the year if the girls attended three counseling sessions and appeared before an all-male athletic board to apologize for their behavior. The students challenged the punishment as an unconstitutional attempt by the school to regulate their private off-campus expression.
J.S. – Eighth Grader Suspended for a MySpace Parody of Her Principal – An eighth-grade student identified as J.S. created a fake MySpace profile mocking her middle-school principal after she had been disciplined for dress-code violations. She created the page on a weekend using her home computer and filled it with crude and sexually suggestive jokes about the principal. When school officials learned about the account, they suspended her for 10 days, despite the fact that the profile had been created completely outside school. J.S. and her parents sued the district. After years of litigation, the full Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the school had violated her First Amendment rights because the parody had not caused the kind of substantial disruption necessary to justify punishment of her off-campus speech. The district ultimately agreed to a monetary judgment in her favor.
Avery Doninger – Barred From Running for Student Government Because of a Blog Post – Avery Doninger was a junior and class secretary at Lewis S. Mills High School in Connecticut when she became involved in a dispute with administrators over the scheduling of a student-organized music event called Jamfest. From home, Doninger posted on a publicly accessible blog criticizing administrators and used a vulgar term to describe them while encouraging other students to contact the school about the event. Administrators subsequently disqualified her from running for senior class secretary and prevented her from giving a campaign speech. Her punishment was therefore imposed directly on her school participation because of political-like criticism she expressed on the internet outside school. Doninger sued, but the courts ultimately declined to overturn the punishment, finding that officials could reasonably have believed the post risked disrupting school operations. Even though the school prevailed legally, the case is a notable example of school officials using a teenager’s off-campus online criticism of school leadership to remove her from student government.
Taylor Bell – Suspended and Sent to Alternative School After Posting a Rap Criticizing Coaches – Taylor Bell, a Mississippi high school student and aspiring rapper, wrote and recorded a rap song away from school after hearing allegations that two coaches had acted inappropriately toward female students. Bell recorded the song at a private studio and uploaded it from home to Facebook and YouTube. The lyrics accused the coaches of sexual misconduct but also included violent and threatening imagery directed toward them. When school officials discovered the song, Bell was suspended and sent to an alternative school for several weeks. Bell argued that the school was punishing him for speech created entirely away from campus and that the song was artistic expression intended to expose alleged misconduct. The Fifth Circuit ultimately upheld the discipline because of the threatening language and its connection to the school community. The case nevertheless demonstrates how monitoring students’ public social-media activity can enable schools to impose serious academic consequences for creative and critical expression produced outside school.
Channelview Student – Punishment Announced Even After a Social-Media Threat Was Deemed Unsubstantiated – In 2026, Channelview Independent School District in Texas investigated social-media reports concerning a possible threat involving Channelview High School. Authorities went to the student’s home and ultimately determined that there was no substantiated threat to the campus. Despite that finding, the district announced that the student involved would still face disciplinary action under its student code of conduct. The case demonstrates how once a student’s online activity attracts school attention, disciplinary consequences can continue even when the original safety concern that prompted intervention turns out not to be credible.
