One would think from their recent shutdowns of three beloved elementary schools–– Pinkney, Kennedy and Broken Arrow––that USD 497 was supremely strapped for cash, especially since they cited a $4 million budget shortfall.
So how did they choose to reinvest the money they saved from shutting these schools down? NOT in crossing guards—the Lawrence, KS Times cites a severe lack in new construction zones. Instead, they chose to spend $162,000 for just three years on a new program called GAGGLE.
According to their website, GAGGLE is a program intended to protect students from threats of violence and notify administrators when a student is potentially at risk of harming themself. The program uses “machine learning” to scan all “Email messages/subject lines, Attachments, Images, Gun Images and Videos, Links to websites and Shared items from Google Drive” and on Canvas, the LHS version of Schoology, it scans everything.
Most people would argue that the school has a right to monitor any activity on their devices, but this is not the controversial aspect. The issue is more with security. For one, a real GAGGLE employee has to review the content each time something is flagged by their “AI,” meaning potentially sensitive student content is revealed to uninvolved parties.
Also, there seems to be a huge false-positive rate. At Free State, a false positive led to a lockdown. Perhaps much more consequentially, a room full of LHS art students was taken to the principal’s office because GAGGLE (incorrectly) flagged their art for nudity. Some students noticed that their art had even been deleted from their Google Drives.
But it’s fine because Laura Kelly says, “Our schools have made so much progress over the past five years because we’ve fully funded K-12 education.”