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School Pays To Get an Algorithm To Scan Students' Social Media For Threats and Suicide Risks Posts (wbur.org)
When someone visits the buildings of Shawsheen Valley Technical High School in Billerica, as they walk through the secure foyer, they have to get their driver's license or another state-issued ID scanned. But the secure foyer does kind of a high-level national background check, too, explains Superintendent Tim Broadrick. From a report: The "LobbyGuard" scanner is the size of a computer tablet. It scans a driver's license, takes a picture of the school visitor and if all is OK with the person's background check, almost instantly clears the person to enter the school. An employee behind a window then pushes a button and unlocks the door to the school hallway. Amid nationwide concern about school shootings, there's talk at Shawsheen Tech of covering the wall of glass in the lobby with a special film to make it harder for a bullet to pierce. There's also a police officer -- known as a school resource officer -- stationed at the school. He has an office in the lobby. And the school has adopted another security measure to try to protect students from attacks -- one you can't see. It's a computer program designed to detect threats against the school in social media posts. And it runs 24/7.
"It's receiving and filtering and then gives us alerts when certain kinds of public communication are detected," Broadrick explains. Shawsheen Tech buys the social media scanning service from a Vermont-based company called Social Sentinel. It's one of many technology firms doing some form of social media scanning or monitoring. Social Sentinel claims it's the only one with expertise in protecting schools. Shawsheen Tech has about 1,300 students. It pays Social Sentinel approximately $10,000 per year, according to Broadrick.
"It's receiving and filtering and then gives us alerts when certain kinds of public communication are detected," Broadrick explains. Shawsheen Tech buys the social media scanning service from a Vermont-based company called Social Sentinel. It's one of many technology firms doing some form of social media scanning or monitoring. Social Sentinel claims it's the only one with expertise in protecting schools. Shawsheen Tech has about 1,300 students. It pays Social Sentinel approximately $10,000 per year, according to Broadrick.
This is what you get when you value SAFETY more than FREEDOM. 40 years of liberal logic & indoctrination, lack of morals, lack of ethics, lack of manners, lack of respect, no family, and on and on... When I was in high school in the 70's, pretty much every pickup had a gun rack with a .22 rifle and or
shotgun. Some had pistols in the glovebox. Not one was locked. Kids carried pocket knives, or buck
knives in a sheath on their belt. NOT ONCE was there ever a shooting, stabbing or anything else.
The gun hasn't changed...the KIDS have changed. And NOT for the better. Liberal logic & indoctrination
hasn't worked!
My kids' school has a locked front door and a fence around the school yard. They claim it's to prevent a kid being abducted but they will eventually open the door to everyone. So the extra security worthless, is a total pain and worse it means I have to walk my kids the long way round the parking lot. I'm in Canada. We average less than one abduction by a complete stranger every 3 years of a child not on a native reserve. It is so rare most Canadians know who Paul_Bernardo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is. Contrast that risk with the risk of my kids being hit in the parking lot. It's thousands a year with about 20 fatalities of small children.
This is a school where they should be good at math. The risks to small children are childhood leukemia and traffic accidents. As they get older its meningitis, traffic accidents and suicide. How about we spend 1/10 of the money we spend on Hollywood threats on real threats to my kids?
Where do school shootings rank? There have been about 250 deaths in school shootings over 18 years, or about 14 per year.(and K-12, not just ages 15-19). Since there are approximately 51 million K-12 students in the U.S., a student's chances of being killed in a non-gang, non-suicide school shooting in any given year are about 1 in 3.6 million. You are roughly 3x more likely to be struck by lightning (1 in 1.08 million).
Like airliner crashes, school shootings are one of these extremely rare, statistically insignificant events whose emotional impact creates a large amount of social interest. This causes a disproportionate amount of press coverage, leading people to wildly overestimate the actual danger. If you really want to save high schoolers' lives, teach them to: drive safely and buckle their seat belts, not to abuse drugs, seek counseling for depression, stay out of gangs, use sunscreen, eat healthy and exercise, get the flu shot, don't smoke, don't eat too many sweets, and avoid teen pregnancy. Each of these will save many more lives than all the hand-wringing over school shootings, some (like suicide-prevention) around a hundred times more.