September 27, 2021
Amelia Vance, Anisha Reddy, Yasamin Sharifi, Jasmine Park, and Sara Collins
CC BY-NC 4.0
As educators and school leaders return to campus after two years of significant upheaval and loss, many are prioritizing efforts focused on students’ well-being, including ensuring that students receive adequate mental health support. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, some experts suggest that the stressors associated with the pandemic and learning from home may have impacted students’ mental health, potentially increasing students’ risks of self-harm and suicide.1 Given this increased concern about student mental health, many school districts have recently and rapidly adopted self-harm monitoring systems.
Self-harm monitoring systems are computerized programs that can monitor students’ online activity on school-issued devices, school networks, and school accounts to identify whether students are at risk of dangerous mental health crises. These monitoring systems identify individual students by processing and collecting personal information from their online activities and sending alerts about individual students and their flagged content to school officials. In some cases, these systems or school policies facilitate sharing this information with parents or third parties, such as law enforcement agencies.
Despite their increased use, self-harm monitoring systems are an unproven technique for effectively identifying and assisting students who may be considering self-harm simply based on their online activities.
School districts may overestimate the ability of self-harm monitoring systems to identify students and underestimate the importance of developing comprehensive policies and processes for using the systems. Due to the inherent limitations in a computer system’s ability to interpret context, these systems often inaccurately or mistakenly flag student content and over-collect confidential data.2
The increased and rapid adoption of these systems raises important questions about the effectiveness and consequences of self-harm monitoring systems for students’ mental health, privacy, and equity. Monitoring systems can scan and monitor students’ searches, emails, documents, and online activities including social media and online communications on school-issued devices. Education leaders must carefully weigh the risks and harms associated with adopting monitoring technologies, implement safeguards and processes to protect students who may be identified, establish a strong communications strategy that includes school staff, students, parents,3 and caregivers, and ensure that their schools’ and districts’ monitoring programs and service-delivery systems do not exacerbate inequities. Further, schools must have the necessary mental health resources and professionals (school-based psychologists, counselors, and social workers) in place to support students identified by the program, which most schools across the country do not have.4
Merely adopting monitoring systems cannot serve as a substitute for robust mental health supports provided in school or a comprehensive self-harm prevention strategy rooted in well-developed medical evidence. Identifying students alone does not equate to supporting their mental health.
Absent other support, simply identifying students who may be at risk of self-harm—if the system does so correctly—will, at best, lead to no results. At worst, it can violate a student’s privacy or lead to a misinformed or otherwise inappropriate response. Schools must have robust mental health response plans in place to effectively support any students who may be identified before adopting monitoring systems.
Without proper planning and recognition of monitoring systems’ limitations, using monitoring software as a self-harm detection tool can trigger unintended consequences. In particular, using self-harm monitoring systems without strong guardrails and privacy-protective policies is likely to disproportionately harm already vulnerable student groups. Potential harmful outcomes include:
- Students being mistakenly flagged,
- Students being unfairly treated once flagged as a result of improper sharing of this status and bias or stigma around mental illness,
- Students being subject to excess scrutiny by the school in ways that can be stigmatizing and alienating,
- Students having mental health details or their status-as-flagged inappropriately disclosed,
- Students being needlessly put in contact with law enforcement and social services, or facing school disciplinary consequences as a result of being flagged,
- Students having sensitive personal information, such as gender identity, sexual orientation, citizenship status, religious beliefs, political affiliations, or family situation revealed or shared, and
- Students experiencing a chilling effect, making them hesitant to search for needed resources on school devices out of fear of being watched by school officials or flagged by the monitoring system.
All of these outcomes could ultimately undermine the primary goal of improving students’ mental well-being.5 To mitigate this, schools must:
- Ensure they have sufficient school-based mental health resources and appropriate processes in place to support any students with mental health needs if they are accurately identified through self-harm monitoring technology,
- Develop a robust mental health response plan beyond simply identifying students through a monitoring system, and
- Have well-developed policies governing how schools will use monitoring systems, respond to alerts, and protect student information before they acquire the technology.
To help education leaders understand and weigh these risks, this report describes self-harm monitoring technology and how schools use it, details the privacy and equity concerns introduced by these monitoring systems, points out challenges that undermine the accuracy and limit the usefulness of these systems for addressing student mental health crises, outlines legal considerations related to monitoring students for self-harm, provides crucial questions that school and district leaders should consider regarding monitoring technologies, and offers recommendations and resources to help schools and districts protect students’ privacy in the context of monitoring for self-harm.
The Future of Privacy Forum thanks the following individuals and organizations for contributing their time, insight, and work in providing feedback on the information in this report:
Isabelle Barbour, MPH, Truthteller Consulting
Sam Boyd, Senior Staff Attorney, Southern Poverty Law Center
Caitlyn Clibbon, Disability Rights Florida
Tony DePalma, Disability Rights Florida
Maritza Gallardo-Cooper, PhD, NCSP, School Safety and Crisis Response Committee of the National Association of School Psychologists
Dr. Sara Jordan
Dr. Carrie Klein
Lindsay Kubatzky, National Center for Learning Disabilities
Jennifer Mathis, Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law
Clarence Okoh, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.
David Sallay, Utah State Board of Education and FPF consultant
Zoe M. Savitsky
Todd A. Savage, Ph.D., NCSP, School Safety and Crisis Response Committee of the National Association of School Psychologists
The Children’s Rights Practice of the Southern Poverty Law Center
Gretchen M. Shipley, Fagen Friedman & Fulfrost LLP
Scott A. Woitaszewski, Ph.D., NCSP, School Safety and Crisis Response Committee of the National Association of School Psychologists