Lesley Mathis knows what her daughter said was wrong. But she never expected the 13-year-old girl would get arrested for it.
Before the morning was even over, the Tennessee eighth grader was under arrest. She was interrogated, strip-searched and spent the night in a jail cell, her mother says.
Earlier in the day, her friends had teased the teen about her tanned complexion and called her “Mexican,” even though she’s not. When a friend asked what she was planning for Thursday, she wrote: “on Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s.”
Mathis said the comments were “wrong” and “stupid,” but context showed they were not a threat.
“It made me feel like, is this the America we live in?” Mathis said of her daughter’s arrest. “And it was this stupid, stupid technology that is just going through picking up random words and not looking at context.”
Educators say the technology has saved lives. But critics warn it can criminalize children for careless words.
“It has routinized law enforcement access and presence in students’ lives, including in their home,” said Elizabeth Laird, a director at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
In a country weary of school shootings, several states have taken a harder line on threats to schools. Among them is Tennessee, which passed a 2023 zero-tolerance law requiring any threat of mass violence against a school to be reported immediately to law enforcement.
The 13-year-old girl arrested in August 2023 had been texting with friends on a chat function tied to her school email at Fairview Middle School, which uses Gaggle to monitor students’ accounts. (The Associated Press is withholding the girl’s name to protect her privacy. The school district did not respond to a request for comment.)
“She told me afterwards, ‘I thought you hated me.’ That kind of haunts you,” said Mathis, the girl’s mother.
A court ordered eight weeks of house arrest, a psychological evaluation and 20 days at an alternative school for the girl.
“I wish that was treated as a teachable moment, not a law enforcement moment,” said Patterson.
Students who think they are chatting privately among friends often do not realize they are under constant surveillance, said Shahar Pasch, an education lawyer in Florida.
Teenagers face steeper consequences than adults for what they write online, Alexa said.
“If an adult makes a super racist joke that’s threatening on their computer, they can delete it, and they wouldn’t be arrested,” she said.
Amy Bennett, chief of staff for Lightspeed Systems, said that the software helps understaffed schools “be proactive rather than punitive” by identifying early warning signs of bullying, self-harm, violence or abuse.
The technology can also involve law enforcement in responses to mental health crises. In Florida’s Polk County Schools, a district of more than 100,000 students, the school safety program received nearly 500 Gaggle alerts over four years, officers said in public Board of Education meetings. This led to 72 involuntary hospitalization cases under the Baker Act, a state law that allows authorities to require mental health evaluations for people against their will if they pose a risk to themselves or others.
“A really high number of children who experience involuntary examination remember it as a really traumatic and damaging experience — not something that helps them with their mental health care,” said Sam Boyd, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Polk and West Palm Beach school districts did not provide comments.
Information that could allow schools to assess the software’s effectiveness, such as the rate of false alerts, is closely held by technology companies and unavailable publicly unless schools track the data themselves.
Gaggle alerted more than 1,200 incidents to the Lawrence, Kansas, school district in a recent 10-month period. But almost two-thirds of those alerts were deemed by school officials to be nonissues — including over 200 false alarms from student homework, according to an Associated Press analysis of data received via a public records request.
Natasha Torkzaban, who graduated in 2024, said she was flagged for editing a friend’s college essay because it had the words “mental health.”
School officials have said they take concerns about Gaggle seriously, but also say the technology has detected dozens of imminent threats of suicide or violence.
“Sometimes you have to look at the trade for the greater good,” said Board of Education member Anne Costello in a July 2024 board meeting.
Two years after their ordeal, Mathis said her daughter is doing better, although she’s still “terrified” of running into one of the school officers who arrested her. One bright spot, she said, was the compassion of the teachers at her daughter’s alternative school. They took time every day to let the kids share their feelings and frustrations, without judgment.
“It’s like we just want kids to be these little soldiers, and they’re not,” said Mathis. “They’re just humans.”
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