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Are schools allowed to monitor their students on social media? Middle and high schools in Glendale, California are doing just that. School officials have hired a company to track 13,000 students' online posts on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and others, paying more than $40,000 a year for the service, CBS News reports.

Glendale's superintendent says the reason behind this somewhat drastic new measure is an emphasis on student safety. It also allows school officials to intervene if students are discussing suicide, violence, substance abuse, or bullying.

What are the legal implications behind this?
Government Action
The Fourth Amendment guarantees U.S. citizens the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures absent a warrant issued with probable cause. But it also requires government action and a reasonable expectation of privacy in what's being searched.

Government action doesn't apply when private persons are conducting the search. For example, if a friend is snooping in another friend's bag, this may be a violation of the bag-owner's privacy, but the Fourth Amendment wouldn't apply because the friend is not a government figure.

In the case of schools monitoring students' social media, however, Glendale's public school district does qualify as a government entity.
No Reasonable Expectation of Privacy
But the "reasonable expectation of privacy" part is where the Fourth Amendment test falls short.

Students in Glendale can't be seen as having a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to their social media posts, because whatever students are posting can be seen by the general public. Unless the firm hired by the school district is hacking into students' accounts or using their passwords, then there is no Fourth Amendment issue here.

A similar argument can be made when it comes to trash that one leaves out on one's curb. Courts have ruled that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in trash left out by a curb for pickup, because the (former) owner of the trash knowingly put it out there in public.

So while it may seem invasive, the best way for students to approach this situation is to be informed about their rights. If they don't want their social media accounts to be viewed by certain people, they should set their profiles to "private" and limit the amount of information they share.

The social media lesson here: When you have a public profile, there really is no limit as to who can see this information.

Related Resources:

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Can Schools Monitor Students on Social Media?

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Are schools allowed to monitor their students on social media? Middle and high schools in Glendale, California are doing just that. School officials have hired a company to track 13,000 students' online posts on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and others, paying...

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California's opinion

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(CBS News) Social media texting, tweeting, and posting are all part of being a teen these days, but now some teens' online actions are being monitored on a daily basis.

The social media sites of all 13,000 students in Glendale, Calif.'s middle and high schools are being monitored.

School officials hired a company called Geo Listening to daily track the students' online posts with the goal to intervene when students discuss suicide, bullying, violence, or substance abuse. Richard Sheehan, superintendent of Glendale Unified School District, said, "The whole purpose of this is student safety ... Basically it just monitors for key words, where, if a student is considering harming themselves, harming someone else."

Geo Listening collects information from sites like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram -- publicly accessible social networks -- and sends the information culled from the searches in a daily report to school officials. In a statement, Chris Frydrych, chief executive officer of Geo Listening told CBS News "[we] don't monitor private emails, text messages, phone calls or voicemails."

The service costs $40,500 per year.

CBS News spoke to one parent, Michelle Wright, who said she hopes it makes teens think twice about what they post. "There's a lot of cyberbullying that I've seen," Wright said. "So I think if the school gets involved that's it wonderful, it's a win-win."

But the American Civil Liberties Union is more concerned with how it impacts privacy and civil rights issues. Brendan Hamme, staff attorney of the ACLU of Southern California, said, "We're looking for what privacy safeguards are put into place, how the information is being utilized, how it's being stored and kept, if there are restrictions on how it's shared with other entities."

Yet many teens being monitored say they just don't want grown-ups listening in. Ashley Sandoval, 15, said, "We rebel. If your parents come and tell you, 'Oh you can't do this,' you're going to go and do it just to show them that you can. So I don't think monitoring us is going to do us any good."

Geo Listening claims it isn't prying into the lives of teenagers -- just giving the old-school notion of "hall monitor" a high-tech twist.
Watch John Blackstone's full report above.
For more on the finer points of law, "CBS This Morning" turned to CBS News legal analyst Jack Ford who explained the practice does feel invasive or awkward, but it is legal because the information is publicly available online.

"It's not as if somebody's breaking into password-protected accounts and doing things you usually can get as a consequence of getting a search warrant," he said. "They've said, 'We're just going to monitor the things that are out there anyway.' ... So you can understand why some people might not be happy with it. Others might be delighted with it, but not illegal."

But what kind of privacy are students entitled to?

Students, Ford said, have a "reasonable expectation of privacy," but in this kind of situation, people can take a look at it -- and that's the claim the schools can make.
For more on this issue, watch Ford's full interview below.
Ford said, "The argument is clearly by the schools, 'You're sending these out. These posts are going out on Facebook and on Twitter, so clearly you don't have an expectation of privacy. Indeed, it's exactly the opposite. You're putting it out there for the public.' That seems to be the standard there. If it's inside your pocketbook or your wallet, that's a different issue, but if you're posting it for other people to see, then so far the law has said, 'We can take a look at it, especially if you're concerned for security issues'."

The schools can monitor and pick up threats and report them, but where it gets tricky is when other issues come up, such as statements about instructors. Ford said, "Suppose what you're sending out there is a post that says that 'My history teacher is an idiot.' That's going to depend on a lot of factors -- public school, private school -- whether or not your school has a conduct code, and many of them do now where they say respect is going to be a factor here. There are all sorts of issues that can come into play as a consequence of this."

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Calif. school district monitoring students' social media activity

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(CBS News) Social media texting, tweeting, and posting are all part of being a teen these days, but now some teens' online actions are being monitored on a daily basis. The social media sites of all 13,000 students in Glendale, Calif.'s middle and high schools are being monitored.

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A school district in Southern California has hired a private firm to comb through the cyber lives of its 14,000 middle- and high-school students, looking for signs of trouble.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the Glendale Unified School District is spending $40,000 to have the firm monitor social media use among the district's students. School officials want to know if the kids are posting suicidal thoughts, obscenities or comments intended to bully fellow students.

The move is not that surprising. After all, 8 in 10 teens use some kind of social media, a Pew Research Center study found at the end of last year.

And it comes amid continuing stories of social media gone wrong - when it's used for cyberbullying or, in extreme cases, linked to suicides.

Just last week, 12-year-old Rebecca Ann Sedwick of Lakeland, Fla., killed herself after being "absolutely terrorized on social media," Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said. In a New York Times article about the incident, her mother, Tricia Norman, said her daughter's school should have done more to help her.
Scouring Cyberspace
It's not rare for schools to look at students' online comments, especially after catching wind of some sort of abuse or threat, says Justin Patchin, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center.

But Glendale's initiative has attracted some suspicion and much media attention, partly because of the hefty price tag and partly because of its systematic approach. As the Los Angeles Times reports:

"The company's computers scour an untold number of public posts by students on blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, for example. Analysts are alerted to terms that suggest suicidal thoughts, bullying, vandalism and even the use of obscenities, among other things. When they find posts they think should spur an intervention or anything that violates schools' student codes of conduct, the company alerts the campus."

California-based Geo Listening wouldn't say how many schools it's working with. But its founder, Chris Frydrych, says he expects the company to be monitoring about 3,000 schools around the world by year's end, according to the L.A. Times.

Dick Sheehan, the school district's superintendent, says the strategy is "designed around student safety and making sure kids are protected." Critics are saying it's an invasion of privacy and could have a chilling effect on free speech.

The real question is simply: Will it work?
A New Age Of Bullying
Cyberbullying is more troubling than the conventional kind because it brings unprecedented anonymity - kids can pretend to be anyone online, says Michigan State University researcher Anna McAlister - and because it can happen around the clock, in public online spaces.

So, assuming schools have a responsibility to address cyberbullying, what path should they take? Not the one Glendale is taking, says Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media. The nonprofit has written a curriculum on "digital literacy and citizenship" - teaching students how to navigate the digital technology safely and responsibly- and urges schools to start teaching it in first grade.

The curriculum includes handouts on how to recognize cyberbullying, documentary-style videos on its consequences and tip sheets for parents on how to address it.

Steyer says he understands the focus on keeping students safe but is concerned about how the information is aggregated and shared. "Our approach is teaching kids empathy," he says. "I think that's much better than spying on kids."
At What Cost?
Spying implies that a school - or a parent or an employer - is monitoring kids without telling them, which Patchin, of the Cyberbullying Research Center, doesn't recommend. "Because they'll find something they have to confront their kids about," he says. "And is your kid ever going to trust you again?"

The approach also brings up issues of liability, he says. What if there's an obvious threat the school doesn't see? What if its response leads to further harm?

Patchin says he understands the temptation to monitor possible threats online, but it's more effective to build a culture where students feel empowered to take action when they have or notice issues and where adults "don't make it worse."

In other words, he says, it might be better to put $40,000 toward hiring a good guidance counselor.
Emily Siner is an intern on NPR's Digital News Desk.

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Why Spying On Our Kids To Solve Cyberbullying Might Not Work

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A school district in California has attracted some suspicion and much media attention for hiring a company to monitor the social media pages of 14,000 students. But an expert says teaching kids empathy is a better approach than spying on them.

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Should schools monitor kids on social media?

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People will post just about anything on their social media accounts -- even confessions about crimes, or cries for help. But these crucial messages often get lost in a sea of comments.Now, a school district in Glendale, California, is getting help monitoring the social media activity of its 13,000+ middle and high school students.

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A teenager who claimed "sarcasm" after talking on Facebook about shooting up a kindergarten spent months in jail this year for making a "terroristic threat." Over the summer, Instagram photos of guns and money led to New York City's largest gun bust ever. A mom's Facebook photo of her baby with a bong led to her 2010 arrest.

While criminals - or those guilty of ill-placed sarcasm - aren't wising up about social media oversharing, tools for monitoring Americans online are increasingly accessible and affordable to authorities, no NSA-level clearance required. Those in charge are monitoring more and more and social networks are happy to comply, especially where extra revenue is involved.

If you share something publicly on social media, "you should expect the world to read it," said Andy Sellars, a staff attorney at the Digital Media Law Project. "And you should expect that world to include law enforcement."

Expect, in fact, anybody - now more than ever. Beyond the feds, marketers and cops, there is a growing customer base for Internet-monitoring contractors who sift through personal details readily available on the Internet. Recently, some schools began enlisting these services to follow students on social media and monitor for cyberbullying, and eventually others will catch on.

We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal "Game of Thrones" downloads, or run sweeps for insurance companies seeking non-smokers confessing to lapsing back into the habit. Instead of that one guy getting busted for a lame joke misinterpreted as a real threat, the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.

The tools are getting better because there are more ways to get at the flood of data. As Twitter heads towards its IPO, the micro-messaging service is making its exclusive "firehose" of data available (for an undisclosed fee) to a growing number of third parties. While basic (and free) Twitter searches provide a limited amount of results, the Twitter firehose - previously open to only the likes of search engines such as Google and Bing - blasts everything publicly available on Twitter ... in real time.

While this firehose is valuable to marketers, data consulting firm BrightPlanet found a way to make it valuable (and affordable) to police departments. For only $150 a month, BrightPlanet's "BlueJay Law Enforcement Twitter Crime Scanner" allows cops to conduct very specific searches within the Twitter firehose.

"Monitor large public events, social unrest, gang communications and criminally predicated individuals," suggests the online pamphlet for the BlueJay browser tool, which reads like a mission statement for George Orwell's Ministry of Truth. "Identify potential witnesses and indicators for evidence."

The CSI of social media evidence gathering is mostly manual, but automating it could bring new benefits: A sudden flurry of tweets coming from a specific area can indicate anything from a riot to a natural disaster. As with most technologies, though, this is a double-edged sword.

"Used well, such tools should make police departments more aware of both local problems and complaints about their own work," Nate Anderson, author of The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed, wrote on Ars Technica. "Used less than well, it can be a bit creepy, sort of on par with having a kid's uncle listen outside her bedroom during a slumber party. And used badly, it can make a nice tool for keeping an eye on critics/dissenters."

What's more, software isn't the best interpreter of very human data. Anderson points out that some of the real examples used in BlueJay's promotional material include #gunfire, #protest and #meth, which may not only not provide any "actionable intelligence," but could in fact be people talking about "Breaking Bad."

Anyone familiar with Facebook knows what happens when we rely on bots more than humans to interpret social media interactions. Using real humans to interpret sensitive social media interaction could be a valuable service to someone with the right business plan.

Geo Listening grabbed a lot of attention recently when it was reported that a suburban Los Angeles school district paid the social media monitoring company $40,500 to monitor the public posts of about 13,000 middle and high school students, eight schools in all.

Unlike BlueJay, Geo Listening is a full-service monitoring system which uses a staff of 10 humans, as well as contractors, to examine the public posts pinged by its monitoring technology, and send daily reports back to the schools. Public posts that use terms that signify drug use, bullying, suicidal thoughts, vandalism, truancy and violations of the school's code of conduct, are examined for context, and only reported if they warrant concert, Geo Listening CEO Chris Frydrych told NBC News.

During the initial pilot program for the Glendale school district in L.A., Frydrych said his team found a student who was posting about taking his life. "We were able to get him help," Frydrych said, adding that a goal of his company is not to get students in trouble, but to identify where intervention is needed. "These are kids who need help, and we can get it to them," he say.

It's hard to knock something that might actually do something about cyberbullying, but the intersection of students, free speech and social media was contentious long before Geo Listening ever got into business. Students are suspended or expelled for criticizing teachers or posting photos of themselves engaging in inappropriate behavior. Last year, an F-bomb-filled tweet sent at 2:30 a.m. got one student expelled three months before graduation, because he allegedly accessed Twitter through a school-issued computer.

Such social media monitoring services are sold on the platform that they can stop bad things from happening, but is that enough of a justification?

"We could stop bad things from happening if we install cameras in everyone's bedroom in America," Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, told NBC News. "Which trade-off are we willing to accept? Every word, every fleeting thought we type into a search engine and every product we think about buying gets recorded by a large database, not to help us but to exert power over us."

"Spying is the nature of our society," Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt said recently an an event in New York City. Despite his infamously cavalier attitude toward the privacy of Google users, he has a point.

As social networks continues to look for ways to make money, the potential for providing direct access to the information we share publicly online is unsettling. Consider Facebook, and its infinite database of publicly shared photos on the Internet. In August, the social network announced that it might add profile photos to its facial recognition database, to aid in photo tagging.

"Can I say that we will never use facial recognition technology for any other purposes? Absolutely not," Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan said in a statement.

Of course, like all social media, you can opt out. At least for now.

Helen A.S. Popkin is Deputy Editor, Tech & Science at NBCNews.com. You can also find her on Twitter and/or Facebook.

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Careful what you tweet: Police, schools tap social media to track behavior

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A teenager who claimed "sarcasm" after talking on Facebook about shooting up a kindergarten spent months in jail this year for making a "terroristic threat." Over the summer, Instagram photos of guns and money led to New York City's largest gun bust ever.

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Florida's side of the story

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Gateway to Tampa Bay area news, weather, radar, sports, traffic, and more. From WTVT-TV/DT FOX 13, the most powerful name in local news.

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Students struggle to balance free speech rights

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Students struggle to balance free speech rights

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Delaware schools and schools across the country are crafting policies to encourage responsible use of the social media but in doing so often run head on into the First Amendment.

Many educators and free speech advocates see the need to educated students at an early age to the consequences of cyberbullying and other questionable uses of the social media. -db

From DFMNews, November 8, 2011, by Eileen Smith Dallabrida.

Your contributions make our work possible.

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Schools struggle to balance free speech rights with responsible use of social media -

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Delaware schools and schools across the country are crafting policies to encourage responsible use of the social media but in doing so often run head on into the First Amendment. Many educators and free speech advocates see the need to educated students at an early age to the consequences of cyberbullying and other questionable uses ...

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In September, a federal appeals court in Nevada, for instance, sided with school officials who suspended a high school sophomore for threatening, through messages on Myspace, to shoot classmates. In 2011, an Indiana court ruled that school officials had violated the Constitution when they disciplined students for posting pictures on Facebook of themselves at a slumber party, posing with rainbow-colored lollipops shaped like phalluses.

"It is a concern and in some cases, a major problem for school districts," said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, which represents public school superintendents.

Surveillance of students' online speech, he said, can be cumbersome and confusing. "Is this something that a student has the right to do, or is this something that flies against the rules and regulations of a district?"

Interviews with educators suggest that surveillance of students off campus is still mostly done the old-fashioned way, by relying on students to report trouble or following students on social networks. Tracking students on social media comes with its own risks: One principal in Missouri resigned last year after accusations that she had snooped on students using a fake Facebook account. "It was our children she was monitoring," said one Twitter user who identified herself as Judy Rayford, after the news broke last year, without, she added, "authorization" from children or parents.

But technology is catching on.

In August, officials in Glendale, a suburb in Southern California, paid Geo Listening, a technology company, to comb through the social network posts of children in the district. The company said its service was not to pry, but to help the district, Glendale Unified, protect its students after suicides by teenagers in the area.

Students mocked the effort on Twitter, saying officials at G.U.S.D., the Glendale Unified School District, would not "even understand what I tweet most of the time, they should hire a high school slang analyst #shoutout2GUSD."

"We should be monitoring gusd instead," one Twitter user wrote after an instructor was arrested on charges of sexual abuse; the instructor pleaded not guilty.

Chris Frydrych, the chief executive of Geo Listening, based in Hermosa Beach, also in Southern California, declined to explain how his company's technology worked, except to say that it was "a sprinkling of technology and a whole lot of human capital." He said Geo Listening looked for keywords and sentiments on posts that could be viewed publicly. It cannot, for instance, read anyone's Facebook posts that are designated for "friends" or "friends of friends."

But with Facebook's announcement this month that teenagers will be permitted to post public status updates and images, Geo Listening and similar services will potentially have access to more information on that social network.

Glendale has paid Geo Listening $40,500 to monitor the social media posts. Mr. Frydrych declined to say which other schools his company works with, except to predict that by the end of the year, his company would have signed up 3,000 schools.

David Jones of CompuGuardian, based in Salt Lake City, said his product let school officials monitor whether students were researching topics like how to build bombs or discussing anorexia. His customers include five schools, but he, too, is optimistic about market growth.

"It helps you boil down to what students are having what problems," he said. "And then you can drill down."

But when does protecting children from each other or from themselves turn into chilling free speech?

John G. Palfrey Jr., head of Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, said he favored a middle ground. He follows his students on Twitter if they follow him, for instance, but he is wary of automated tools that try to conduct what he called National Security Agency-style surveillance.

He briefly contended with this question last year when students created a blog where they could anonymously share "secrets." Many posts were on the fringe, Mr. Palfrey recalled, and some teachers and students were concerned that children's identities could be determined from their writing patterns. The blog's student founders were persuaded to add a note of caution, warning participants that their identities could be discovered.

Mr. Palfrey offered an offline analogy. "We wouldn't want to record every conversation they are having in the hallway," he said. "The safety and well-being of our students is our top priority, but we also need for them to have the time and space to grow without feeling like we are watching their every move."

That fine line seems to be equally confounding the courts.

In the Nevada case, a 16-year-old boy bragged on Myspace about having guns at home, and threatened to kill fellow students on a particular date. He also cited the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, in which a troubled student killed 32 people.

The boy ended up spending 31 days in a local jail and was suspended from school for 90 days. He then sued the district, saying his free speech rights had been violated.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the claim. It called his threats "alarming" and so specific that they presented "a real risk of significant disruption" to the school. Administrators were justified, the court ruled, for penalizing what was ostensibly off-campus speech.

"It's going to be more and more of legal issues," said Gretchen Shipley, a lawyer who represents school districts. "The ability to monitor is growing so quickly."

The Indiana case offers a contrast. In the summer of 2009, two incoming 10th graders at Churubusco High School posted what the court called "raunchy" pictures of themselves. Once school officials found out, the girls were suspended from extracurricular activities for the school year. The girls sued, saying their free speech rights had been violated. The school contended that its student handbook bars conduct that could "discredit" or "dishonor" it.

The court found that prohibition too broad. The students' pictures, "juvenile" though they were, did not cause "substantial disruption" at school, the court ruled, and even though it was just "crude humor," it was protected speech. "No message of lofty social or political importance was conveyed, but none is required," the court said.

Correction: October 30, 2013

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Warily, Schools Watch Students on the Internet

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In September, a federal appeals court in Nevada, for instance, sided with school officials who suspended a high school sophomore for threatening, through messages on Myspace, to shoot classmates. In 2011, an Indiana court ruled that school officials had violated the Constitution when they disciplined students for posting pictures on Facebook of themselves at a slumber party, posing with rainbow-colored lollipops shaped like phalluses.

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Is signing a social media contract a violation of the First Amendment?

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STOCKTON -

A local school districts attempt at stopping cyber-bullying has crossed the line with many of its students. The Lodi Unified School District is requiring high school students who participate in after-school programs such as sports or clubs to sign a social media contract.

Basically the document says the school district can monitor students posts on social media and kick them off the team, or out of the club, if they are inappropriate.

"We're not against a social media contract," explained Bear Creek High School Junior Zachary Denney. "Rather, we're against the broad spectrum that they have on what is exactly inappropriate."

Students claim they are the one's being bullied, by the school district, to sign a document they say violates their First Amendment rights.

"Social media on Facebook and Twitter is our way of expressing ourselves in this generation," said Sabrina Foster, a Junior at Bear Creek.

According to the contract, if students post, tweet, or even "like" something on social media that is deemed inappropriate - the first, time it's a game suspension. A second offense though and you'll be kicked off the team for good.

Bear Creek Principal Bill Atterberry wants everyone to keep an open mind.

"Understanding that we're also looking to protect students and to make them feel comfortable and doing anything we can to stop bullying on our campus'"

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Students Railing Against Social Media Contract Implemented by School District

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STOCKTON -- A local school districts attempt at stopping cyber-bullying has crossed the line with many of its students. The Lodi Unified School District is requiring high school students who participate in after-school programs such as sports or clubs to sign a social media contract.

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Just as parents are grappling with how to keep their kids safe on social media, schools are increasingly confronting a controversial question: Should they do more to monitor students' online interactions off-campus to protect them from dangers such as bullying, drug use, violence and suicide?

In Huntsville, Alabama, the school system hired a retired FBI agent for security work, which includes reviewing social media "when a high priority tip is received about an emerging threat to a school, student or staff member," Keith Ward, a spokesman for the Huntsville City Schools, told CNN.

Ward said the district paid $157,190 to a firm, T&W, Inc., which employs the former FBI agent. The district's connection to the firm and the ex-agent was first reported by AI.com.

Last year, the district received a tip about a social media post concerning a threat to a high school teacher, Ward said. The student was found to have brought a knife with an eight inch blade to campus, he added.

"After this incident, the superintendent wanted to have a method to quickly identify threats before any harm might occur," Ward said.

The district started a program called Students Against Fear (SAFe), which is based on tips from students, staff members and parents. Only after a tip comes in regarding the potential for a student to pose a threat is the student's public social media activity checked out.

Since the program started, 14 students have been expelled, but not due to their social media posts, Ward said -- a review of their social media accounts merely supported the case for expulsion.

"As any good parent would do, we take all the measures that are appropriate to ensure the safety of our kids," said school district superintendent Casey Wardynski in September, when asked about the program at a news conference.

"We were able to save a life"

The Huntsville, Alabama school system is just the latest district to capture headlines for monitoring students on social media sites.

In the summer of 2012, the Glendale school district in suburban Los Angeles was in the spotlight for its decision to pay a tech firm $40,500 to track what middle and high school students post publicly on Facebook, Twitter and other social media.

The school district went with the firm Geo Listening after a pilot program with the company helped a student who was talking on social media about "ending his life," company CEOChris Frydrych told CNN's Michael Martinez last September.

"We were able to save a life," said Richard Sheehan, the Glendale superintendent, adding that two students in the school district had committed suicide the past two years.

"It's just another avenue to open up a dialogue with parents about safety," he said.

The Glendale school district is not alone. David Jones, president of the firm Safe Outlook Corporation, said two school districts and three schools pay, on average, between $4,000 to $9,000 per year for one of his technology products called CompuGuardian and that he expects the number of schools participating to go up. (Jones said he was not at liberty to reveal which schools work with his company.)

His product gives schools access to, among other things, reporting tools that allow users to search key words connected to cyberbullying and drug use, and to see whether students are researching topics about dangers such as school violence.

"You can identify a student, and you can jump into their activity logs and see exactly what they've typed, exactly where they've gone, exactly what they've done, and it gives you some history that you can go back to that child and use some disciplinary action," Jones said. "You can bring in the parent and say, 'Hey, look, this is what your child's doing. You need to talk to them about it.' "

Florida suicide sparks questions for schools

The issue of just what kids may be doing to each other online gained even more attention after a 12-year-old Florida girl, Rebecca Sedwick, who was allegedly repeatedly cyberbullied, jumped to her death in September of last year.

Two girls, ages 12 and 14, were arrested and charged with aggravated stalking, accused of sending Sedwick messages such as "Why aren't you dead?" and "Wait a minute, why are you still alive?" (Those charges were eventually dropped.)

Wayne Blanton, executive director of the Florida School Boards Association, said the school was aware of on-campus bullying of Sedwick and dealt with it by separating the students and putting them in different classes, but it was not aware of any off-campus bullying -- online -- that was allegedly taking place.

Under a Florida law that went into effect in July of last year (PDF), before Sedwick's death, if parents or students notify a school about suspected bullying off-campus, the school has the authority to look at a student's Facebook posts and e-mails, according to Blanton.

"The key to everything is, we have to be notified ... because there is no way we could monitor all the Facebook accounts and e-mail accounts and tweets and Twitters and all that," Blanton said. "We have 2.8 million students, but if it's reported, our teachers, our principals, our school resource officers are receiving extensive training and acting immediately on that."

"A gray area that could ... lead to a lot of litigation"

Blanton said school administrators are talking, especially after the Sedwick case, about what more they can do in terms of monitoring kids' social media but said that besides the logistics of keeping tabs on millions of students, there are big legal questions about a student's privacy rights.

"I think that's the biggest issue you're wrestling with when you start intercepting someone's messages," Blanton said. "Should I intercept your messages based on certain words? You're really getting into a gray area that could potentially lead to a lot of litigation."

Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, the school superintendents association, said it's "not always clear" legally what can be done and what is within the scope of the district's authority.

"In one state, the court will support the district and say, 'absolutely, you have the right to do that.' In a very similar situation in another court, the court will rule 'absolutely not, it's freedom of speech,' " Domenech said. "So the whole legal issue right now is very much up in the air."

Cases in point: In September 2013 in Nevada, a federal appeals court backed school officials in the suspension of a high school student who allegedly threatened his classmates with violence on Myspace. But in Indiana in 2011, a court found that school officials had violated students' free speech rights when two girls were suspended from extracurricular activities for posting pictures of themselves with phallic-shaped lollipops.

And, in March 2014, a Minnesota student was awarded a $70,000 settlement after her school district forced her to turn over passwords for her Facebook and email accounts, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota. As part of the settlement, the school district has agreed to change its policies to better protect students' rights.

"I think the best guideline we can give school districts is to always go back to the issue of the safety of the students uppermost," Domenech said. "If the safety of a student's involved and you are not necessarily sure whether the district has the authority to do it or not, well, you know what, go out on a limb at that point, because if you are talking about saving a student's life then you'd rather be safe than sorry."

Balancing safety with not "recording their every move"

John Palfrey Jr., head of the boarding school Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, said he and his colleagues try to strike a balance between ensuring students' safety and not having them feel "like we are recording their every move."

If a student follows him on Twitter, he will follow them back, but on Facebook, teachers don't accept friend requests from students or extend them, and they don't "go hunting around" to see what students are saying on the social networking platform.

"We see certain spaces that they're communicating with their friends as akin to what they might be saying ... behind closed doors in a dorm room and I think that's a place where we, as administrators, don't belong," said Palfrey.

Public largely critical of school monitoring

How much to monitor students' social media is not just an issue fraught with logistical and legal challenges. There is also the court of public opinion, which leans heavily to the "schools are overreaching" side of the equation, according to comments we received on CNN's Facebook page.

"Schools need to respect boundaries and the First Amendment," Tom Gayda, who is director of student publications for an Indianapolis high school, wrote in an e-mail.

"Kids needs to be free to say (something) without feeling like the school is watching them 24/7," Gayda later said in an interview. "My concern is if a kid goes home and writes 'the school lunch sucks,' and the next day they're brought in and in trouble for complaining about school food."

But Lauren, a 20-year-old college student who only wanted to use her first name, believes that schools should be monitoring social media content posted by students because many times, she said, parents aren't aware of what their children are up to.

"I recently found my 13-year-old sister's Tumblr with the title 'Depressed but well dressed,' " Lauren said. "It immediately made me take action, let my parents know and make sure she got the help she needed.

"Had the situation been any different, the outcome might have been tragic," she said. "I support this measure and believe more schools should follow."

Social media monitoring: Wave of the future?

Domenech, who represents public school superintendents, said that at this stage, he thinks only a "very small number" of districts are actively monitoring students online, primarily because they don't have the staffing or the money to hire a firm to help.

Instead of more schools trying to follow the Huntsville, Alabama or Glendale, California district's lead, Blanton of the Florida School Boards Association believes schools should mount a major public relations campaign targeting students and parents, letting them know it's OK to report anything of concern they see online.

He compares it to an ad campaign in Florida from about 15 years ago encouraging students to report any weapons they see on campus. Now, 90% of guns found on school premisesin the stateare reported by students, he said.

"We have to get to the same point with when you see a student (or) another student sees a student being bullied, or a parent knows about a Facebook account, they have to let us know," Blanton said.

In the end, prevention is better than high-tech surveillance, said Domenech.

"I think most school districts don't want to become NSAs," he said. "We don't see that that is really our role."

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schools step up social media probe of students  - cnn

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Schools step up social media probe of students - CNN

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Just as parents are grappling with how to keep their kids safe on social media, schools are increasingly confronting a controversial question: Should they do more to monitor students' online interactions off-campus to protect them from dangers such as bullying, drug use, violence and suicide?