LYNN — An early warning alert system, aimed at alerting school officials to threats posted publicly on social media, will soon be implemented in the Lynn Public Schools.
The School Committee approved hiring Social Sentinel at a cost of $18,500 annually to the district in a 5 to 2 vote last week.
Committee members Jared Nicholson and Michael Satterwhite both voted against the measure, saying they would rather see a policy in place first on how to address threats detected.
Dennis Collins, regional vice president of Social Sentinel, Inc., said the service is a social media threat strategy that gives school districts the opportunity to get insight into potential threats of someone harming themselves or others through a post shared publicly on social media.
By detecting the threat made publicly online, he said school districts are given the opportunity to act in a proactive manner. He said the service is not meant to monitor users or activity, but rather searches for language of harm. For instance, certain keywords may trigger an alert.
In each school district, Collins said some keywords pertaining to specific districts, such as names of school buildings, mascots or police officers, may be added to the keywords that could trigger an alert.
“We do not and cannot search for individuals or groups, but we search for language of harm and we associate that with that particular school district to give you the opportunity to alert you in time to prevent something bad from happening,” Collins said. “We identify the threat and make an association to the particular community, according to the author’s activity and bio.”
The service incorporates social media networks such as Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, but doesn’t include Facebook and Snapchat because the information posted on individual accounts is usually not public, Collins said.
“This allows electronically, publicly posted things that anyone can look at any time if you have the opportunity to review it, and look at it as a potential threat,” said Mayor Thomas M. McGee, who serves as chairman of the School Committee. “It is not doing anything that is not publicly posted. It is that person deciding to put out in the public realm their information based on either a threat to themselves or others … If it’s not available publicly, it’s not available to us.”
Nicholson and Satterwhite said they were in favor of the service, but would have rather seen other, similar vendors engaged before choosing Social Sentinel, and a policy implemented, which would address scenarios such as discipline based on threats potentially detected.
“I personally feel like there are more answers I’d like us to have about choosing Sentinel among its competitors, about how we would implement it,” Nicholson said. “It feels a little bit to me like we are choosing a vendor and implementing it, versus making a policy decision about whether we want to do social monitoring, and then hiring a vendor, and I would prefer to do it the latter way.”
But Superintendent Dr. Patrick Tutwiler said the school district already has policies in place, such as the state’s anti-bullying law, that govern how officials behave when certain things happen, such as when a threat is detected.
Under the state’s anti-bullying law, Tutwiler said if someone made a threat to someone else, which made the recipient of that threat uncomfortable in school, the school would start a bullying investigation, but if the targeted person didn’t care, there would be no action from the school.
School Committee vice chair Donna Coppola said she was in favor of the service, but was concerned about whether the system would be constantly monitored, such as to detect a threat of self-harm on the weekend.
Lynn Police Officer Oren Wright, the school security and emergency planning liaison, who, along with school administrative officials, will be receiving threat alerts detected by the service, said he would be in charge of monitoring the system 24/7.
He reported being skeptical about Social Sentinel at first. But he said a nearby school district that uses the service reported having several saves, in terms of detecting students making threats of self-harm or relaying cries for help on social media.
“We’re lucky in the city we’re in — most of the school shootings happen in more rural areas, not to say it can’t happen here, (but) the issues of self-harm, I think, are equal,” Wright said. “If we’re helping kids with that and you never see a school shooting, it’s a win, if we help one person … It’s about being proactive to help these kids because we have a lot of sick kids in our city, in the LPS.”
Tutwiler also reported being skeptical about the service at first.
“But when I thought about the question — are we doing everything we can? When you apply that question to the service they offer, no we’re not. We’re exposed,” he said.
