North State Journal: “In March of this year, Wake County Public Schools (WCPSS) was one of the first districts in North Carolina to begin using an app that monitors student email accounts to identify and flag “inappropriate words and images” with the purpose to “alert school officials immediately if there is an imminent threat to a student.”
According to the Gaggle website, 440,000 students across 67 of the state’s 115 districts are being monitored by the program. The website also boasts that it flagged 23,000 student safety incidents for district officials, that four in 10 incidents reported were for self-harm or suicide, and that “113 student lives were saved.”
“Gaggle will monitor students’ Google Drive and Outlook Email for concerns around self-harm and suicide, harassment, drugs and alcohol, violence towards others, nudity and sexual content,” according to WCPSS communications on the program.
At the onset of the 2021-22 school year, WCPSS handed out Google Chromebooks to every student in the district. That means around 157,673 students are being monitored using Gaggle.”