Glendale schools' social media monitoring
Two Crescenta Valley High School students add touchups to an image on their monitor. The Glendale Unified school board hired a company to monitor students' public posts on social networks, sparking mixed response from students. (Glendale News Press )
August 28, 2013, 4:26 p.m.
Glendale school officials have hired a company to monitor and analyze students' public social media posts, saying it will help them step in when students are in danger of harming themselves or others.
After collecting information from students' posts on such sites as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, the Hermosa Beach company, Geo Listening, will provide Glendale school officials with a daily report, the Glendale News-Press reported this week.
The report will categorize posts by their frequency and how they relate to cyber-bullying, harm, hate, despair, substance abuse, vandalism and truancy, according to the newspaper.
Glendale Unified, which piloted the service at Hoover, Glendale and Crescenta Valley high schools last year, will pay the company $40,500 to monitor posts made by about 13,000 middle school and high school students at eight Glendale schools.
According to a district report, Geo Listening gives school officials "critical information as early as possible," allowing school employees "to disrupt negative pathways and make any intervention more effective."
Glendale Unified Supt. Dick Sheehan said the service gives the district another opportunity to "go