A jaw-dropping statistic published last March in JAMA Open Network: One in 15 American adults has witnessed a mass shooting.
Fear of mass shootings drove American public schools to establish active-shooter drills after the 1999 Columbine massacre, when two high school seniors fatally shot 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves. Data released by the Department of Education showed that almost 96 percent of U.S. public schools drilled students at least once during the 2021-2022 school year on lockdown procedures. The drills have become sophisticated; some include the use of pellet guns and fake blood.
Justin Heinze, an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, told me in a recent interview that some states run active-shooter drills as many as four times per school year, even though there is no data available to prove they work. A study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2020 found that the majority of youth do not think such drills make schools safer, and suggested that drills do not prevent shootings.
In fact, this constant preparation carries risk. Repeated participation in disaster-preparedness simulations can rewire the brain, wrote Gary R. Simonds, a neurosurgeon who teaches at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Neuroscience, in Psychology Today. It builds up flight-or-fight and stress management centers in the brain but at the cost of weakening enjoyment centers. Simonds identified it as a pathway to burnout.
School teachers have the highest burnout rate of all occupations in the U.S., according to a 2022 Gallup poll. It feels wrong to subject them to drills that heighten stress but so far show no evidence of mitigating the threat. Heinze told me that teachers, who have internalized responsibility for their students, can find drills so stressful that some will not show up to school if they know a drill is happening. They also face the challenges of debriefing students after a drill and catching up for lost learning time. In their 2021 book “Dress Rehearsals for Gun Violence,” education professors Kjersti VanSlyke-Briggs and Elizabeth Bloom discuss the intense anxiety that falls on teachers when there is a false alarm.
Almost 96 percent of U.S. public schools drilled students at least once during the 2021-2022 school year on lockdown procedures.
However, another type of intervention offers ways to thwart violence in schools: social media monitoring. Schools do this by employing private companies to screen online posts for language that signals imminent violence. School districts in cities such as Glendale, California; Chicago, Illinois; and Wilmington, Delaware; and all the public schools in Florida are employing private companies such as Safer Schools Together and GoGuardian for these services.
Social media monitoring has produced measurable positive outcomes on student behavior and relieves teachers of bearing all of the weight of protecting their students. A 2019 report by the University of Chicago Crime Lab demonstrated that public schools that used social media surveillance to identify individuals needing targeted intervention had fewer misconduct incidents, fewer out-of-school suspensions, and higher rates of school attendance.
But can the technology identify potential shooters? In 2019, the Violence Project, a nonpartisan think tank, published a report that analyzed all mass shootings in the U.S. since 1966, and found that most elementary and high school shooters were suicidal men with a history of trauma who made others aware of their plans at some point before the shooting.
This finding proves relevant to a 2023 study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. The study tracked 62 million posts on Twitter (now called X) in Japan over a 10-year period to see if language suggestive of suicide aligned with actual suicidal behaviors. Results showed that social media data can serve as a valuable source of information for suicide prevention and intervention efforts. If social media monitoring data can be used to reliably identify and intervene in a suicidal crisis, then it has promise as a useful tool in preventing school mass shootings.
Recognizing the role played by bullying is also critical to school safety. Research published in January 2024 in the International Journal of Bullying Prevention showed that cyberbullying is significantly associated with all in-person types of violence, and therefore the prevention of it could curb school violence. In 2020, a paper in the Australasian Journal of Information Systems identified parental control and web-filtering software systems as a way to protect youth from unsolicited interactions online. Social media monitoring as a tool can encourage families to get more involved in the safety of their kids and absorb pressure outside of school systems.
Monitoring students’ social media does bring up legal concerns about the restriction of free speech and encroachment on privacy. But independent news organization Source New Mexico reported last year that all social media monitoring companies must adhere to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act as well as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule. The former protects student education records from third-party disclosure, and the latter allocates control to parents over what information online businesses can collect from children under age 13.
Public schools that used social media surveillance to identify individuals needing targeted intervention had fewer misconduct incidents, fewer out-of-school suspensions, and higher rates of school attendance.
Moreover, school district leaders are customizing the way they use flagged online information. In 2022, then-safety and security chief of Chicago Public Schools Jadine Chou told the news organization Chalkbeat that the school district would use trained people to review all flagged content. The individuals would have to be trained appropriately to prevent targeting of minority groups, which is another major concern. The district also created measurable goals in the monitoring company’s contract, which included decreasing suspensions and expulsions by 10 percent and decreasing student arrests by 5 percent, Chalkbeat reported.
When it comes to looking at the efficacy of social media monitoring, it is important to have realistic expectations. Social media has been around since the 1990s, but the first monitoring of school social media activity was in 2013, after a student’s suicide in the Glendale School District. It takes years — possibly close to two decades — for evidence to change health care practice and therefore quite a few school districts are still in the experimental realm of social media monitoring.
Therefore, skeptical educators and parents should not put up unnecessary walls to social media monitoring and its strengths. We need to be in the business of tearing walls down, not just for the sake of our children but for the generations to come.
If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org.
Julia Yarkoni is a family medicine physician based in Israel who writes on health and science topics that affect families. She was a fellow in Journalism and Health Impact at the Dalla Lana School for Public Health.