The “so-called” School Safety bill is now on its way to the Governor. Students, teachers and parents across the state have pleaded with the Legislature not to arm teachers. The call went unheeded. While the prospect of guns in classrooms is alarming, the bill also has other harmful policies. Instead of focusing on increasing school-based mental health services and programming focused on building healthy school climates where students feel safe to learn, the bill increases school policing and erodes student privacy rights.

The Good: Refined Mental Health Services

In line with the ACLU, advocates and youth justice organizations’ call for increased investment in school-based mental health providers to bolster safe school climates, the Florida Legislature required school districts to develop a plan to spend state school mental health dollars on:

• Employing school-based mental health providers (school counselors, psychologists, social workers, etc.) in numbers that better align with nationally recommended ratios. No Florida school district currently meets these recommendations and many students attend schools with police or armed staff, but no counselor.
• Increasing the time school-based mental health providers spend on direct services to students. Many schools rely on school counselors, social workers and even psychologists to do administrative tasks, test proctoring and supervision, such as bus or lunch duty.
• Ensuring at-risk students receive assessments, screenings and services within 15 days of referral and support from community providers within 30 days of referral.
• Employing strategies and programs that reduce the risk of students developing social, emotional and behavioral health problems.
• Improving early identification and treatment of social, emotional and behavioral health problems and improving assistance to students dealing with trauma or violence.

Unfortunately, the budget illustrates where the Legislature's priorities truely lie: the Mental Health Assistance Allocation to local school districts was increased by 8% to a total of $75 million, or $26.47 per student. To contrast, the Safe Schools Allocation, which funds school police and school security provisions, was increased 11% to $180 million, or $63.53 per student, not including the $500,000 available to train and arm school guardians or the $50 million available for building security.

ADVOCATE: Get involved with your school board to monitor how this is being implemented locally. You can find your district’s mental health plan here.

The Bad: Student Privacy on the Chopping Block

This year’s legislation furthers the trend of infringing on privacy rights in the name of security. Last year, Florida established the first statewide centralized student data repository - one database with all of the information about each youth held by the state and local departments of child welfare, education, juvenile justice and law enforcement. Many of these records are supposed to be confidential. Law enforcement generally needs warrants to gain access to such records, but policymakers, educators and law enforcement are pushing to maximize access.

• This year’s legislation creates a taskforce to study adding a Threat Assessment Database to the centralized student database. Threat Assessments are best used to distinguish actual threats from normal adolescent venting, sarcasm and jokes. Given the wide net cast to ensure threats do not go undetected and that youth of color and youth with disabilities are more likely to be seen as threats, it is inappropriate and harmful to use threat assessments to label or track students. This is further evidenced by the fact that the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Commission recommended that every student with an individualized education plan for severe behavioral issues undergo a threat assessment. We cannot repeat the consequences of indiscriminately labeling kids that have plagued school discipline and juvenile justice. Such labels strip young people of any benefit of the doubt and forever alter their identity.
• Currently, there are no legal restrictions on the length of time student data can be maintained in the system.
• Information systems are notorious targets for hackers and a system such as this will provide a lucrative trove of information. Connecting different systems in order to share data creates more access points for hackers, leaving student’s confidential and private information vulnerable to the public.
• Systems of this magnitude, that require integration of data collected by different entities for different purposes, are enormously expensive.
• Although we were successful in pushing against a law requiring a statewide social media surveillance tool, the DOE is poised to create one. It will be up to local school districts whether and how they use it.

ADVOCATE:

• Contact the Commissioner of Education and the Office of Safe Schools to push for restrictions on the length of time data will be kept and to whom access will be given.
• Get involved with your local School Board to ensure they are prioritizing student privacy.

The Ugly: Expanded Zero Tolerance Policies

Despite the evidence that discipline reforms had nothing to do with the Parkland tragedy and were combatting the school-to-prison pipeline, the Florida Legislature expanded the zero-tolerance law, which requires certain offenses at schools be reported to law enforcement.

• Under the previous law, which was clarified after students were arrested for gun-shaped pop tarts and science experiments, it was clear that normal youth behavior like fights, petty theft and petty vandalism did not have to be referred to law enforcement. The Legislature removed that clarity, expanding the statute to cover petty acts of misconduct.

ADVOCATE: Get involved with your school board to ensure local zero tolerance policies are not expanded to the detriment of school safety. Request the district’s memorandum(s) of understanding with local law enforcement, discipline code and matrix.

“Safe School Officers”

The law continues to require that every school have a “safe school officer,” but the legislation, beyond allowing that person to be a teacher, allows the school to hire or contract a security guard.

From the evidence on guns in homes and the experience of the last year, we can expect that guns around children will lead to guns being used on and around children. In Florida alone, we have seen a School Guardian in line to be a School Resource Officer murder his family and die by suicide outside a school and a School Resource Officer accidentally discharge his gun in a middle school lunchroom. Stories continue to roll in across the country highlighting the risk guns in schools present in even the most trained, well-intentioned hands. We also know from research on police-involved shootings and implicit bias in schools that the risk for Black students will be even greater.

Despite often being characterized as different from general police, the law requires no special training for police officers to serve as school resource officers. From decades of research and evidence, we know police stationed in schools will arrest students. We know these students will be disproportionately Black and Brown, have disabilities and/or be LGB and gender nonconforming. We also know that police will use force on our kids that we’d never accept from teachers or even parents, including tasers and pepper spray.

Therefore, until this law is changed, schools’ best option for compliance that puts student safety and wellbeing first seems to be employing guards to secure the perimeter of campus.

Visit our School Safety Advocacy Toolkit for more resources to advocate for safe schools in your community.

The outcome of a battle heating up at Google over the limits of employee free speech will have huge consequences for all of us. Will Google shut down internal dissent and silence whistleblowers? Or will the company live up to its initial motto, “Don’t be evil?”

In 2017, researchers Meredith Whittaker and Kate Crawford founded the AI Now Institute at New York University, with the goal of “produc[ing] interdisciplinary research on the social implications of artificial intelligence [in] four key domains: rights and liberties, labor and automation, bias and inclusion, and safety and critical infrastructure.” Since then, the group has published key research on race and gender discrimination in AI, public agency accountability, litigation related to algorithms, and more. (Full disclosure: The ACLU is a proud partner of AI Now.)

Both Whittaker and Crawford have strong ties to the tech industry. The former is the founder of Google’s Open Research Group, and the latter is a principal researcher at Microsoft. Both women still work for these companies, even though their work at AI Now often critiques the tech industry’s shortcomings and offers a perspective rooted in human and civil rights, instead of profit maximization — an unorthodox perspective in the Valley, to put it mildly.

For years, I’ve been impressed that Whittaker and Crawford could simultaneously work for and offer public critiques of these big tech companies and took that as an indication that Google and Microsoft are mature, if problematic, institutions. A willingness to tolerate internal dissent is important in any organization. Fostering such an environment is especially critical for companies like Google and Microsoft in the United States, where lawmakers have largely refused to impose regulations, leaving a dangerous amount of power in the hands of an elite — and often obsessively secretive — few in Silicon Valley.

But recent events suggest that at least at Google, executive patience with democratic debate and a culture of openness is wearing thin. According to press reports, Google has in recent months retaliated against both Whittaker and a fellow activist at the company, Claire Stapleton, after their successful organizing led to policy change at the nearly trillion dollar company.

In October 2018, The New York Times reported that Google had provided handsome exit packages to executives credibly accused of sexual harassment and assault in the workplace. The former head of the Android group, Andy Rubin, was paid $90 million to leave the company after he was accused of sexual wrongdoing. Google subsequently invested millions of dollars in a company controlled by Mr. Rubin. Then, in March of this year, the Times published yet more evidence that Google sought to protect powerful men accused of sexual malfeasance. The latest report showed that in 2016, Google paid executive Amit Singhal $45 million when he left the firm after an employee accused him of groping her at a work event.

But while Google provided golden parachutes to executives accused of sexual harassment and assault, the company simultaneously forced the victims of those incidents to take their complaints against the company through arbitration, denying them their day in court.

Googlers, led by activists like Whittaker and Stapleton, rebelled. In November 2018, 20,000 Googlers worldwide walked off the job, demanding the forced arbitration policy be repealed. The protest, joined by one in five Google employees worldwide, attracted global press and was devastatingly effective. Within days, the company announced it would eliminate the forced arbitration policy for people who spoke out about sexual harassment in the workplace. In February, facing further demands from workers, Google scrapped its forced arbitration clause entirely.

Whittaker’s organizing at the company hasn’t been limited to fighting for changes to the internal policy governing employee rights. She has been unapologetic in her defense of democratic values and has challenged Google’s work with the U.S. military and Chinese government. More recently, she was part of a group of concerned Googlers who protested the appointment of a transphobic reactionary from the Heritage Foundation to an external advisory board tasked with examining questions related to AI and ethics. That board was subsequently dissolved.

Now, Whittaker says, she’s facing retaliation from the company for her efforts to make Google a more accountable, equitable, and democratic institution. According to a letter she sent to co-workers, executives recently told her she would be forced to choose between her work with AI Now and her employment at the company. Claire Stapleton, one of the organizers of the anti-arbitration walkout, says she too has faced retaliation for her organizing, which included a demotion — only reversed when she hired a lawyer.

Google denies it retaliated against either employee. But last Friday, Whittaker and Stapleton organized a group of hundreds of Googlers to engage in a company-wide meeting about retaliation workers have faced across the world. According to them, over 300 people submitted their own testimonies that Google leadership has retaliated against them for their organizing. And Google employees are holding a sit-in tomorrow to protest retaliation they say employee organizers have faced.

In AI Now’s 2018 annual report, Whittaker and her colleagues wrote about the important role whistleblowers play at institutions like Google:

Technology companies should provide protections for conscientious objectors, employee organizing, and ethical whistleblowers. Organizing and resistance by technology workers has emerged as a force for accountability and ethical decision making. Technology companies need to protect workers’ ability to organize, whistleblow, and make ethical choices about what projects they work on. This should include clear policies accommodating and protecting conscientious objectors, ensuring workers the right to know what they are working on, and the ability to abstain from such work without retaliation or retribution. Workers raising ethical concerns must also be protected, as should whistleblowing in the public interest.

As Whittaker and her activist colleagues have demonstrated over the past few years, the world is watching Google and other big tech companies. The decisions these companies make about product design, political lobbying, and which technologies they’ll build and sell to which types of governments impact all of us and future generations. That’s why retaliating against Big Tech employees who push their employers to do the right thing isn’t just a threat to the individual livelihoods of those workers — it’s a threat to us all.

Kade Crockford, Director, ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project