SAN ANTONIO — Northside ISD is working on activating a new system that monitors students’ activity while logged onto school computers in an effort to identify potentially threatening behavior.
“The goal is simply to keep students and our schools safe or safer,” said Barry Perez, NISD executive communications director.
The Bark program is a digital safety net linked to school-assigned Google accounts with the capability of monitoring various social activities, including chat features, Gmail and Google Drive.
Perez said the school is not using Bark to surveil students’ personal email or social media accounts.
The Bark website notes the system can be set to detect varying levels of red flag-behavior. The triggers are then automatically sent to school district staff on campus or NISD police who are able to investigate the situation.
“It looks for any triggers that might indicate self-harm, it might indicate a threatening text, threatening comments, threatening language, sexual content,” Perez said.
NISD first tested out Bark last school year at five middle school campuses, which Perez said proved beneficial across the board.
“I think what we found from the pilot was the monitoring that we were able to get (and) the reports that were made allowed us to respond in situations, where that might be a student who had exhibited some language or some communication that was indicative of potential self-harm in some cases or perhaps cyber bullying or perhaps threatening comments that needed some investigation,” Perez said. “In most cases, those things necessarily weren’t true, would not come to fruition, but we don’t want to take that chance. Any time any communication is of a threatening or of a concerning nature, we want to make sure that we have staff on it that can address it and can follow up appropriately.”
The Bark system will not be ready at all campuses on the first day of school Aug. 22. Parents will be notified when the monitoring program is operational at their child’s school.
To learn about other ways NISD is addressing school safety and security, go here.