In loco parentis, or just plain loco: Surveilling Kansas students doesn’t make sense

Lawrence High School student journalists Natasha Torkzaban, left, and Maya Smith appear during an April 19, 2024, meeting about the Gaggle spyware program. Current and former students are now suing the district. (Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

Last month, current and former high school students in Lawrence filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that the school district’s use of Gaggle, a self-styled “safety management tool” that enrollees must put on their devices as a prerequisite to attend class, violated the students’ rights to free expression and due process.

Gaggle claims its software helps schools “proactively identify and support struggling students — before it’s too late.” Further, according to the district’s website, although the task of “proactively identifying” problems involves Gaggle scanning “students’ district-issued accounts for harmful content,” the process is not overly invasive in part because the software “cannot and does not monitor personal devices or any personal accounts.”

But the student plaintiffs disagree, claiming that Gaggle has “flagged email communications accessed via personal devices, including messages sent from personal phones through school-issued Gmail accounts.”  Thus, according to the plaintiffs, Gaggle “subject(s) all students to round-the-clock digital surveillance” and “suspicionless searches and seizures of student expression on a scale and scope that no court has ever upheld — and that the Constitution does not permit.”

The outcome of the case will depend largely on whether the district can show that implementing software designed to monitor students the way it did was closely related enough to an important government interest — namely, student safety — to justify Gaggle’s intrusion into the students’ lives.

But with the plaintiffs on the record that they are seeking to “set a national precedent” with this lawsuit, it may be awhile before the legal issues at play are resolved.

In the meantime, it’s worth noting the variety of allegations contained in the lawsuit that the use of Gaggle was nonsensical, and in turn, violated the students’ rights. If those allegations bear out as the case progresses, it will become correspondingly more difficult for the district to show that its use of Gaggle complied with the Constitution.

I was struck by three instances that seemed particularly arbitrary and counter to any notion that Gaggle advances student safety.

First, when student journalists at Lawrence High School began to realize in the spring of 2024 that Gaggle was quarantining some of the work they had prepared for publication in the student newspaper, the Budget, they devised a plan to test the extent of the software’s reach. One of them, former student Natasha Torkzaban, who is one of the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the district, sent an email to the then-faculty advisor for the Budget in which she wrote that she was “worried about her mental health.”

Although the Torkzaban was not in fact worried about her mental state when she wrote that email, the lawsuit alleges that the faculty advisor “never received Torkzaban’s email because, on information and belief, it was flagged and seized by Gaggle and the District pursuant to the surveillance program.”

It will be interesting to learn the district’s explanation for how any important government interest is served by flagging emails about nonexistent mental health issues.

Second, as Kansas Reflector columnist Eric Thomas pointed out, Gaggle intercepted the district’s own response to an open records request for records related to Gaggle that Suzana Kennedy, a former student journalist at LHS and another of the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, made in the fall of 2024.  As the weeks dragged on without a response from the district, Kennedy learned, as set forth in the lawsuit, that unknown to the district “Gaggle is preventing (Kennedy) from receiving” emails containing records responsive to the KORA “because of the nature of the words in the data (Kennedy) requested.”

In other words, Gaggle swung into action to censor student expression that had no bearing whatsoever on student safety, without the district’s knowledge or express say-so. In so doing, Gaggle prevented public disclosure of crucial information about the system itself for weeks if not months. Rather than promote any important government interest, Gaggle actively thwarted the district itself from timely compliance with state law that would have shed light on the software’s functionality.

Finally, the plaintiffs allege in their complaint that “as recently as April 2025, a student’s email to his parents was seized by Gaggle.”

The subsequent sentence in that document is perhaps its most undeniable: “Neither the District nor the Board have articulated any government interest that would ever be served by seizing and blocking communications between students and their parents.”

The three instances described here may be rather innocuous in comparison to the most explosive allegations in the lawsuit. But they starkly illustrate the district’s commitment to implement Gaggle whether student safety was at risk or not.

That doesn’t make sense.

Max Kautsch focuses his practice on First Amendment rights and open government law. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.