School AI technology monitoring software can trigger false flags and unwarranted disciplinary charges against innocent students. It’s happening all over the country, as schools adopt sophisticated artificial-intelligence systems to monitor student use of school computers, personal devices, and social media, to alert school officials to bullying and other issues. Don’t let your student suffer unwarranted school discipline because of the errors and intrusions of a rogue AI technology and the sloppiness of school disciplinary officials. Let us help you monitor the monitors. Retain the LLF National Law Firm’s Student Defense Team now to defend your K-12 student against school disciplinary charges that could result in school suspension, expulsion, and referral for alternative disciplinary boot camp placement. Call 888.535.3686 or use our contact form now for highly qualified representation and your minor student’s best outcome. Keep your minor student on track with a clean school record.

School Anti-Bullying Obligations

In your dispute with your minor student’s school over the school’s AI flagging of your student’s electronic communications, you should first understand the school’s need to implement appropriate anti-bullying measures. States across the nation have adopted anti-bullying legislation since the widespread publicity over several notorious bullying instances, including instances involving the serious injury, death, or suicide of K-12 school students. The state anti-bullying laws take a similar shape, requiring schools to adopt anti-bullying policies, promptly investigate bullying allegations, notify the parents of both the alleged bullying victim and perpetrator students, and take responsible action to protect against bullying, including removing dangerous students and making juvenile referrals. Those state anti-bullying laws include the following examples:

Your state education laws will very likely include a similar provision. While your minor student may not have committed any bullying whatsoever, and your student’s school officials may be acting arbitrarily and capriciously in pursuing your student’s discipline based on AI bullying flagging, keeping the school’s anti-bullying obligations in mind can help to defuse and defend the charges. Let our attorneys put their strategic skills and substantial experience to work for your minor student.

Cyber-Bullying as a Special School Concern

You would also do well to keep in mind school officials’ common concern to address and prevent electronic or digital bullying, commonly known as cyberbullying. It may at first seem strange to you that schools, or students for that matter, would take threatening or disturbing electronic messages so seriously as to issue disciplinary charges over them. After all, sticks and stones may break bones, but do words ever hurt one? The answer, though, is clearly yes, electronic messages can deeply disturb, distract, and harm students, whether or not that surprising potential for serious harm is a sad commentary on our digital society. According to the federal government’s anti-bullying website, all states now have anti-bullying laws, while a research site indicates that all but three states now have anti-cyberbullying laws. In your student’s defense, we may be able to make much of the fact that the only alleged bullying conduct was at a distance, in solely electronic form, leaving no possibility for direct physical violence, trauma, and harm. But cyberbullying remains a concern for its mental and emotional effects, and for the implications of physical threats when students meet in person.

The Definition of Cyberbullying

Definitions of cyberbullying can vary from state to state in their particulars. Let us help you confirm your state’s definition of cyberbullying. The federal government’s anti-bullying website construes a general definition of cyberbullying from the state definition of “bullying that takes place over digital devices like cell phones, computers, and tablets.” The core of cyberbullying is for a student to share negative, harmful, false, demeaning, embarrassing, or humiliating electronic messages about another student. Cyberbullying in its technical, legal sense generally involves student-on-student harm of an intentional, deliberate, or reckless kind. One does not mistakenly commit cyberbullying. Schools also have no direct concern when others who have no school connection engage in cyberbullying of one another. School responsibilities begin and end with protecting students, not members of the public. We may, in your student’s defense, be able to argue that the alleged conduct did not affect school students or the school community, or interfere with any student’s enjoyment of a safe and secure instructional environment.

Cyberbullying Technology

According to the same federal government source, students can commit cyberbullying through instant messaging, direct messaging, texts, social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, discussion forums, message boards like Reddit, or gaming forums. Students may use school computers, laptop computers, tablets, or other similar communication devices for cyberbullying, or they may use personal computers, tablets, or cell phones. The device students use for cyberbullying may be less important to the outcome of disciplinary charges than the content of the message and the message’s relationship to school activities. We may still be able to raise as a defense that your student did not access any school technology when transmitting the disputed messages.

Cyberbullying Locations

The location of the students involved in the alleged cyberbullying may also be only a relatively minor factor. Students can cyberbully one another using technology at a distance, from any school, home, or other location. Whatever passed between the students continues to affect their relationship when they once again convene and meet at school. However, we may also be able to use the fact that your student did not initiate the disputed electronic communications from school or during school hours, but instead from remote locations, keeping the school campus free from the initiation of any cyberbullying activity. Trust our attorneys to make the most of your student’s cyberbullying defense.

The Advent of AI Monitoring Software

Students nationwide suddenly faced substantial additional risk of cyberbullying disciplinary charges, with the advent of artificial-intelligence (AI) monitoring software. Technology companies recently introduced Gaggle, GoGuardian, Security, and other school monitoring software, specifically to address anti-cyberbullying obligations, while also alerting school officials to other concerns over self-harm, violence, and technology misuses. These school technology monitoring systems patrol the school’s networks, devices, and accounts, flagging language or images that raise potential bullying, intimidation, and harassment concerns. These software systems may also monitor the internet generally or social media applications specifically, for mentions of the school or its students, personnel, or programs that may in some way be defamatory, oppressive, or harmful. Anyone can Google search for internet information. AI school monitoring software implements continual searches to compile, organize, and present to school officials potential cyberbullying involving harmful, demeaning, or offensive exchanges between students.

School Officials Using AI Monitoring Software

K-12 schools assign the use of AI monitoring software to various school personnel, depending on the school’s size, sophistication, and administrative organization. In a smaller school setting, the principal, school leader, or other highest-ranking administrator over the school may handle the monitoring, as one of many other duties. Monitoring may mean glancing at the system’s readout periodically through the day, once a day at day’s end, or on another periodic basis. In a larger school setting, an assistant principal, dean of students, or director responsible for student discipline may conduct the AI monitoring, which may go on more or less continually, while the same official performs student investigations, counseling, and other similar student-conduct duties. In an even larger district, AI monitoring of student cyberbullying may fall to a technology director or a lower-level technology team member who has no direct student contact. The school official who monitors the AI software may be important to the outcome of your student’s disciplinary matter. Our attorneys know how to evaluate the role and responsibility of those officials for your student’s best disciplinary outcome.

AI Monitoring Software Forensics

From the above discussion, you can imagine just how complex the operations of an AI monitoring system may be. Yet the outcome of your student’s disciplinary matter may depend on a close and clear understanding of that system’s operation. Our attorneys thus have forensic computer consultants available to them to investigate, examine, and testify or attest to the system’s proper and improper use and operation. We will likely, in other words, know the ins and outs of the school’s AI monitoring software better than anyone at the school. Our effective attorney representation requires our superior skill and knowledge, including knowing the AI software’s peculiar operations. Our forensic consultants have the education, training, and experience to act as consulting and testifying experts in school discipline cases involving AI systems. Trust our attorneys to bring the right resources to bear in your student’s defense. Your student’s educational interests and vocational or professional future are worth a skilled and sophisticated defense.

AI Monitoring Software Errors

AI school monitoring software is like other electronic technologies: it has vast theoretical promise to simplify and improve school operations, while it often instead does the opposite, complicating and detracting from school operations through unforeseen costs and errors. AI school monitoring software tends to introduce problems, complications, errors, and issues in the following areas, any one or more of which could affect our defense of your student’s disciplinary matter involving alleged cyberbullying. The following discussion draws on the study and assessment of AI school monitoring software by the Federation of American Scientists and other monitoring organizations.

Invasion of Student Privacy

A first serious concern over AI school monitoring software is the potential for serious invasions of privacy. Students do not give up every bit of their privacy simply because they are enrolled in a K-12 school program. Students retain reasonable expectations of privacy both at home and in certain school settings, particularly around private places like backpacks, purses or handbags, lockers, restrooms, and locker rooms. The same can be true for student communications. Students certainly have reasonable expectations of privacy when communicating in person or electronically with parents and other relatives, but also with medical care providers, counselors, religious advisors, and mentors. Yet students can also have intensely private communications with other students as they learn about themselves, their social, physical, and emotional development, their relationships, and their place and responsibilities in the world. Without privacy, students have no room to share and thus to learn from others and to grow. When school officials secretly deploy AI school monitoring software potentially reaching all manner of student electronic communications with many different individuals in different roles, they can grossly invade privacy and seriously harm students. Our attorneys know how to bring those harms and potential harms forward in defense of your student’s disciplinary charges.

False Flag Errors: Misidentifying Innocent Matters

A second serious concern with AI school monitoring software is its propensity to create false flags over innocent student communications, dragging unsuspecting students needlessly into damaging and distracting disciplinary matters. Artificial intelligence isn’t intelligent. Rather, it’s only artificial. Yes, certain words, particularly those having to do with violence, threats of violence, profanity, sex, drugs, alcohol, gangs, and criminal behavior, can appear more frequently in cyberbullying messages than in common discourse. But words draw their meaning from their context. In interpreting words, their context is everything. Indeed, common and perfectly acceptable expressions often draw on exaggeration for their humor and meaning, such as I’d kill for a cold slushy, expressed humorously between friends on an especially hot day. Individuals of all ages also use inside jokes, even ribald parodies, to draw closer to others and learn about themselves and their relationships. AI school monitoring software won’t know the students, their relationships, or their peculiar and swiftly changing expressions, where good can mean bad, cool can mean hot, and all kinds of other anomalies. Our attorneys know how to investigate and prove the context of student expressions to show their innocence regarding cyberbullying intentions. Keep in mind that cyberbullying is generally a guilty intent wrong, meaning a wrong in which the perpetrator student must desire the victim student’s harm or be reckless as to that obvious harm.

Illusion of Independence, Objectivity, and Certitude

A third concern over AI school monitoring software is that it creates a misleading illusion of independence, objectivity, and certainty over the nature, content, meaning, and intent of the disputed electronic messages. In that sense, the AI school monitoring evidence is like video evidence, which school officials can mistake as being incontestable, when, to the contrary, video evidence also often requires appropriate context and interpretation. One must know what happens just offscreen, including the relationship between the depicted individuals. The same is true of electronic messages. One must know what has happened outside of the message, including the relationship and intentions of the involved students. Yet busy school officials may just point to the AI school monitoring flagging, while refusing to listen to reasonable explanations. Every professional using electronic systems, from physicians to engineers, prosecutors, and pilots, has the same problem of over-relying on electronic systems when the systems are incomplete and imperfect representations of a fuller reality. Our attorneys know how to pierce the illusion of certitude that AI school monitoring systems can create, to prevail in defense of unwarranted cyberbullying charges.

Discouraging Independent Investigation

Another concern over AI school monitoring systems is that they discourage school officials from making independent and complete investigations in disciplinary matters. School disciplinary investigations can take substantial time and effort to properly complete, when school disciplinarians often have substantial duties and little extra investigation time. To school officials, disciplinary matters always arise at the most inopportune times. Thus, when they have the AI monitoring system report and electronic information, they may just rely on that tip of the proverbial iceberg, forgoing any further investigation. School officials may refuse not only to listen to your student but even to listen to the putative victim or other witnesses who would explain the full circumstances exonerating your student. School officials may simply continue to point to the electronic message and its printout, as if to say, There it is, in black and white. Our attorneys know how to alert school disciplinary officials to their due process obligations and to bring to the attention of hearing officials the shortcomings of an incomplete investigation. We can also do our own complete investigation, using the results to prove your student’s innocence at a formal hearing as necessary.

Lack of Student and Parent Awareness and Consent

Yet another problem with AI school monitoring software is that schools often deploy it without notice to students and parents, and without parent or student consent. School officials may claim their statutory and regulatory duty to prevent cyberbullying as the basis for their secret deployment of AI monitoring software. They may have considered but refused to provide parental notice and seek parental consent. Yet notice and consent are hallmarks of trust in any relationship, including school relationships. School officials who secretly review the text messages, emails, social media posts, and chat discussions of students can badly undermine trust. They can even appear to be cyber-stalking and potentially criminally or civilly unlawfully invading students’ federal and state electronic privacy rights. Our attorneys know how to bring those concerns forward in defense of your student’s cyberbullying charges. If the involved school disciplinary officials do not show appropriate sensitivity toward their invasive wrongs, we may be able to gain better relief from the school district’s general counsel or other oversight officials.

Discriminatory Application

Another potential problem with AI school monitoring software is that it can subtly invite and encourage school officials to act on pre-existing biases or prejudice against certain students or students of certain classes and characteristics. The American Federation of Scientists survey cited above cites evidence that students with disabilities, in particular, can suffer disproportionate discipline or other harms from school monitoring activities. Students with disabilities may, for instance, be less willing to express themselves thoughtfully and fully online or make innocent misuses of condemned expressions when affected by emotional or other cognitive disabilities. Discrete, disadvantaged student populations may also have peculiar expressions, innocent among them but appearing anything but innocent to school disciplinary officials. Our attorneys know how to identify bias and prejudice in the misuse of AI school monitoring software, in defense of cyberbullying charges.

Lack of Empirically Established Value

A final problem with AI school monitoring systems, again pointed out by the above-cited American Federation of Scientists research survey, is that no clear empirical evidence strongly supports their use. AI school monitoring software systems may not even work as intended to reduce cyberbullying, student suicide, and similar harms. If they do work to some extent, their harms in terms of false flag errors and unwarranted disciplinary charges may substantially outweigh their modest merits. AI school monitoring software also has direct and hidden costs, like the loss of trust and privacy, as well as the cost of implementation and administrator monitoring time. Our attorneys know how to bring these issues forward in defense of your student’s cyberbullying charges.

School Student Conduct Codes

K-12 schools across the nation regulate student behavior through their student codes of conduct, appearing in school or district handbooks and school or district policies. Student conduct codes not only define the student’s wrongs, such as bullying, intimidation, harassment, violence, property damage, and trespass. Student conduct codes also define the punishments for those wrongs, routinely including school suspension, expulsion, and transfer to an alternative disciplinary school. Student conduct codes also define the procedures school officials must follow to impose discipline. The outcome of your student’s cyberbullying disciplinary charges may depend on the interpretation and application of your student’s school conduct code. See, for example, the Student Code of Conduct for the Dallas (TX) Independent School District, prohibiting a long list of student wrongs including school bullying.

Cyberbullying Provisions in School Conduct Codes

Many school conduct codes expressly include cyberbullying in their long list of prohibited behaviors. The Dallas Independent School District Student Code of Conduct, just cited above, is an example, stating, “The District prohibits bullying, including cyberbullying” before going on to define bullying and its potentially aggravating, discriminatory circumstances. However, not every school’s conduct code will expressly prohibit cyberbullying. After all, anti-bullying measures have been around for two decades or more, while anti-cyberbullying measures are still relatively new for many schools and districts. The outcome of your student’s cyberbullying disciplinary charges may depend in small or large part on whether the school includes an express cyberbullying prohibition in its student conduct code. If the code does not include the provision, school officials may try to imply one from other terms and conditions. However, our attorneys know how to interpret and apply student conduct codes and their terms regarding bullying and cyberbullying for the best defense effect. Get our help, and trust us with your minor student’s defense.

K-12 School Disciplinary Procedures

The school’s disciplinary procedures also matter to the outcome of your minor student’s K-12 school cyberbullying charges, based on AI school monitoring software. Public schools generally owe students constitutional due process, meaning fair notice and a fair hearing before an impartial decision maker, before imposing long-term suspension or expulsion. State statutes and regulations may confirm that due process requirement, as in the case of Georgia Administrative Code Section 160.4.8.1.5 governing public grade school disciplinary suspensions. The student code of conduct at your student’s school likely offers similar due process assurances or, at a minimum, defines the required notice and hearing. See, for example, the repeated assurances of due process in the aforementioned Dallas (TX) Independent School District Student Code of Conduct. Our attorneys know how to invoke school disciplinary procedures for your student’s best cyberbullying defense. Our attorneys commonly:

  • notify school disciplinary officials of our appearance on the accused student’s behalf, ensuring that school officials direct communications to us for our prompt evaluation, advice, and response on the student’s behalf;
  • timely answer the charges with all available defenses based on the evidence, while ensuring that the charges disclose the nature and details of the allegations sufficient for a sound defense;
  • arrange conciliation conferences toward early voluntary resolution of the charges by dismissal or based on remedial measures;
  • invoke the formal hearing at which to present exonerating and mitigating evidence, while challenging the incriminating evidence;
  • appeal any adverse hearing decision through the district and state agency procedures;
  • seek civil court review as permitted under the state’s administrative procedures act for final decisions in contested cases;
  • seek alternative special relief through the district’s general counsel’s office if the accused student has already lost all hearings and appeals.

Defenses to AI-Driven Cyberbullying Charges

Our defense attorneys also know the substantive and procedural defenses to raise in cyberbullying cases involving AI school software monitoring. Those defenses can, depending on the circumstances, include any of the following:

  • misidentification of your student as an involved perpetrator, when other students initiated the electronic messages;
  • misunderstanding of your student’s innocent intentions, incorrectly presuming harmful intent or recklessness;
  • misconstruing of your student’s communications, taking words and expressions that both students understood to be jokes and inoffensive ribbing as if bearing substantial offense;
  • violation of your student’s privacy rights, gaining access to electronic files, records, and communications protected under state and federal electronic privacy and communications acts;
  • violation of your student’s due process rights, depriving your student of a fair and complete investigation, fair notice of the charges, and fair opportunity for a hearing before an unbiased decision maker;
  • unlawful bias, prejudice, and discrimination against your student based on your student’s protected characteristics, pursuing discipline against your student that school officials would not have pursued against a student without those protected characteristics;
  • that your student has a clean record with no prior discipline, did not cause any substantial harm, injury, or offense, and has retracted any arguably offensive communications and made appropriate apologies and amends;
  • that your student has already voluntarily undergone remedial training, education, and counseling regarding bullying and cyberbullying, so that your student presents no repeat offense risk.

The Impact of K-12 School Cyberbullying Discipline

When determining how to proceed with our prompt retention on your student’s behalf, keep in mind the potential severe impacts of school discipline for cyberbullying. Your student could clearly suffer school suspension and expulsion, depending on the seriousness of any harm, the reprehensibility of the alleged misconduct, your student’s disciplinary record, your student’s response to the charges, and other aggravating and mitigating factors. Your student could also suffer transfer to a disciplinary reform school or boot camp. That discipline could cause your student to lose credit, delay advancement, and delay graduation. Your student could self-isolate and withdraw from studies, lacking peer and teacher support, and the structure of the traditional school program. Loss of college admissions and scholarships, and loss of employment and career opportunities could follow. Do not underestimate the potential harm from a cyberbullying charge. Let us help with your student’s defense.

Premier Student Defense Available

If your minor student’s K-12 school officials have accused your student of bullying, cyber-bullying, harassment, or other disciplinary wrongs because of a false flag from AI monitoring software, promptly retain the LLF National Law Firm’s Student Defense Team. Our attorneys have the substantial legal knowledge, skill, and experience necessary to defend AI false flag cases. Do not retain an unqualified local criminal defense lawyer, family lawyer, or personal injury attorney. Court law and rules differ from education law and academic administrative rules and procedures. Call 888.535.3686 or use our contact form now to retain us for your minor student’s case, no matter your location across the country. We have helped hundreds of students nationwide defend and defeat bullying, cyberbullying, and other disciplinary charges.

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