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The Tennessee Conservative [By Adelia Kirchner] –
Earlier this year, a 13-year-old 8th grade girl from Fairview Middle School was arrested, strip-searched and put in solitary confinement before being sentenced to 8 weeks of house arrest, a psych evaluation and 20 days attendance at an alternative school.
Why? Because the school’s artificial intelligence (AI) surveillance program flagged a conversation she had with friends on school-issued devices.
The flagged joke, while perhaps offensive and made in poor taste, does seem typical of a back and forth between your average middle school-aged students.
The girl’s friends had been teasing her about having a tanned complexion and called her “Mexican” even though the girl is not actually Mexican.
When one of the friends proceeded to ask the girl what she had planned for that Thursday, the girl responded saying, “on Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s.”
While to many reasonable adults this would clearly be a teaching and parenting moment, to the Gaggle AI program utilized by the school this was instead a “threat of mass violence.”
Where school officials could have done their own investigation by simply reading the student’s messages to gain context and contacting the parents involved, due to a reliance on the AI surveillance police were instead alerted immediately.
The 13-year-old girl was reportedly promptly arrested, driven to the police station, strip-searched, forced to shower on camera, coerced into signing documents she didn’t understand without a lawyer and thrown into solitary confinement for 24 hours.
The girl’s parents were not timely informed on what had happened or where their daughter was, and once they were finally filled in, they were not allowed any contact with her until after she was released from solitary confinement.
A judge later ordered the girl to house arrest and a psych evaluation saying that the child was “probably mentally retarded.”
To add onto the previous chaos and continuing social services visits, while the girl was on house arrest the middle school filed truancy charges against her parents for not having her in school.
The girl’s mother has since stated that she knows what her daughter did was wrong, but that she would have never expected the flagged comment to result in her eighth grader spending the night in a jail cell.
The mother stated that her daughter’s comments were “wrong” and “stupid” but in full context she believes it is clear they were not a threat.
“It made me feel like, is this the America we live in?” the girl’s mother stated. “And it was this stupid, stupid technology that is just going through picking up random words and not looking at context.”
Back in June, reports circulated regarding a lawsuit brought by the family of the 13-year-old and the family of a 14-year-old boy from Page Middle School who faced a similar situation.
The two families filed suit against Governor Bill Lee (R-TN) and the Williamson County School District after their children’s comments were misinterpreted by AI surveillance and school officials as “threats of mass violence” under a 2023 Zero Tolerance law.
This law defines threats of mass violence as speech that a “reasonable” individual may conclude would result in serious bodily injury or the death of two or more people.
“This was an overreach and misapplication of the law, which resulted in a denial of their constitutional rights,” the attorney representing the families, Larry Crain, said at the time.
According to an analysis by The Associated Press, Gaggle content flags are wrong almost 70% of the time.
“Gaggle alerted more than 1,200 incidents to the Lawrence, Kansas, school district in a recent 10-month period,” Data Reporter for The Associated Press Education Reporting Network, Sharon Lurye wrote. “But almost two-thirds of those alerts were deemed by school officials to be nonissues.”
In the Polk County, Florida school district of over 100,000 students, almost 500 Gaggle alerts were received over the span of 4 years.
These alerts reportedly resulted in a total of 72 involuntary hospitalization cases under a Florida state law called the Baker Act, which allows authorities to require mental health evaluations for individuals against their will if they “pose a risk to themselves or others.”
This included more than 200 false alarms from flags on student’s homework assignments.
About the Author: Adelia Kirchner is a Tennessee resident and reporter for the Tennessee Conservative. Currently the host of Subtle Rampage Podcast, she has also worked for the South Dakota State Legislature and interned for Senator Bill Hagerty’s Office in Nashville, Tennessee. You can reach Adelia at adelia@tennesseeconservativenews.com.
3 Responses
What a SHAM public education has become…..now, some the smart folks have taken advantage of BILLY’s LAW and escaped public schools with TAX PAYER SUBSIDIES, and, the teachers don’t care because Billy promised them all a RAISE to teach fewer kids – “WHAT A BARGAIN”! The question is….how fast will everyone else be leaving, removing their kids from this nightmare? Or, will they continue to expose them to these communistic tactics that are becoming all to frequent.
Let’s introduce a bill that requires the school principal and whoever is responsible for the program in that school to be subjected to the same treatment if it was found that the AI was wrong. No matter how many times they get arrested for the AI’s error(s).
It will stop then…………. Now…all they are going to do is say their sorry the AI program did it. There is NO accountability for any wrongful AI flagging and student arrest/mistreatment. Any lawsuits are just taking taxpayer money the people who are responsible walk free.
Pubic ejikashun, terminally infested with lucifer’s dimmercraps, is an ongoing crime against America.
Gaggle AI should be banned from schools.