Etiket arşivi: School

Does Your School Use Suicide Prevention Software? We Want to Hear From You.

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In response to the youth mental health crisis, many school districts are investing in software that monitors what students type on their school devices, alerting counselors if a child appears to be contemplating suicide or self-harm.

Such tools — produced by companies like Gaggle, GoGuardian Beacon, Bark and Securly — can pick up what a child types into a Google search, or a school essay, or an email or text message to a friend. Some of these alerts may be false alarms, set off by innocuous research projects or offhand comments, but the most serious alerts may prompt calls to parents or even home visits by school staff members or law enforcement.

I write about mental health for The New York Times, including the effects of social media use on children’s brains and algorithms that predict who is at risk for suicide. I’m interested in knowing more about how these monitoring tools are working in real life.

If you are a student, parent, teacher or school administrator, I’d like to hear about your experiences. Do you think these tools have saved lives? Do they help students who are anxious or depressed get the care they need? Are you concerned about students’ privacy? Is there any cost to false positives?

I will read each submission and may use your contact information to follow up with you. I will not publish any details you share without contacting you and verifying your information.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Nevada Asked A.I. Which Students Need Help. The Answer Caused an Outcry.

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Nevada has long had the most lopsided school funding in the country. Low-income districts there have nearly 35 percent less money to spend per pupil than wealthier ones do — the largest gap of any state.

A year ago, Nevada set out to improve on that dubious status with some help from artificial intelligence provided by an outside contractor. Instead, it set off an uproar.

The A.I. system calculated that the state’s previous estimate of the number of children who would struggle in school was far too high. Before, Nevada treated all low-income students as “at risk” of academic and social troubles. The A.I. algorithm was more complex — and set a much higher bar.

It weighed dozens of factors besides income to decide whether a student might fall behind in school, including how often they attended class and the language spoken at home. And when the calculations were done, the number of students classified as at-risk plummeted to less than 65,000, from over 270,000 in 2022.

As a result, many schools saw state money that they had relied on disappear. Districts scrambled to slash programs and redo budgets.

The outcome has horrified many school leaders who believe the number of children in Nevada who need extra support has ballooned, not shrunk, since the pandemic took hold.

Joseph H. Reich, Charter School Pioneer, Dies at 89

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Joseph H. Reich, a financier and philanthropist who with his wife created one of New York City’s first independently run public schools, proving that impoverished students could outperform expectations in such a setting — and which helped to kick-start the city’s charter-school movement — died on Sept. 29 at his home in Sheffield, Mass. He was 89.

The cause was respiratory failure, his daughter Marcia Walsh said.

Convinced that city-run schools were failing to educate students in high-poverty neighborhoods, Mr. Reich (pronounced rich) and his wife, Carol F. Reich, raised $1 million and secured a building, opening the Beginning With Children school in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in 1992.

It was largely funded with taxpayer money and free to students, but it operated outside the bureaucracy of the local school district.

That model was largely a novelty; it would be another six years until New York State passed the Charter Schools Act, codifying rules for such experiments. The year before that, Beginning With Children had been named the city’s most improved elementary school, a beacon to hundreds of charter schools that would follow.

“We both shared a common and basic belief: Families of means can afford to send their children to private schools or relocate to an affluent neighborhood where public schools have greater resources. The poor cannot,” the Reiches wrote in a mission statement. “We recoiled against this injustice.”

Today, 15 percent of New York City schoolchildren are enrolled in one of the city’s 281 charter schools — though the school choice movement still ignites fiery debates over whether charters siphon off motivated students and money from traditional neighborhood schools.