North Allegheny’s IT staff are no strangers to heavy workloads. Every week, the department deals with troublesome situations, which may include cyber bullying alerts, a self-harm warning, or even a sexual harassment “hit-list”. They are responsible for content filtering and making sure that students stay safe while on their electronic devices.

However, since the beginning of the pandemic and the increased amount of time students have been spending on their devices, that workload has become especially difficult to handle. 

As a result, the district has purchased $28,000 worth of additional student safety monitoring provisions from Securly, the district’s current web content filtering system. The additions entail a Google doc monitoring service and, more importantly, assistance to the IT department to lighten the workload.

Prior to the purchase, the district had been running on a basic subscription with Securly. The most important service on this subscription was Auditor. 

According to Mr. Richard Platts, Director of Technology and Innovation, “Auditor offers the ability to notify school district staff when there are searches or content in emails that meet three basic criteria. Those are self-harm, violence, and bullying.” 

Once the IT staff are alerted with such a warning, a very limited number of people are notified in order to keep the situation as private as possible. These people include school counselors, principals, staff who work on the monitoring side of the district, and perhaps people in the building who know that student well. 

Auditor and the original Securly subscription had been very helpful in the past, but they were not without their shortcomings. 

First of all, false alarms happened often. 

“We get a lot of alerts for things that aren’t truly items of specific concern,” Mr. Platts said.

For example, a student who was researching the Great Depression could be reported because of the frequent search of the word “depression.” Or students studying suicide and drug usage in health class could be mistakenly marked as in danger. 

Secondly, the number of cases that were getting reported kept Mr. Platts’s team from fulfilling their other responsibilities of making sure systems are running smoothly for students and teachers.

A large aspect of the new monitoring services will aim to solve this issue. 

Mr. Platts emphasized that “the most important thing that we’re getting is we’re getting help from Securly to lighten our workload.” 

Essentially, as part of these new provisions, the district will hire a certified professional working at Securly to manage security responses, which was originally done by the IT department. This professional will also be available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, something that was not possible for Mr. Platts and his team. 

“If they discover an alert at one o’clock in the morning of a student who has hit that threshold of a critical, perhaps self-harm, situation, they’ll pick up the phone and they’ll call someone to provide assistance,” Mr. Platts explained. 

These additions will allow student safety reports to be handled more efficiently and allow the IT staff to focus on other aspects of their work. However, no big changes will be made to student privacy or latop use. 

The money being spent by the district will pay for these additional services until December, when North Allegheny’s subscription with Securly expires. At that point, the district will have to reassess and determine if the service Securly provides is worth a renewed subscription.