In 2019, a year after police announced they had foiled an alleged shooting plot at Fair Haven Union High School, a task force convened by Gov. Phil Scott released a series of recommendations to improve school security across Vermont.
One of its suggestions: The state should invest in software to monitor students’ social media for threats to schools.
In Vermont, school officials had a homegrown business to contract with: Social Sentinel, a company founded in Burlington whose proprietary software tracks social media posts and flags those perceived as threats. As social media monitoring has grown in popularity, the company has signed contracts with schools across the country.
“Vendors of social media monitoring have, in multiple instances, prevented violent acts by making schools aware of ‘leakage’ of events in social media,” the governor’s task force wrote.
But in the wake of a deadly mass shooting last month at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Social Sentinel has drawn national scrutiny over reports that the local school district had contracted with the company during the 2019-20 school year.
It still is not clear whether that contract was in place at the time of the Uvalde shooting or if the shooter’s online activities would have been detected by its program. The company has not been accused of any wrongdoing or misconduct.
But in the weeks since, amid an apparently nationwide uptick of threats against schools, the revelation of Social Sentinel’s contract has renewed a national discussion about the effectiveness of such programs in schools.
Days after the Uvalde shootings, which killed 19 students and two teachers, The Washington Post and other national and international media reported on a document indicating that the Uvalde school district had contracted with Social Sentinel as recently as two years ago.
The program was intended to monitor “all social media with a connection to Uvalde as a measure to identify any possible threats that might be made against students and or staff within the school district,” according to the document.
Social Sentinel’s program uses algorithms to monitor social media posts in a certain geographic area for specific phrases or words, as well as images, according to news reports. Clients are notified if the company’s programs spot a potential threat.
Social Sentinel’s terms of use indicate that the service monitors posts to a client school’s social media accounts, according to The Dallas Morning News. Although the gunman in Uvalde reportedly posted images of rifles to Instagram ahead of the shooting, none of the images included captions or mentioned the school or district, the Morning News reported.
Social Sentinel, with offices at the Innovation Center on Lakeside Avenue in Burlington, was founded in 2014 by onetime University of Vermont Police Chief Gary Margolis.
He was also the co-founder of Margolis Healy and Associates, a Burlington-based security consulting firm founded in 2008, according to its website. That firm has contracted with the state of Vermont and the federal government to improve school safety practices. Margolis Healy was acquired by the Philadelphia-based law firm Cozen O’Connor in 2017.
Social Sentinel “built a technology that actually helps prevent bad things from happening,” Margolis said in a 2019 interview with VTDigger, “by giving information that can give context to what’s going on, in a way that respects privacy.”
Social Sentinel was sold in late 2020 to the Ohio-based Navigate360, according to a company news release. Navigate360’s website advertises “holistic safety and wellness solutions” for schools, businesses and medical facilities.
Reached by phone on May 27, Margolis said he is no longer working with Social Sentinel and did not know whether Uvalde schools had contracted with the company this school year. Margolis said he couldn’t comment on the program’s current capability to detect online threats.
“I haven’t been with the company for a long time, so I don’t know anything about what it does now or doesn’t do,” Margolis said.
Multiple attempts by VTDigger to reach representatives from Social Sentinel and Navigate360 since the Texas school shooting were unsuccessful.
Nobody answered the door at Social Sentinel’s Burlington office, located in the Innovation Center, on a Friday afternoon in late May. A person who answered the phone at the building manager’s office said Social Sentinel maintains the office but that workers are seldom there.
Messages sent to the Uvalde school district via its website were not returned.
JP Guilbault, the CEO of Navigate360, told Vox that the company was “not currently aware of any specific links connecting the gunman to the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District or Robb Elementary on any public social media sites.”
Social Sentinel can identify “suicidal, homicidal, bullying and other harmful language that is public and connected to district-, school- or staff-identified names as well as social media handles and hashtags associated with school-identified pages,” Guilbault told the news outlet.
But some advocates and researchers have raised concerns about the effectiveness and unintended consequences of social media monitoring in schools. Critics charge that the products have not demonstrated their effectiveness but could compromise students’ privacy and unfairly target minority students.
Hye Jung Han, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, told technology news site The Verge last month that such programs’ track records did not yet justify infringing on students’ privacy.
“To use unproven, untested surveillance technologies on children, without first checking whether they are safe to use, exposes children to an unacceptable risk of harm,” Han said.
As of 2019, school officials from five Vermont school districts or supervisory unions said they had or once had contracts with Social Sentinel.
At least one Vermont school district, Montpelier Roxbury Public Schools, has a current contract with the company. The district has maintained the contract for about three years, according to Superintendent Libby Bonesteel.
Bonesteel said she was not sure whether the service had ever flagged any threats or information that required intervention. Last month, officials learned of a threat against Montpelier High School — one that resulted in weapons being seized from a student’s home — through other channels, she said.
But the tool was a source of reassurance for district officials, she said.
“Oftentimes, we know that people who are intending to do harm post something on social media,” Bonesteel said. “So it gives us a sense of security that we have that monitor for Montpelier Roxbury.”
Bonesteel said she was unsure how much the program cost the district.
Administrators from three other districts or supervisory unions said they had decided not to renew their contracts with Social Sentinel over the past few years.
Jeanne Collins, the superintendent of Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union, said the supervisory union had a one-year contract with the company years ago. The service had helped identify two students who were at risk of self-harm based on their social media posts, Collins said.
School staff had found the program useful, she said, but had decided against renewing the contract amid “difficult budget decisions.”
“We couldn’t justify the cost, but we were pleased with the year we had,” Collins said, saying the service had cost about $10,000. “We were not unhappy in any way.”
In two other districts, officials said they had decided against renewing contracts after finding the software was not as useful as they had hoped it would be.
Essex Westford School District officials used Social Sentinel for about a year and a half before deciding not to renew the contract in 2020, according to Brian Donahue, the district’s chief operating officer.
At that time, the software was “primarily capturing Facebook and Twitter” and not other social media sites that were more popular among children, Donahue said.
“I always thought it was pretty impressive what they could do, but it didn’t seem immediately relevant to us, and (seemed) like a different investment was better,” Donahue said.
After police foiled the alleged shooting plot at Fair Haven Union High School in 2018, the Slate Valley Unified School District — which includes Fair Haven — signed a contract with Social Sentinel amid a raft of new security measures.
But last year officials opted not to renew that contract, superintendent Brooke Olsen-Farrell said.
“I think when kids are making threats, they’re not doing it necessarily on a public forum,” Olsen-Farrell said. “They’re doing it in private, peer-to-peer (communications) on social media. So Social Sentinel wasn’t searching those.”
The district still uses a monitoring program called GoGuardian, Olsen-Farrell said, a service which allows staff to view a broader range of data from students’ online behavior.
It’s unclear whether any other Vermont school districts outside Montpelier Roxbury have active contracts with Social Sentinel. Another seven superintendents who responded to emails from VTDigger said they did not have contracts with the company.