By Eliana Miller
Linewize is a new monitoring system put into place to help our staff keep students focused and safe. Whether it comes down to blocking sites to keep students focused during school hours, or checking in to make sure students are doing their work and not looking at anything bad. Depending on who you ask around campus they may hate or love Linewize, but there is one thing for sure: trying to get yourself help lands you in the counselors, school psychologist or even office hands. Is this necessary or the wrong steps to be taken to insure our students safety?
Before school had started there was information spread that certain suicide hotlines and help hotlines have been blocked by Linewize. One of the big ones being the transgender help line known as: The Trevor Project. Being in Journalism, me and a few other students (JD Caballero-George, grade 12, Ryan Afable, grade 10, and Laila Hicks, grade 10) began to do some research on websites that were and were not blocked by Linewize. While we had our question answered of: “are suicide hotlines rediliy availible for students now?” We also found out some more information. The school will call you down for looking up these sites.
Originally when we had started deep diving into the blocked and unblocked sites on our chromebooks, I was aware of the possibility of getting in trouble for looking up AI chat sites/generators and games. So, when I was called down to see a school counselor, I was not expecting the talk to be about my mental health. I believe that the faculty calling students down after looking up hotlines/accessing hotlines is problematic.
My biggest reason that this is problematic is because if students are actively trying to seek help, it shouldn’t be met with a call to their teacher (if in class) who then has to tell them to walk down to another room in front of the other students. Even if the teacher is able to do this quietly, kids observe, and there’s still a chance of that student being called out in front of everyone. Imagine you are already feeling really terrible and now your classmates are aware that something is going on. Even if they don’t know exactly what, they know you’re “in trouble”.
Another thing that is unnecessary is the idea of seeing students when they are actively already seeking help from someone else. Sometimes talking to someone in person, or talking to someone you know can be too overwhelming and you need to talk to a stranger.
I have talked to some mental health faculty members here on campus to see what they think about the flagging system along with confirming/denying some theories. So far I was under the impression that anyone who searched up anything having to do with mental health help was flagged, but that is incorrect. “We see if someone types, for example: ‘how to kill your PE teacher’. I would then get an alert from that student. I am given the information based on concerning keywords that students may have typed,” Said an anonymous facility member. With some research and questioning of other faculty members, some of these keywords include words that have themes revolving around suicide or violence. That brings about another issue with this system though, classes needing research regarding mental health and weaponry such as history and AP psychology.
While this may not seem like a huge issue at first glance, one of the mental health faculty members mentioned, “Most of the people I have had to call in were for research they were doing during class. Some students just wanted to know what resources were available to them.” I think this is an issue because there are going to be so many times that students are going to have to look up weapons of war for history, violent subjects for research, or even look up sites such as the suicide hotline for statistics for AP psychology.
While the system itself is flawed, it does have some ups. I believe one of the biggest positives that comes out of this system is that mental health workers at the school are notified about possible threats to the school and other students.
Overall, I believe that the system is beyond flawed. I think students who are actively reaching out for help should not be called down to talk to a counselor. I think the flags should be reworked to specifically target searches that actively show a student has a plan to hurt themselves or someone else. Students should not be flagged for looking up things for classes, or resources to get themselves the help they need at their pace.
beniciapaw.com 