This is nasty, but the unpleasant truth is that these schools are just rationally responding to public pressure and doing CYA. Every time there's a school shooter, the first thing the parents and media do is dig through his angry Facebook posts and go, "Look at all these red flags! Why wasn't anything done?". Well, now the schools are doing something. It's not the right thing to do, and it's not going to fix anything, but getting angry at the schools isn't going to cause them to change course: they're responding to public demand. You need to start talking to parents and educating them.
My first thought exactly. If the school "knew" about it and dismissed the alerts as a false positive I would have to imagine that opens them up to far greater liability than simply not knowing about the behavior in the first place.
>If the school "knew" about it and dismissed the alerts as a false positive...
Knowing what you know about liability, ask yourself, what are the real chances of the school knowing something and dismissing it as a false positive?
I think if you search your heart you'd probably come to the conclusion that the fact that the school will follow up on every little thing is exactly the problem. Not everyone means "I'd kill for that test answer sheet" when they write "I'd kill for that test answer sheet".
> I think if you search your heart you'd probably come to the conclusion that the fact that the school will follow up on every little thing is exactly the problem.
The issues of school administrator overreach and school district liability for negligence are not mutually exclusive.
> Knowing what you know about liability, ask yourself, what are the real chances of the school knowing something and dismissing it as a false positive?
Knowing what I know about liability and knowing what I know about compliance monitoring systems with high rates of false positives is precisely why I said what I said.
Negligence = known or should have known of X
Efforts to hold schools accountable for shootings have historically been difficult because the plaintiffs must show (1) but for the action of the school, the injury would not have occurred and (2) the injury was a foreseeable result of the school's negligence.
This monitoring system creates actual knowledge of a potential threat where most law suits over school shootings have had to argue the school "should have known" and requires the school to take make a record of their decision for every alert (investigate or ignore).
