wardynski

Dr. Casey Wardynski, superintendent of Huntsville City Schools, announces a new set of procedures aimed at reducing violence on school campuses by monitoring social media postings by students.

Over the weekend, Huntsville City Schools Superintendent Casey Wardynski released a video detailing new system-wide procedures designed to improve discipline and safety in schools.

Cell phone videos of fights at Huntsville High and Grissom High have been circulating online in recent weeks, stirring up debate about the effectiveness of discipline policies at the schools.

"We're going to implement a procedure that directly addresses an area that's become a real concern again," said Wardynski in the video, published here, "which is how violence in our schools - how threats to our schools - interact with social media, and how social media can play a role, if we pay attention to it, in heading off problems."

The new procedure will allow the superintendent and administrators to review the public social media posts of students who have a history of violence or whose behavior demonstrates a risk to student and employee safety.

The superintendent could use a student's social media posts as reason to discipline the student, or to refer the student to counseling or other school-based supports. The new procedure covers both a student's public posts - those that can be seen by anyone viewing the student's social media account - and any posts that other students or parents bring to the superintendent's attention.

Read the entire procedure here.

In 2014, AL.com reported extensively on Wardynski's Students Against Fear (SAFe) program, which monitored social media accounts of about 600 students in the school system. At the time, Wardynski said he started the SAFe program after receiving a call from the NSA about a potential threat. Not all school board members knew about the program, and it drew the attention of the ACLU.

For the new 2016 procedures, the school system's director of operations will use school supervision technology, tips from students and teachers, and information from campus security officers to identify students who are making threats or planning violence on social media.

Wardynski justified the new procedure by saying a "set of incidents" recently at Grissom High, Huntsville High and a Huntsville elementary school could have been predicted if administration had been monitoring social media.

"In each of those cases we've gone and done a forensic analysis of those cases and looked at social media surrounding those, and found there were a lot of precursor indicators in Facebook and other locations in social media that indicated a fight was headed to our school," he said.

In particular, the fight at Grissom High - a video of which made the rounds on social media and, according to Wardynski "apparently will be replayed endlessly on TV in the local market" - was planned in advance on social media, including its being videoed on cell phones. The two students who planned the fight were withdrawn from the school before they were expelled, but the system chose to expel them anyway to make it harder for them to re-enroll elsewhere without that system knowing of their past behavior.

Questions about reporting

The new social media procedure could be used to deter students who post videos of school fights, said Anson Knowles, former Huntsville city school board candidate.

"It is not difficult to see that the superintendent may punish students for posting videos of violence in their schools in an effort to prevent the public from seeing what is happening in the schools," he said.

He points to one section in particular, which says, "If the superintendent determines that a student has made posts to social media indicating either that student or another student's propensity towards violence or gang affiliation, the superintendent may also refer such student to any applicable school-based or district-level student supports."

Knowles believes student behavior outside of the school should be under police jurisdiction. He blames recent violence in schools on changes in the Huntsville City Schools' Code of Conduct.

"Wardynski's new procedure is more about preventing students from providing evidence of his own failures," he said. "This is absurd and should not be allowed."

Safety concerns

Safety is the biggest concern of most parents at local schools, said Stephanie Daniel, PTSA president at Huntsville High.

She calls the new social media procedures a step in the right direction toward addressing parents' worries.

"Students in our school have elected to fight, video those fights, and then post those videos to social media," she said. "These acts are meant to gain attention and create a culture of fear.

"I believe the administration is dedicated to protecting the learning environment of our school and has since reocmmended expulsion for several students."

She said Huntsville High has nearly 2,000 students and "99 percent of the students come to school and do the right things and make our community proud."

Further changes

Another new procedure that will take effect this year will be centralized registration. When it's fully up and running later this year, students will no longer register for school at their own neighborhood schools. Centralized registration days will be set up so that HCS can better identify students who don't need to be allowed back in school or who should be referred to school support programs for at-risk students.

Huntsville City Schools employs about 100 campus security officers, mostly in middle and high schools, and that 22 police officers are stationed in schools, "mostly to deal with threats from the outside coming into our schools, but also to deal with problems in the schools where law enforcement is required," Wardynski said.

Updated 2/29/2016 at 8:28 p.m. to include comments from Knowles. Updated 3/1/2016 at 12:04 p.m. to include comments from Daniel.