After concerns from parents and students, Juneau School District is reworking the way it’s using a controversial new monitoring program.<\/p>\n
During Tuesday’s regular school board meeting, Superintendent Bridget Weiss addressed Bark<\/a>, a software program used to monitor student communications on school servers. When that program was implemented in September, parents and students raised concerns about privacy and data collection.<\/p>\n Weiss said a Frequently Asked Questions sheet was sent out to parents, and district representatives had spent time working with the company to try and assuage concerns about the software.<\/p>\n User data will now only be held by the company for 15 days, rather than the previous 30, and language filters had been altered to be less sensitive, resulting in fewer false positives, Weiss said.<\/p>\n Weiss said the next step is creating collaborative work groups with community members in pursuit of that goal.<\/p>\n Weiss also talked about the ways the school district addresses safety and security in schools. Staff recently completed the mandatory Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate school-shooter training for the year.<\/p>\n “Age and developmentally appropriate” school shooter drills were held in all school buildings, Weiss told the school board. Additionally, Weiss said the Juneau Police Department recently contacted the district with the idea of creating a kind of collaborative team of individuals trained in threat assessment.<\/p>\n The idea is still in its infancy, Weiss said, but the goal was to be “proactive rather than reactive, and provide support for people who might need that.”<\/p>\n JAMMing out, language<\/strong><\/p>\n The board received a musical reprieve from its routine business.<\/p>\n To open the meeting, members of Juneau Alaska Music Matters (JAMM) performed two songs for the school board using violins, cellos, ukuleles and drums.<\/p>\n JAMM Executive Director Megan Johnson told the audience there were now instructors working for the tuition-free music program who had begun their own musical education with JAMM.<\/p>\n “It’s a beautiful representation of our success,” Johnson said.<\/p>\n After the young musicians left the School Board got back to its regular business. The bulk of the meeting began with Weiss giving her regular report to the board.<\/p>\n Weiss said that she had recently returned from a meeting with the Native Education Advisory Council, which focused on how school districts can support indigenous language learning.<\/p>\n