Schools fight to track high-tech teen gossip mill

Schools fight to track high-tech teen gossip mill

TARA M. MANTHEY; The News Tribune
Teens communicate with each other quickly.

Faster than parents and principals can usually keep up with. Sometimes it causes havoc, as with a surprise food fight in Midland and rumors of shootings that emptied classrooms in Federal Way.

At times the sophisticated gossiping can lead authorities more quickly to the truth, when the threat of violence is but a rumor.

And on occasion, the chatter can reveal a menace that’s more than hearsay.

Teens have mastered high-tech communication. Now school authorities are struggling to figure out how to keep ahead of it – and tap into it – to keep kids safe.

With one command, a teen can dispatch a message to dozens of friends with mobile phones. Online, one can post a bulletin immediately available to hundreds in a circle of friends. Those friends can just as easily repost it, propelling it through the millions of users of MySpace.com.

The subjects of their missives are no different than they were 10 or 15 years ago, said Andrew Phillips, a Maple Valley youth pastor and IT professional who offers workshops to parents wondering about teen use of technology.

The difference is the speed.

“If they had to call everyone, how long would that take? Twenty minutes?” he said.

Slow-moving e-mail is a dying tool among kids with mobile phones and instant messaging, he said. As the velocity increases, he said parents and teachers must keep up with lessons on the proper use of technology.

“We really need to teach and train young people how to discern truth,” Phillips said. “We need to go back to the basics: How do we respect people?”

TAUGHT TO TELL

Teens trolling MySpace and instant messaging catch dangerous musings before they become manifestos. In the seven years since the Columbine High School massacre, today’s students have been consistently told to inform authorities about even the vaguest threat.

They won’t be treated as tattlers, teachers tell them, but heroes.

An online conversation about a plan to shoot classmates led to the arrest of a Rogers High School student in late April.

A student chatting with the would-be shooter told a friend. That friend called another, who was in Oregon at a Junior ROTC competition, according to school incident reports. A chaperone, Sgt. Major Norman Fowler, contacted sheriff’s deputies back in Pierce County.

The teen was arrested the next day at his home. Police say he planned to use his stepfather’s guns to shoot certain people and then himself at the South Hill school on May 26.

School district officials and law enforcement praised the school’s students and leadership in the days after the near miss.

“If it were not for this tremendous team effort, the story may have been very different,” Casey Cox, Puyallup’s executive director of secondary school leadership, wrote to Rogers administrators.

A week before that incident, police arrested three Key Peninsula Middle School students for plotting to shoot at the school to prompt a lockdown, then set the school on fire.

Their plan was also foiled by rumors running through the school shortly before the arrest, officials said.

HIGH-TECH CHATTER

Usually rumors aren’t true, but they can still be disruptive when they travel faster than the truth – especially when broadcast through text messaging.

On May 1, about two-thirds of Todd Beamer High School in Federal Way either didn’t come to school or were picked up by parents. They stayed away after early-morning murmurs of a shooting gained such momentum that they beat broadcast reports, e-mails and a Web posting trying to squelch the bogus rumor.

Police and school officials began investigating the rumor the previous evening and worked through the night, Principal Josh Garcia said.

In the morning, the rumor ripped through mobile phones, instant messaging and old-fashioned word-of-mouth. Meanwhile, school officials had posted a note online that the threat wasn’t credible and sent e-mail through a network of parent volunteers, Garcia said.

Given the news of arrests at other Pierce County schools in previous weeks, Garcia said the students were justly nervous. He was pleased that so many students told their parents and authorities when they heard the rumor.

“They were genuinely concerned that something was going to happen,” he said.

The district’s communications department wished the school had a way to promulgate its own version of events to parents as fast as teens can text message.

“We don’t have a system that can call 1,800 kids in the matter of a couple of hours,” said Diane Turner, the district’s spokeswoman.

At least one South Sound district does have such a system.

A STEP AHEAD

When Clover Park High School was locked down last Monday, parents knew about it before reporters.

Parents also knew that the entire student body was to be sent home while police investigated, before the students knew enough to set off rumors, spokeswoman Kim Prentice said.

The rapid dissemination was possible through a system called Connect-Ed. The Web-based, subscription service sends automated calls to parents of every student in the school.

It can send the message by e-mail, if parents prefer, and it knows whether to deliver calls in Spanish or English. Messages can be broadcast to the entire district, or be focused on the parents of a particular school, class or bus route.

The Clover Park School District signed up for the service this year to help with attendance, said Sharon DeMyers, the IT administrator. Connect-Ed, owned by The NTI Group Inc. of California, automatically calls parents when students are absent. It knows whether they pick up, too.

It cost $10,000 to start up and the fee is $3.50 per full-time equivalent student per year. In Clover Park, that’s about $40,000 per year. It’s also used to notify parents about events. Student attendance in school and parent participation at school functions has improved, DeMyers said.

As a secondary benefit, the instant dispatches are perfect in emergency situations, she said. In the case of the high school lockdown, parents were familiar with the message system and knew that it came directly from the principal.

“They knew that we had the situation well in hand,” DeMyers said.

KEEPING UP

Students at Tacoma’s Mason Middle School recently told their parents about a rumor that Wilson High School students would cause trouble at the school on June 6.

“The rumors were flying about whatever that would be,” said Patti Holmgren, Tacoma’s spokeswoman.

Principals at both schools and police investigated and found no truth to the rumor. They’ve talked to students and parents and the rumor has died down. They’ll keep an ear on the rumor, whether in the halls or online, to try to stay ahead of it, Holmgren said.

High-tech dissemination of chitchat does have advantages over track-free bathroom gossip.

“In one way we have more control because you can check where the kids write, which is often online,” she said.

But it only helps if someone is watching.

On May 12 an electronic plot of a lesser kind unfolded at Morris E. Ford Middle School in Midland.

Hordes of students left the lunchroom as noon neared.

At 11:54, the remaining students got quiet. Exactly a minute later, applesauce and condiments streaked through the air. It took several minutes for teachers to intervene, student and participant Rachael Worby said. She and others were suspended.

The kids found it easy to keep the scheme from adults. They organized it on MySpace.