Schools today operate with fragmented behavioral monitoring systems that fail to provide administrators with comprehensive oversight of student behavior. The current landscape includes specialized tools for hallway movement, attendance tracking, and device monitoring, but these systems rarely integrate into a cohesive platform. This fragmentation creates blind spots in student oversight and diminishes the effectiveness of behavioral interventions, ultimately compromising both school safety and academic outcomes.
Background / Existing Solutions
Digital hall pass tools like SmartPass offer granular control over hallway movement. This includes: encounter prevention, tracking missed class time, and locating students quickly (smartpass.app) . There are also attendance platforms like SchoolPass enable live tracking of tardiness, per-period attendance, and unexcused absences system.
Despite domain specific tools for monitoring specific behaviors, few systems unify all relevant data streams (classroom attendance, hallway passes, device use, network activity, and behavioral flags) into one cohesive dashboard. Platforms like Schoolytics aggregate academic data (grades, assessment scores, attendance) to support Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS), yet they typically exclude real-time behavioral monitoring like hallway tracking or device activity
Some schools have adopted online surveillance tools that monitor student behavior 24/7 using AI-based flagging, scanning both school-issued and personal devices, creating student “risk scores”, but often without meaningful human oversight or transparency UC San Diego Today . These systems highlight both the potential of integrated monitoring and the serious privacy, equity, and ethical concerns they provoke.
Problem Validation
Teachers and staff report frustration with fragmented systems that fail to capture whole-student behaviors. There is a strong drive for unified platforms that simplify monitoring and support timely action, especially when disengagement, skipping, or distractions emerge.
Integrated data systems (IDS) used in community school models (UCLA Community Schools) demonstrate how centralizing indicators across academic and non-academic domains can support equitable service delivery, monitor intervention impacts, and inform data-driven decisions at the school level
Research from the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) reveals that surveillance systems can harm student trust and well-being: 44% of teachers reported instances where monitoring triggered law enforcement contact, and 29% of LGBTQ+ students experienced involuntary outing as a result. These findings highlight how important it is to thoughtfully design the monitoring system which safeguards student rights.
Design Requirements
Based on these insights, a unified behavioral monitoring platform like SchoolLense should meet the following criteria: