Current and former students suing the Lawrence, Kansas, school district over its use of AI surveillance tools saw a big victory this summer when a federal judge ordered the district to pay more than $113,000 in the students’ legal fees for violating the Kansas Open Records Act.
U.S. District Judge Kathryn H. Vratil previously found that the district had not acted in good faith when it waited months to fulfill the students’ records requests.
The decision is part of a larger lawsuit, filed in August 2025 by nine current and former students, alleging that Lawrence Public Schools’ surveillance of student data violated their privacy and press freedom rights.
The district had previously contracted with Gaggle, a digital monitoring company that uses AI to sift through student accounts, devices and online activity — including the district’s Google Workspace — to flag what it deems a potential safety risk.
As the case went on, the district quietly switched the AI surveillance service it used from Gaggle to ManagedMethods, a similar K-12 cloud security platform.
Plaintiff Phoebe Morris said student journalists wanted to report on that change.
“When we learned that the District had switched student-monitoring software without publicly announcing the change, we wanted to understand when, why and how it happened,” Morris said. “As journalists, we needed the public records so we could accurately inform our school community. Those documents were crucial to our reporting.”
Student journalists requested several documents, including contracts and internal communications related to the district’s transition to ManagedMethods.
“The process was tedious—we waited months for meaningful responses—but also rewarding. I learned how the legal system works and, more importantly, how important it is to advocate for my rights as a student journalist,” Morris said.
The court ordered the district to provide the requested documents and pay the students’ costs in litigating the records dispute, but student plaintiff Suzana Kennedy believes the win goes beyond this one lawsuit.
“This victory demonstrates that school districts cannot disregard students’ public-records requests simply because the requests are inconvenient. Students are intelligent and capable, and their concerns deserve to be taken seriously. People with more power — whether because of age, status or authority — should use it to uplift students, not suppress them,” Kennedy said.
The district declined a request from The Lawrence Times to comment on the latest ruling.
Before filing the lawsuit, editors of The Budget at Lawrence High School attempted to negotiate with administrators for months over their concerns about the AI surveillance, including its interference in the journalistic process and the privacy and safety issues they identified. For those efforts, they were recognized as finalists for the Student Press Law Center’s 2024 Courage in Student Journalism Award.
Administrators agreed to exempt student journalists from the surveillance tool to protect their confidential reporting materials, but the plaintiffs allege in the lawsuit that the exemption was never honored.
The case is ongoing, with a jury trial scheduled for January 2027.
“The pace has been frustrating, but this is a fight I believe is worth seeing through,” Kennedy said.
For more news like this on student journalism and the law, subscribe to the Student Press Law Center’s newsletter.