BARK for WAO Students

Dear WAO Families:

Keeping students safer on our school-provided devices and accounts is of paramount importance to us here at Warren-Alvarado-Oslo.  In that regard, we would like to make you aware of a recent step our team has taken to monitor school-issued accounts.  BARK for Schools is a powerful but free new monitoring service we are utilizing to help us better protect students both at school and at home.

Providing students access to laptops and email accounts opens up an incredible world of learning opportunities - as well as potential dangers that could impact our students, our staff and the families in our community.  BARK helps us monitor all of the content our students are creating, sharing, and sending through school-issued accounts. This helps us to detect potentially dangerous situations that students may be facing  both in and out of school, including:

  • Cyber-bullying
  • Threats of Violence
  • Predatory Advances
  • Sexual Content
  • Suicidal Idealization

BARK's technology is proven.  In 2018 BARK detected 1.2 million instances of cyber-bullying, 140,000+ communications discussing self-harm or suicidal idealization, nearly 100 student conversations with sexual predators, and 51 potential acts of violence in schools.

If you would like more information, please contact us by calling the school.  Thank you for helping us keep our students safer online and in real life.

Sincerely,

Heidi Thorstenson
District Tech Director

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BARK is an application that sits on the backside of only our GSuite/Google accounts (waostudent.org).

We do NOT filter any personal accounts with BARK. Only school issued accounts are filtered.  

If they use their waostudent.org account on their cell phones and/or other personal devices, it will be filtered.  

If they use a different email like gmail.com or yahoo.com, it is NOT filtered with BARK.