Sixty minutes. That’s how long it took for a private Snapchat message to travel from Kristen Volpe’s phone to the FBI to the deputies standing in her elementary school hallway. On January 29, 2025, the 22-year-old student teacher at John L. Hensey Elementary in Washington, Illinois, vented to her boyfriend and two roommates — three people total — after a student closed her laptop mid-class and wiped her lesson plan. She referenced shooting the student or the school. She meant it as a frustrated joke. Snapchat’s algorithm didn’t get the humor.
No student reported her. No parent. No coworker. The flag was entirely automated. Snapchat’s policy permits voluntary emergency disclosures to law enforcement — no warrant required — when the platform determines imminent harm exists. The algorithm makes that initial call. Think of it like your Ring doorbell deciding to call 911 on its own, except the doorbell is reading your text messages.
As a teacher you should be smart enough to know there is no private conversation to be had on Snapchat. She learned a valuable lesson about her lack of privacy.
To be fair to her, she’s 22, and a trainee.
Being brought up from day one in a surveillance state probably makes it easy to forget that every action is being watched
Not just that… I’ve met plenty of teachers that were almost completely tech-illiterate and that includes to some degree a few that even taught tech-related classes. Being a teacher doesn’t magically mean you know everything, even within the field you’re specialized in.
Very true, I know plenty of professionals that aren’t the most well versed in their specialist topic.
There’s also a case to be made for the sheer lack of funding going into education that leads to situations where teachers aren’t getting the training they need to be as knowledgeable as possible.