Due to an impending lawsuit filed January 13 of 2017 by the Attorney General, Jim Hood, in the Circuit Court of Lowndes County, the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science will be shifting away from the use of Google products in the classroom by the start of the new school year.

This lawsuit, intended to curb the alleged misuse of collected student data, hasn’t reached verdict to move the more than 500,000 public education students out of the reach of Google products, which allegedly is using targeting software to advertise to students in the classroom from data taken on these student accounts.

Hood, in a statement made over a year ago said, “Through this lawsuit, we want to know the extent of Google’s data mining and marketing of student information to third parties…”

The latest movement in this lawsuit, however, has been to ask school districts to disembark from the required use of Google products, and MSMS was one of the schools recently contacted from the Attorney General. Google Products commonly used from required Google Accounts by students and faculty are YouTube (a video sharing platform), G-Mail (an email service), Google Docs (a document creating and sharing platform), Google Sheets (a spreadsheet program), Google Forums (a polling program), Google Classroom (a virtual assignment posting, interactive “classroom” program), Google Calendars (an interactive scheduling program) and Google Drive (a cloud based file storage and sharing program).

There is no deadline for MSMS to completely phase out of its required use in the classroom, nor is there a system that the school is looking to change into. The executive director, Dr. Germain McConnell, spoke about this change, and intuitively, about the lack of nuance in it. “We’re simply going to have to move in a different direction. Mr. Rhea is putting a transition plan in place right now so we don’t totally disrupt what we’re doing right now, so we can look at something comparable, so that we can come back in the fall semester, we can still do things we’ve done through the Google suites.”

This shift, however, he admits, doesn’t mean that Google products will be otherwise affected on the school’s network, which, for residents of the school, means that even though Google products won’t be required in the classroom, they will be free for use in and outside of the classroom—their responsibility understanding how Google might be storing and handling their data. He admits that the school still might use Google Calendar because Google products are free, and the cost of other products are a factor.

The issue of a transfer away from Google products comes to the school at a curious time for students, as a new network filter has been implemented. The new filter now requires students to log into the network, and as added, as junior student at the school, Christopher French, stated: “a sense of uneasiness. I mean, I feel as if the school is watching over what I do.”

This issue isn’t lost on McConnell, who says,

He admits, if something, “comes up,” they have the capabilities to look at student’s data. However, without a free system to transfer to and a student body uneasy about overreach of their data from two entities without a voice in the matter, this transitions won’t be easy.