I need to tell you about what just happened in Jefferson County, Colorado. Because it is one of the most troubling examples of a school district failing its community that I have seen in a long time.

Last spring, Jeffco Public Schools participated in a pilot program with a student safety company called Gaggle. The company examined district-managed technology, including student Chromebooks and Google accounts, to identify potential safety risks. The audit ran from February to April of 2025. The district received the results in August of 2025.

What did the audit find? Thousands of incidents flagged for concerning content. Cyberbullying. Drug use. Sexual content. And 153 imminent threats. Including a hit list with 15 names on it.

The district did not share this with parents. They did not publish it. They did not hold a community meeting. A parent group called Jeffco Kids First filed a public records request and uncovered the audit. A parent named Jeremy Garst stood up at a school board meeting and said he did not even know the audit existed. He does not think anyone knew.

The district's response was essentially: we already knew about most of this through our other systems, and we handled whatever was new. What their statement did not explain was why the audit was never made public. CBS Colorado asked specifically. They have not received an answer.

And then it got worse. On Wednesday, the district released a follow-up statement acknowledging that Gaggle had been contractually required to delete sensitive student data after sharing findings. The district received confirmation that the data was deleted in October of 2025. But it was not actually deleted. The full data still existed. The district called it a potential privacy violation and said it was taking immediate action.

There is also a direct connection to a real tragedy here. Jefferson County is the same district where a shooting occurred at Evergreen High School last September. Parents are now asking whether the audit results were shared with the sheriff's office during that investigation. The district has not answered that question either.

I have said this many times and I will keep saying it. Parents deserve to know what is happening in their children's schools. Not a sanitized version. Not a press release after the fact. The actual information. A safety audit that finds 153 imminent threats and a hit list is not internal housekeeping. It is information that belongs to the community whose children are in those buildings.

Transparency is not a nice-to-have in school safety. It is essential. The moment a school district starts deciding which safety information parents are allowed to know, it has broken the fundamental trust that makes the whole system work.

Jefferson County parents were failed here. The question now is whether any other district in this country is sitting on similar information and making the same choice to keep it quiet.

Read the full CBS Colorado investigation: cbsnews.com/colorado

Know what safety systems your school is actually using.

The School Safety Dashboard is free, built so every parent can see what is in place and what is not. No guessing.

If a district runs an audit and finds 153 imminent threats and never tells parents, the audit did not make those children safer. Transparency would have.

For Alex. And for all of them.

Max Schachter