Cobb County, Georgia, schools hire secret company to monitor threats

(TNS) — The Cobb County schools superintendent came to this month’s board meeting with a bold announcement: The district would use national intelligence methods to detect threats on campus, he said, touting an ambitious initiative to intervene sooner for the tragedy to unfold.

But how much will it cost and who will do the work? Although the program was already underway, Superintendent Chris Ragsdale was reluctant to say so.

Questions about Cobb County’s New Threat Assessment Program It began spinning on October 17 as soon as representatives of the secret company doing the work took the stand in Marietta.

A man who identified himself as a former Navy SEAL named Rob told the board that he was the company’s CEO. He said he and his colleagues wanted to “keep ourselves and our company anonymous for security reasons,” citing “the sensitive nature of our work.”

“Today we came out of the shadows,” Rob said, although he and his colleagues did not want to give their last names.

Here’s what they would reveal: At least four people who claimed to have ties to national intelligence agencies and federal authorities had begun evaluating safety in cobb schoolsbeginning with the buildings of three unidentified campuses. They set ambitious goals of analyzing student data and online activity and identifying security risks before they arise. They said they believe the methods used to monitor foreign adversaries could also work in school hallways and classrooms.

What the company and the district did not say at the meeting was what the company is called or how much the district spends. Ragsdale said he did not believe the school board needed to vote on the agreement. He said he would only tell the board the details privately.

But after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution identified the man as Rob Sarver and contacted him for comment, the school district acknowledged that the mysterious company is Servius Group, which it described as a group of “members of the intelligence community” whose job requires anonymity on your own. security. Servius Group has described itself in the past as a private travel security company that provides special forces personnel to the rich.

In response to written questions, the district said it does not have a contract with Servius. But at last week’s board meeting, Ragsdale said the deal is not intended to be a short-term commitment.

The superintendent described the company’s presentation as “the beginning of a long journey.” He said the district hired Servius as a way to “partner with the intelligence community” to put Cobb “at the tip of the spear” of school safety.

Ragsdale had promised a public presentation on efforts to strengthen the district’s threat assessments in September. Parents had asked for more information about safety initiatives after a shooter at Apalachee High School in Winder killed two students and two teachers.

At the time, Ragsdale, a former Cobb County administrator who became superintendent in 2015, said the district would hide details of its security efforts from public view. This month, Ragsdale said basic details about the project would be kept secret if the board ever needs to approve spending.

“The board will know,” the superintendent said, “but exactly what or who will do the work will not be made public.”

At the meeting, Sarver was joined by Michelle, a self-described counterintelligence analyst; Robert, who said he was a “sociocognitive scientist”; and Courtney, who said she was a data scientist. Despite security concerns, they all appeared in a public video and provided details about their academic and professional backgrounds.

Sarver, for example, said he graduated from the Naval Academy and the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. He had served multiple tours of duty as a SEAL and later worked for Goldman Sachs, Cognizant and Sycamore Tree Capital Partners, he said.

The AJC compared those credentials and the man’s image to Sarver’s LinkedIn page and biographies published by Sycamore Tree and publishing company. your next book. Reached by phone by a reporter, Sarver confirmed that he spoke at the school board meeting.

Online, Sarver describes himself as co-author of a forthcoming book for veterans returning to civilian life and a former executive at wildlife conservation and livestock tracking companies. In a follow-up text message, he said some of Servius’ projects were “sensitive and classified, requiring a level of anonymity for security reasons.” He said his company had worked with schools elsewhere in the United States and abroad.

At the school board meeting, Sarver said his team had been working with the district for months to apply methods they developed with the U.S. military in Cobb County schools. The group has already begun studying the physical security of three school facilities, he said, and intends to evaluate the rest.

Courtney said the company would monitor students’ threat levels using 16 indicators, such as mental health crises, gang activity and domestic violence, although she said she could not detail them all. Courtney said the company would apply artificial intelligence to data on bullying, student truancy and online harassment. And Robert said they would conduct “cognitive analysis” of the students to identify early warning signs.

In a statement a week later to the AJC, the district said Servius would only obtain basic school directory information, such as what schools share with companies that produce yearbooks, textbooks and diplomas.

Servius representatives offered as examples of their past work research in which Robert, who said he had recently worked with U.S. special forces and a federal task force seeking to disrupt the distribution of fentanyl, claimed to have predicted that Russia would invade Ukraine and that China would send warships into US waters studying changes in its leaders’ language.

At Cobb, Ragsdale added, the team could “scrape social media down to the raw data” as they applied their methods to Georgia’s second-largest school district.

All of this would help the district stay “to the left of the launch,” Servius representatives said, using a military term for anticipating an attack. By comparison, they said, most approaches to school safety are reactive, such as trying to limit the damage of a shooting with locked doors, reinforced walls and armed officers.

“By the time the event occurs, it’s too late,” Ragsdale said.

The Apalachee shooting unleashed a wave of threats against schools throughout Georgia. While many of them turned out to be hoaxes and pranks, they sowed chaos and confusion at a time when the state was reeling from the deadliest outbreak of school violence in its history.

In Cobb County alone, the district said it had addressed more than 75 alleged threats to its schools since the Apalachee shooting, each costing tens of thousands of dollars to respond and causing thousands of students to miss school.

“The sooner we can identify threats before they disrupt schools of 100,000 students, the better,” the district said in a statement.

Board member Becky Sayler, a Democrat who asked Ragsdale at the meeting about the details of the project, said the presentation “definitely raised more questions than it answered.”

“I know parents want to have confidence in the safety measures at their children’s schools and I think more details are needed about the company, the scope of its work and its cost,” Sayler said in an email. “Right now, the vagueness of ‘data mining’ does not instill confidence.”

Ragsdale did not respond to board members’ questions at the meeting about the cost or scope of the program. The district told the AJC it is using funds from a state safety grant to pay for the work.

State lawmakers voted this year to give school districts $47,124 per school to spend on security initiatives. At Cobb, which enrolled more than 100,000 students last year in 112 schools, the grants are worth more than $5.2 million.

In response to a follow-up question from the AJC, the district said it had spent less than $200,000 with Servius so far.

He did not say exactly how much he spent with Servius.

Editor’s note: This story was updated with a response from Cobb schools about the money spent so far on the safety program. The response was provided Friday morning, after the story was posted online.

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