ORLANDO, Fla. – Orange County school officials are snooping on student and teacher social media accounts looking for “signs of danger” in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other posts.

The school district is using the software Snaptrends to scan thousands of social media posts for key words officials believe will lead them to cyberbullies, troubled teens and illegal activity in area schools, WESH reports.

Parents, however, aren’t exactly thrilled with the district’s use of the relatively new technology, and attended a recent board meeting to vent their frustrations.

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“My privacy issues aren’t with the fact that they’re just out there looking at it, because frankly with social media it’s not private. But what are they going to do with the information they look at?” Cindy Hamilton, co-founder of Opt Out Orlando, told the news site.

“That’s what we’re concerned about.”

School board member Joie Cadle countered that it’s imperative school officials know when students or teachers make threats that may be carried out.

“If they are sitting in a classroom and they are tweeting because they are mad at their teacher or their girlfriend for whatever reason, and there are some threatening words in there, we need to be able to know if it is credible,” Cadle said.

My News 13 reports the new system, which is also used by local police, will be monitored by the school district’s 16-person police force. District officials contend they don’t plan to snoop through private posts or listen in on calls.

“We have no ability to monitor anything that’s posted privately, we have no ability to monitor phone calls or anything like that,” board chairman Bill Sublette said.

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“We felt that that (social media posts are) an important student safety measure,” he said, according to My Fox Orlando. “We have more threats every year. Whether it’s threats to student safety, teacher safety, school safety. Sometimes even a threat to where the student is suicidal.”

“If we, in the interest of protecting our students and teachers, are monitoring the public postings, I don’t know what to say to someone who has a privacy concern about that because that frankly seems so illogical to me,” Sublette said.

Board members told the public at the recent meeting they also plan to hire 11 more police officers soon, something Hamilton apparently feels is unnecessary.

“Why is it that the Orange County Public Schools now needs its own police force as well as social media monitoring program?” she questioned, according to My News 13.

Hamilton said parents deserve to know more details about the social media monitoring.

“We would like to know who do they plan to share that data with and what is the filters involved in collecting the data,” she said. “If they’re out there on social media talking about the possibility of killing themselves, I would really appreciate a phone call instead of an investigation launched into whether or not they’re posting on social media.”

Sublette assured Hamilton and other parents the school board won’t share the information with anyone, “not even board members,” and would notify a parent or guardian immediately if a student is suicidal,” My Fox Orlando reports.