The system will also give Huntsville City Schools Superintendent Casey Wardynski and district administrators the ability to punish students for posting videos of fights in school, a measure at some believe is designed to hide the district's failings, AL.com reports.

The new social media tracking effort builds on a program launched by Wardynski in 2014 that tracked the social media accounts of about 600 students, unbeknownst to them, the school board, or the ACLU. Wardynski reworked the program and debuted new 2016 procedures this week in a video posted to the district's website.

"We're going to implement a procedure that directly addresses an area that's become a real concern again," Wardynski said in the video, "which is how violence in our schools – how threats to our schools – interact with social media, and how social media can play a role, if we pay attention to it, in heading off problems."