The Cullman County Board of Education has joined a national lawsuit against social media companies for, what they say is, the detrimental effect online activity can have on students’ mental health.

Superintendent Shane Barnette said he estimates the system deals with behavior which can be traced back to social media “on a daily basis” and was eager to be one of the suits early adopters when the option was presented by the school board’s attorney ahead of its June 15 meeting.

“I would say, in our middle schools and high schools we deal with something whether it be self-harm, harming others, bullying or something like that, relative to social media on a daily basis. It ties our administration up and our counsellors,” Barnette said.

The suit is being filed against Meta — parent company of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat — and claims that a lack of appropriate safe guards and addictive qualities have cultivated a mental health crisis amongst today’s students and left school administrators to pick up the pieces.

“What we spend on mental health has increased exponentially every year. A lot of that comes from grants and things like that, but our mental health struggles for our adults and our students are real. We are doing our best as a system to meet those needs, but social media makes that so much harder,” Barnette said.

The plaintiffs in the case — which Barnette said are continuing to grow and includes school systems from across the U.S. — are not alone in their observations. In April U.S. Senator Katie Britt (R-AL) was joined by fellow senators Tom Cotton (R-AR), Brian Schatz (D-HW) and Chris Murphy (D-CN) in introducing a bill targeting the impacts of social media on young children.

The Protecting Kids on Social Media Act would place a minimum age restriction of 13 for users of social media apps and would require parental consent for those under 18. The bill would also restrict the use of algorithms to only users who are over 18-years-old.

In a press release announcing the bill, the senators referenced the CDC’s most recent Youth Risk Behavior Survey which found 57 percent of high school girls and 29 percent of high school boys reported signs of depression in 2021 and one in three high school girls had considered suicide last year. The senators also reference a Bloomberg article linking social media use to a number of teenage suicides.

“There is no doubt that our country is facing a growing mental health crisis and a deteriorating culture of violence. Children and teenagers across our nation are dying, families are being devastated, and our society is withering. The only beneficiaries of the status quo are social media companies’ bottom lines and the foreign adversaries cheering them on. I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to enact the commonsense, age-appropriate solutions needed to tackle this generational challenge,” Britt said in the release.

The lawsuit is being filed in the California state court system and while the CCBOE’s attorney Bishop Colvin will be available to assist with the case, it is being handled by the Beasley Allen law firm in Montgomery along with its national partner law firms.

Barnette said he believes the school systems will be seeking monetary damages for the resources they have allocated to combat mental health in schools, but would personally be happy with a settlement which reforms Meta’s policies.

“My end goal is not so much for us to get any money out of this. If nothing else comes out of this lawsuit, it should require these social media outlets to have some kind of checks and balances that give parents more oversight into what their kids are getting involved in. Something’s got to change,” he said.

Barnette said he is also planning to provide expert training for the system’s families to become educated on the consequences and pitfalls associated with social media.

On Tuesday, Meta add some new parental supervision tools and privacy features to its platforms.

But many of the features require minors — and their parents — to opt in, raising questions about how effective the measures are.

Instagram will now send a notice to teens after they block someone, encouraging them to let their parents “supervise” their account. The idea is to grab kids’ attention when they might be more open to parental guidance.

If a teen opts in, the system will let parents set time limits, see who their kid follows or is followed by, and allows them to track how much time the minor spends on Instagram. It does not let parents see message content.

Instagram launched parental supervision tools last year to help families navigate the platform and find resources and guidance. A sticking point in the process is that kids need to sign up if they want parents to supervise their accounts. It’s not clear how many teen users have opted in and Meta has not disclosed any numbers.

By making the feature optional, Meta says it is trying to “balance teen safety and autonomy” as well as prompt conversations between parents and their children.

Jim Steyer, the CEO and founder of Common Sense Media, called the news a “smoke screen.”

“None of these new features address the negative impact their business model is having on the well-being of kids, including their mental health. We need national privacy laws to protect kids,” Steyer said in a statement.

Such features can be useful for families in which parents are already involved in their child’s online life and activities. Experts say that’s not the reality for many people.

Last month, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned that there is not enough evidence to show that social media is safe for children and teens and called on tech companies to take “immediate action to protect kids now.”

Murthy told The Associated Press that while he recognizes social media companies have taken some steps to make their platforms safer, those actions are not enough. For instance, while kids under 13 are technically banned from social media, many younger children access Instagram, TikTok and other apps by lying about their age, either with or without their parents’ permission.

Murthy also said it’s unfair to expect parents to manage what their children do with rapidly evolving technology that “fundamentally changes how their kids think about themselves, how they build friendships, how they experience the world — and technology, by the way, that prior generations never had to manage,”

“We’re putting all of that on the shoulders of parents, which is just simply not fair,” Murthy said.