Cobb County’s schools superintendent arrived at 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 before tragedy unfolds.
But how much will it cost and who is doing the work? Though the program was underway, Superintendent Chris Ragsdale was reluctant to say.
Questions about Cobb County’s new threat assessment program began swirling Oct. 17 as soon as representatives from the secretive company conducting the work stepped up to the lectern in Marietta.
A man identifying himself as a former Navy SEAL named Rob told the board 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 step out of the shadows,” Rob said, though he and his colleagues would not give their last names.
This much they would reveal: At least four people claiming ties to national intelligence agencies and federal law enforcement had begun assessing security at Cobb schools, starting with the buildings at three unidentified campuses. They laid out lofty goals of analyzing students’ data and online activity and identifying safety risks before they arise. They said they believe the methods used to monitor foreign adversaries could work in school hallways and classrooms, too.
What the company and the district wouldn’t say at the meeting was what the company is called or how much the district is spending. Ragsdale said he didn’t think the school board needed to vote on the arrangement. He said he’d only tell the board about the details in private.
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 “intelligence community members” whose work requires anonymity for their own safety. Servius Group has described itself in the past as a private travel security firm providing former special forces personnel to the wealthy.
In response to written questions, the district said it doesn’t have a contract with Servius. But at last week’s board meeting, Ragsdale said the arrangement isn’t intended as a short-term engagement.
The superintendent called the company’s presentation “the beginning of a long journey.” He said the district brought in Servius as a means of “partnering with the intelligence community” to put Cobb “at the tip of the spear” for school safety.
Ragsdale had promised a public presentation on efforts to bolster the district’s threat assessments in September. Parents had called 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 longtime Cobb County administrator who became superintendent in 2015, said the district would shield the details of its security efforts from public view. This month, Ragsdale said basic details about the project would be kept secret if the spending ever needs to be approved by the board.
“The board will know,” the superintendent said, “but it will not be publicized exactly what or who is going to be doing the job.”
At the meeting, Sarver was joined by Michelle, a self-described counterintelligence analyst; Robert, who said he was a “socio-cognitive scientist”; and Courtney, who said she was a data scientist. Despite the safety concerns, all appeared on a public video feed and provided details on their academic and professional backgrounds.
Sarver, for instance, said he was a graduate of the Naval Academy and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. He’d served multiple tours of duty as a SEAL and later worked for Goldman Sachs, Cognizant and Sycamore Tree Capital Partners, he said.
The AJC matched those credentials and the man’s image to Sarver’s LinkedIn page and biographies released by Sycamore Tree and the company publishing his upcoming book. Reached by a reporter by phone, Sarver confirmed he spoke at the school board meeting.
Online, Sarver describes himself as the co-author of an upcoming 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, necessitating a level of anonymity for safety reasons.” He said his company had worked with schools elsewhere in the U.S. 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 to Cobb County’s schools. Already, the group has started to study the physical security of three schools’ facilities, he said, and it intends to assess the rest.
Courtney said the company would monitor students’ threat levels using 16 indicators such as mental health crises, gang activity and violence at home, though she said she couldn’t detail them all. Courtney said the firm would apply artificial intelligence to data on bullying, student absenteeism and online harassment. And Robert said they would conduct a “cognitive analysis” of students to identify early warning signs.
In a statement a week later to the AJC, the district said Servius would only get basic school directory information such as what schools share with the 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 the U.S. special forces and a federal task force seeking to disrupt fentanyl distribution, claimed to have predicted Russia invading Ukraine and China sending warships into U.S. waters by studying changes in their leaders’ language.
In 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 this would help the district stay “left of launch,” the Servius representatives said, using a military term for preempting an attack. By comparison, they said, most approaches to school safety are reactive, like seeking to limit the damage of a shooting with locked doors, hardened walls and armed officers.
“When the event happens, it’s too late,” Ragsdale said.
The Apalachee shooting set off a wave of threats against schools across Georgia. While many of them proved to be hoaxes and pranks, they sowed chaos and confusion at a moment when the state was reeling from the deadliest outburst 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 one costing tens of thousands of dollars to respond to and causing thousands of students to miss school.
“The sooner we can identify threats before they disrupt schools for 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 project’s details, said the presentation “definitely raised more questions than it provided answers.”
“I know parents want to have confidence in the safety measures in their children’s schools, and I think more details on the company, the scope of their work, and their cost are needed,” Sayler said in an email. “Right now the vagueness of ‘data scraping’ is not instilling confidence.”
Ragsdale did not answer board members’ questions at the meeting about the program’s cost or scope. The district told the AJC it’s using funds from a state security grant to pay for the work.
State lawmakers voted this year to give school districts $47,124 per school to spend on security initiatives. In Cobb, which enrolled more than 100,000 students last year across 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.
Exactly how much it has spent with Servius, it did not say.
Credit: Natrice Miller / Natrice.Miller@ajc.com
Credit: Natrice Miller / Natrice.Miller@ajc.com
