Meta just expanded its Instagram School Partnership Program to pipe the platform directly into student life at nearly 17,000 American schools — one month after settling lawsuits alleging the company deliberately designed its apps to addict children.

The timing tells you everything. Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion over 10 years to 52 attorneys general who accused the company of hooking kids on its platforms. Now, instead of retreating, Zuckerberg's operation is embedding deeper into the school day with institutional blessing — and parents are systematically cut out of the loop.

The program launched last year through education groups ISTE and ASCD, starting as a tool for educators to report bullying directly to Instagram. It has since ballooned. Schools now get Channels where only administrators can post updates for followers, including parents and the local community. Students get School Stories and Notes visible only to verified classmates, a directory of clubs and teams, and the ability to browse a list of classmates on Instagram and add a school banner to their profile.

Before any of this, students must verify their identity through UNiDAYS — a third-party student verification service. That means another corporate entity now sits between parents and their children's data, collecting information to grant access to a social media platform inside a public school ecosystem.

Here is the parental rights problem: Meta says parents receive a notification when their teen joins or leaves a school program, but only if they use Meta's Family Center. There is no described standalone consent mechanism. A parent who doesn't use Meta's tools — who may not even have an account — gets nothing. The company says parents can block Instagram during school hours through Teen Accounts settings. That's an opt-out buried in a settings menu, not a consent gate.

School staff do retain content control. Administrators can remove club accounts, Stories, and Notes. Reports from partner schools go to the front of Instagram's review queue. Meta says the tools are built for use outside lesson time.

What neither Meta nor the education groups have disclosed: the financial terms. Nearly 17,000 schools have signed up, according to TNW, but what Meta pays for this pipeline — and what data flows back through the verification and engagement system — remains opaque. The settlement with state attorneys general requires daily time limits for teens. The school partnership program, which normalizes Instagram as an institutional school communications tool, pulls in the opposite direction.

CBS News, the other outlet on this beat, covered a vocational barber program at Skyline High in Dallas — a story about students earning licenses and gaining real skills. The contrast is sharp: one school program teaches a trade; the other funnels minors into a data-harvesting social media ecosystem that just paid $18 billion to settle claims it targeted children.

Meta settled for addicting kids, then walked into their schools. The question isn't whether 17,000 administrators signed on — it's what they signed away, and whether any parent was ever asked.