Facebook policy

With the state’s March 1 deadline looming, Carthage School Superintendent Blaine Henningsen presented the draft of a policy to the R-9 Board of Education governing electronic communication between students and school staff.

Henningsen told the board, at its regular meeting Monday, that the policy is less invasive than policies some districts are proposing, but still sets basic ground rules for communication after hours and using technology between students and people working for the school district.

The policy encourages staff to communicate with parents and teachers for education purposes and to “use a variety of effective methods, including electronic communication.”

It also requires that “all electronic or any other communication by staff members to students or parents at any time be professional, acceptable in content to any reasonable person and limited to information that is school-related or is acceptable to both the student and parent.”

“This directive is applicable regardless of whether the method of communication is through district-provided devices or the staff member uses his or her own personal electronic communication devices, accounts, webpages, or other forms of electronic communication,” the draft policy states.

State law
Henningsen told the board that the policy is the result of state laws passed last year requiring that all district write a policy governing electronic communication between staff and students.

An early version of the bill passed the legislature and was signed by the governor after last year’s legislative session, but the Missouri State Teacher’s Association went to court to block the law from taking affect, saying it was to broad in scope.

“The law previously wouldn’t even allow teachers to communicate with their kids, which was silly, so we know people have to communicate with their relatives and we know that we have to be able to use technology to communicate with our students, because that’s the world that they live in,” Henningsen said. “They like technology, they are infatuated with technology, we need to use technology and not ban the use of technology as we’re working with our kids.”

Committee suggestions
Henningsen said he assembled a committee last year of parents, students, teachers, administrators, staff and a school board member to work on the policy, and they came up with a series of suggestions.

• “We need to make sure that we recognize in our policy that technology will change,” Henningsen said. “Technology changes quickly and we need to make sure that we have a way to deal with the change in technology that occur so fast.”

• “Students and teachers both wanted to communicate with each other outside the regular school hours,” Henningsen said. “There are many school districts out there that are saying there can be no communication between students and teachers back and forth after the regular school hours and our folks said that’s silly. Students said I need to communicate with my teacher if I forget my homework, if I forget my book or if we have a meeting and its snowing outside.”

• “They did not want us to limit communication to district-provided technology,” Henningsen said. “We have many venues available through the district, we have email, we have My Tiger Spot, and some other things that are available for our people to communicate back and forth. They don’t want to be limited to just district-provided technology.”

• “They said we need to use common sense and our teachers need to be professional when they’re using technology to communicate with our students,” he said.

• “They did not want any teacher to require the use of technology at home for a class,” he said. “They said it wouldn’t fair to require because not every student has technology at home. They wouldn’t have access to it, it would not be fair to do that so do not go in that direction.”

• “Parents should have the option, if they choose to, to be copied on any communication with teachers and their children,” Henningsen said. “Parents should be able to have the option to opt in and say I want a copy of every communication that goes back and forth.”

• “Our administrators thought it would be a great idea to have written permission from parents so teachers could communicate with their children,” Henningsen said. “We talked a lot about passive permission, which means if I don’t hear from you I assume I can communicate with your child. Our administrators were not for that. We said we want to hear from the parents, we don’t want to have a parent say I didn’t know what was going on.”

Henningsen asked the board to look the policy over, make any suggestions they had to him, and then be ready to vote on a final policy at the next board meeting Feb. 20.