Consider some real scenarios regarding students’ use of social media determine how your school would respond:
- A student makes several posts on his MySpace page that he will kill not only the people he hates, but a few more random;
- A group of students create a website chronicling daily life at school that contains racist and offensive comments and makes sexually explicit comments about female classmates; and
- A high school student creates a fake profile of her principal, using the principal’s picture from the school website, which used crude content, disparaging remarks about the principal and his family and made allegations regarding his sexuality.
Today’s students have been raised with the ability to use computers from their birth. As a consequence of the growth of social media sites, the students’ technical sophistication more often than not outpaces their maturity and ability to use such tools responsibly. The statistics from 2012 are staggering: monthly active users on Facebook total nearly 850 million; there were 175 million tweets sent from Twitter every day in 2012; and more than 5 million photos are uploaded to Instagram everyday. Students’ personal use of social media has already begun to impact schools, through cyber-bullying, threats of violence, disrespect of teachers and administrators, which have resulted in suspensions but also has resulted in lawsuits for the school’s response to students’ use of social media. Districts are forced to walk a fine line between harnessing students’ use of social media to further the education mission while simultaneously not violating their rights to use such media.
To help schools address the students’ use of social media, SLRMA has prepared its District Social Media/Electronic Communication Practice and Policy: Self-Audit Checklist and Best Practices on the Use of Social Media and Electronic Communication for School Districts. In this Part 1, immediately available for download, we address Student Social Media Policies. Coming later this year, in Part 2, we address Administrator Social Media Policies. The use of this checklist will immediately help your school contend with an already contentious issue.