The Lee County School District issued a set of “guidelines” for teachers for the 2010-2011 school year that included cautions when using any kind of electronic communications with their students and suggested that any association with students on social networking sites is inappropriate. Lee County is the first district in Florida to issue such guidelines and may be the first in the nation. The only question the move brings to mind is why it took this long for districts to start implementing such strictures.
Networking sites like Facebook are fraught with potential disasters for any professional, but one can only imagine how dangerous the possibilities are for teachers who are “friends” with their students. In fact, one doesn’t have to imagine. In January, one Pennsylvania teacher was suspended after another district employee posted pictures of her from a bachelorette party on Facebook. The photos, which involved a male stripper, were taken down with in twenty four hours, but the damage was done. The ACLU took up the teacher’s case and managed to get her back pay, but one can only imagine how it damaged the teacher’s authority with her students to have them see pictures of her behaving in a less than professional manner.
“The guidelines weren’t issued from a punitive standpoint, but a proactive one. We don’t want teachers and students to do something they might regret,” said Joseph Donzelli, director of communications and printing services at Lee County Public Schools.
“We’ve heard stories from across the country about people posting things on Facebook that have come back to haunt them. We aren’t the Internet police or Big Brother, we just want our teachers and students to make good decisions — and these guidelines will help them do so,” Donzelli told TechNewsDaily.
While many teachers have taken to using social networking as an easy and effective way to communicate with students, it only seems prudent for these teachers to strictly avoid mixing their online personal lives with those of their students.
