BOE aims to set student-teacher communication guidelines

In the era of Facebook, e-mail and other forms of digital communication, the Board of Education (BOE) is working toward adopting policies that would clearly define how students and school employees can socialize with one another.

"The landscape of all these matters is changing very rapidly, whether it's discussion boards, blogs or assignments [teachers post online]," said Brian Fagan, assistant superintendent of curriculum, at Monday night's BOE meeting. "All of these are possible areas for misunderstandings and we're pursuing very actively procedures to make sure we can archive as best as we can these kinds of communications."

There are already school policies in place explaining the type of contact that is inappropriate between students and staff, but if this new policy is adopted by the Board of Education, Superintendent of Schools Elliott Landon wrote in a memo that the guidelines will be "more consistent with our statutory obligations and more explicit with regard to whom it is applicable."

In an interview, Board of Education Chairman Don O'Day said the guidelines were not being reviewed because of any potentially problematic relationships between students and teachers. He's been told there's nothing like that happening in the schools.

Landon said at the board meeting on Monday that he had advised staff to not use their personal e-mail accounts when talking to students, but rather to use their school e-mail account since

everything is archived.

"If they do it on their own account there's no record of what passes between them. They should not use their personal accounts," Landon said. "All communication with students should be through our accounts."

He had advised staff not to use the popular social networking site Facebook to communicate with students, at least for now. His recommendations are not included in the proposed guidelines, but he said that they could be included in an upcoming revision.

"We are looking at ways for teachers to use Facebook accounts to communicate, but so it goes through our system ... so that it's archived," Landon said.

The three pages of proposed guidelines will likely be voted on by the board on March 22.