{"id":1389,"date":"2014-10-10T05:29:14","date_gmt":"2014-10-10T09:29:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shorebeat.com\/brick\/?p=1389"},"modified":"2014-10-10T12:04:44","modified_gmt":"2014-10-10T16:04:44","slug":"brick-school-board-debates-staff-social-media-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/2014\/10\/brick-school-board-debates-staff-social-media-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"Brick School Board Debates Staff Social Media Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Computers<\/a>

Computers and social networking. (Photo: Daniel Nee)<\/p><\/div>\n

Members of Brick Township\u2019s Board of Education spent two hours debating what will eventually become the district\u2019s social media policy at a meeting Thursday night, with many offering vastly differing opinions but ultimately coming to find common ground.<\/p>\n

A state law passed earlier this year mandates school districts adopt a social media policy. Brick\u2019s board introduced a draft policy this summer but has yet to formally adopt it, as members have voiced varying opinions as to how restrictive the policy should be. Some members favored a very restrictive approach, where no staff members of the district can interact with students on personal social media accounts, exchange text messages with students or communicate with them on their personal cell phones.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, some members of the board favored more of a hands-off approach.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t like the impression it gives to our staff, that we\u2019re not trusting them to act appropriately with our students,\u201d said board member Michael Conti, of formally disallowing communication over social media between students and staff. \u201cI think we should extend professional courtesy to our staff of knowing what the limits are.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Karyn Cusanelli, another board member, said having a stricter social media policy can protect teachers as much as students, especially since the school district has no legal way to access records on a third party website such as Facebook if a student or parent makes an allegation of misconduct.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf, God forbid, a teacher is accused, we need to be able to go in and either find out what happened or see that it didn\u2019t happen,\u201d said Cusanelli. \u201cWe\u2019re putting this together in a way that protects the staff and students. If it saves one child from being victimized or one teacher from being falsely accused, it\u2019s worth it, and that\u2019s where I\u2019m coming from with this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Board member Frank Pannucci, Jr. agreed there should be limits, but said there should be exceptions made in the case of a project where a teacher wants to incorporate social media into a class, such as a marketing class.<\/p>\n

\u201cObviously, if something happens, you deal with it,\u201d Pannucci said. \u201cIf a teacher does choose to do that type of lesson, you\u2019ll have to have permission from the parents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, Cusanelli said, there is the potential for legal problems to come about if one student bullies another using the social media website outside of class, an issue that has come up before.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there\u2019s inappropriate things being posted by students, I wouldn\u2019t want a teacher to have a career jeopardized,\u201d she said. \u201cI would hate to see a teacher be expected to police this 24\/7.\u201d<\/p>\n

James Baio, the school district\u2019s information technology manager, told board members that education-specific applications that can be run on district servers exist, which could effectively replace many of the educational components of Facebook and other social media sites. The district, if its leaders choose, could roll out Microsoft SharePoint, a web-based application that features numerous communication and collaboration tools that could be monitored by the district, which would have a record of all the activity of both students and staff.<\/p>\n

\u201cStudents can collaborate, blog with the teacher, submit homework, and get access to lesson content put up by the teacher,\u201d Baio said. \u201cThis is all logged, it\u2019s all tracked and archived, so if we need to go back, we can do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baio cited a lack of access to logged information as one of the biggest pitfalls of allowing student and teacher interaction on third party sites such as Facebook.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhether you register with a personal Gmail account or a district provided e-mail, you\u2019re accepting the rules of that site as an individual,\u201d Baio said. \u201cThe board would not have the right to get any of that data unless you went through legal means to request it. Yes, we want to give the students that experience \u2026 but it should be in a closed, secured environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

There have also been issues with staff and students interacting on Facebook in the past, some district officials said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Facebook mechanism has been a way for people to get around things,\u201d Dr. Richard Caldes said. \u201cThere should not be a conversation going on between students and employees.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve seen kids destroyed by stuff that\u2019s put out there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

After the debate over social and education-related communication between students and teachers came a more pragmatic issue: coaches who text their players about practice schedules, or just some words of encouragement before or after a game.<\/p>\n

\u201cI check with my players constantly on how they\u2019re doing in school, making sure they\u2019re doing their homework,\u201d said Don Marino, a coach on the Brick Township High School freshman football team who is not otherwise employed as a teacher in the district. \u201cI\u2019m their coach, but I\u2019m also their coach in life. Most coaches and teachers earn that respect.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marino said he has often had students come to him for advice and would not be happy with a regulation that could curtail such open communication.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would hope that they would be able to speak to a coach or a teacher about something they\u2019re afraid to come to their parents about,\u201d Marino said.<\/p>\n

Tim Puglisi, president of the Brick Township Education Association, the union which represents the district\u2019s teachers, said he preferred a policy that would provide protection to both students and staff.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe cannot protect [teachers] who overstep their boundaries,\u201d he said. \u201cBut sometimes, they\u2019re innocent. Sometimes it\u2019s an irate parent who is angry because their child did not get playing time. Sometimes it\u2019s because their child got a \u2018D\u2019 on their report card. They just go after the person,\u201d Puglisi said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf my teachers are protected by this, and the kids are protected by this, I love it,\u201d he said, adding that in a more controlled setting rather than a third party website, teachers would likely be in a better position to put a stop to issues such as cyber-bullying.<\/p>\n

Following the lengthy debate, board members seemed to come to a consensus that utilizing tools such as SharePoint and other apps and solutions represented the middle ground \u2013 teachers would be able to use tools otherwise available on social media sites in a setting where the activity is controlled by the district and logged.<\/p>\n

The board also agreed that, until such a system is launched, parental permission could be granted to allow communication between students and staff in situations where it is necessary, such as in sports or co-curricular activities.<\/p>\n

A final draft proposal of a social media policy is likely to be up for a vote at the board\u2019s next meeting, scheduled for Oct. 23 at 7 p.m. at Brick Township High School.<\/p>\n

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Members of Brick Township\u2019s Board of Education spent two hours debating what will eventually become the district\u2019s social media policy at a meeting Thursday night, with many offering vastly differing opinions but ultimately coming to find common ground. A state law passed earlier this year mandates school districts adopt a social media policy. Brick\u2019s board […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1390,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13],"tags":[41,24,400],"class_list":["post-1389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-brick-schools","tag-board-of-education","tag-brick-nj-news","tag-social-media-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/social_media.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pgt2Ft-mp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}