Do Teacher-Student Facebook Friendships Cross the Line?
Missouri recently passed a law to severely limit online interactions between teachers and their students on social networking sites. It quickly became known as Missouri’s “Facebook Law,” and the state’s teachers union filed suit to block the new regulations from taking effect. A state judge has since struck the laww down as unconstitutional. On Monday, the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch
reports, the state’s lawmakers were debating repealing the
law and replacing it with requirements for school-based
policies.
Meanwhile in Southern California, a school district is being sued
after an assistant football coach sent sexually explicit texts
and photographs to a 13-year-old girl. The coach pleaded guilty
and was sentenced to 113 days in the county jail, according to
the
Los Angeles Times.
What these two stories have in common are issues of boundaries
and common sense.There isn’t anyone who would think the coach’s
behavior was appropriate. But I’m also hard-pressed to come up
with a way that school districts can reasonably predict that an
employee would engage in such reckless and harmful behavior.
As for the so-called Facebook Law, it seems more like an attempt
to mollify community members (including parents) who don’t fully
understand just how pervasive technology is in their children’s
lives. Shutting the door on teacher-student online chats won’t
keep children safe. It will only restrict educators from using a
potentially useful interactive form of communication. That
doesn’t mean online relationships between students and teachers
shouldn’t have limits.
As one teacher told me, “My students aren’t my friends … they’re
my students. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about them, it just
means there should be limits to how much they know about my
private life.”
For parents, keeping children safe isn’t about setting up
artificial barriers to contact, it’s about monitoring the actual
contact children have on a daily basis – with their friends, with
strangers they meet in online gaming forums and … yes … with
their teachers. In other words, it’s about the boundaries — and
common sense.
Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Contact Emily Richmond. Follow her on Twitter @EWAEmily.
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