Will Brick Teachers Be 'Unfriending' Students?

Are your children “Facebook friends” with one or more of their teachers? That may change after this week.

All school districts in New Jersey are required to put in place policies governing electronic communications between students and district staff members by the end of this week, under a law passed earlier this year and signed by Gov. Chris Christie.

The law, S411, went into effect April 24 and gave districts 120 days to come up with a policy, according to the text of the law. The intent is to “prevent improper communications between school employees and students made via e-mail, cellular phones, social networking websites, and other Internet-based social media.”

An Aug. 19 letter from the state Department of Education, pointed out the requirement to school districts, saying those that hadn’t put a policy in placed needed to do so.

The law, first introduced as a bill in 2012, was prompted a number of incidents of inappropriate relationships between teachers and students where the prime means of communicating as through cell phones or social media. And while some districts in the state had enacted policies already, not all had.

“We want to make it mandatory,” state Sen. Diane Allen (R-Burlington), one of the bill’s sponsors, said back in April in an NJ.com article on the day the bill was set for a final vote.

The Manchester Township Board of Education approved its policies -- one for teaching staff, and a separate one for support staff -- on Wednesday night, banning all electronic communications between staff members and students with very limited exceptions, Superintendent David Trethaway said.

The policy does not apply to staff members communicating with their own children who are students in the district, Trethaway said. Exceptions also can be granted when the district is notified of the family relationship between a student and a staff member, say a teacher is the uncle or aunt of a student.

And the policy includes limited exceptions for things like sports teams or field trips, when a staff member needs to be able to communicate directly with students via text message. But the policy imposes tight rules on those situations, with approval from the superintendent needed, and dictates that the messages must go to every member of the team or activity.

Teachers are allowed to communicate with students through the district’s Edline website, for professional purposes only, and only with the entire group, the policy says.

Teachers and support staff are not allowed to be “friends” with their current students on Facebook or other social media sites, the policy states, but it doesn’t stop there: Any staff member who is connected to current students through social media must immediately unfriend those students.

Furthermore, the policy says a staff member who receives a friend request from a student, or who receives email from a student on the staff member’s personal email account, must report that to the school district.

For the situations where teachers and staff are allowed to communicate with students electronically, the policies lay out a list of things considered inappropriate, from obvious things such as sexual language or jokes to less-obvious things such as discussing personal or confidential infomration about another student or staff member.

Dan Staples, president of the Manchester Township Education Association, said he couldn’t comment on the policy because he had not had time to read it. ”That’s why I asked for it during the meeting,” he said, “because I hadn’t seen it.”