Before the start of the school year, Williamsburg-James City County Schools Superintendent Steven Constantino made a push for employees to use Twitter more often to interact with students and colleagues.
His speech at the district’s convocation in August gave Constantino more than 100 new followers, many of whom were new to Twitter.
Constantino said the push for more social media use among employees is intended to encourage communication, cultivate new ideas and, simply put, understand students better.
“When we consider that our students have never lived in a world that did not know social media, we as a school system have to adapt to our practice to remain current and relevant,” Constantino said in an email to WYDaily in September.
With more employees using social media also came the setting of some ground rules as school board members voted unanimously Tuesday to pass a policy that would govern how an employee uses social media when acting in the capacity of a teacher, administrator, support staff or other employee of the district.
When the employee is posting messages on a social media site for his or her job, the policy applies. When the employee is just posting for personal use and not using accounts specific to WJCC, the policy does not apply.
There are two sections to the policy with the first containing all the expected “don’ts”: don’t break student-staff confidentiality rules; don’t post anything about students who don’t have a media releases; don’t post inappropriate material; don’t post copyrighted material without permission; and make sure to follow all other division rules.
The second part of the adopted policy is based solely around student and staff interactions, telling employees what is an acceptable online information exchange with a student. The section lists things that will determine if an online interaction is improper: subject matter, content, purpose, authorization, timing, frequency, attempts to conceal communication from supervisors or parents, sexual explicitness of any kind and the solicitation of sexual contact or romance.
The WJCC School Board voted 7-0 Tuesday to pass the policy.
