Editorial: All high schools need social media policies

When social media, students and teachers collide — inappropriate behavior is an avoidable outcome.

Plum High School, the only high school in the Plum Borough School District, faced a string of sexual assault cases when three of its male teachers were charged with carrying on inappropriate sexual relationships with their female students. Criminal affidavits indicated that the teachers used social media to contact alleged victims.

In response, the Plum school board will research and implement a policy that will limit social media contact between students and teachers at the end of December.

“The crisis and the egregious acts that happened in our district, it all began with social media,” school director Tom McGough said during a board policy committee meeting on Tuesday, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Social media has leaked into the educational system — a leak school systems can’t entirely plug. What schools can control, however, are the boundaries of its spread of influence, which they can achieve by utilizing it solely as an educational tool.

Social media platforms can help students craft connections with their teachers. A 2013 Pearson Learning Solutions survey found that 78.9 percent of students believe that the use of elearning and mobile technologies increased the teacher and student communication.

But these connections need appropriate boundaries.

In 2012, New York City issued its first social media guidelines for teachers in the public school system. The set of guidelines is not an outright ban, but is rather aimed at making teachers aware of the importance of maintaining distance between personal and professional accounts. Plum should incorporate a similar set of guidelines in its policy and define boundaries, but not erase connections between students and teachers.

Schools shouldn’t only examine these boundaries following harmful incidents like the sexual assaults that occurred at Plum — every school should have a policy related to social media use, regardless of whether or not the school has experienced its effects.

And when it comes to Plum, social media wasn’t the real problem and doesn’t provide the fix-all solution.

Their policy initiative is a good first step for addressing inappropriate relations between teachers and students, but they should confront the root of the issue by reinforcing their faculty training on this subject.

According to the Post-Gazette, solicitor Lee Price said the  school district should consider training the staff to recognize predators, but the school should also establish new policies to train students about appropriate relationships and how to file reports through the school’s anonymous tip line.

Plum should take advantage of these resources and keep educators from taking advantage of their students.