Yahoo News posted the following AP story: School District to Monitor Student Blogs. My wife is a counselor and psychotherapist working at a school, and I could understand the appeal–students are often willing to post more candidly and personally on their blogs and social networking sites that they would in conversation with an adult.
Why then do most colleges and universities have explicit rules forbidding student affairs staff from participating in sites like FaceBook or MySpace? Paradoxically, it is precisely because of student candor. If a student were to post, say, morbid poetry and then attempt suicide and it were found that school employees had read the poetry and did not act, the school might be held liable. But students post lots of morbid or disturbing work but engage in comparatively little self injurious behavior. And there’s no way even a highly trained professional, like my wife, could separate the dangerous from the banal.
Parents and students interviewed seemed most upset about the invasion of privacy, the inappropriateness of holding students responsible for activities outside of school, and for usurping parental responsibility. I hope that the school board has also considered their liability if students and their families come to expect monitoring? (via Consumerist)
