Madison County Schools Superintendent Mitch McGhee said there’s simply too much gray area to put such a policy in place.
“Where are you going to say what you can put on and what you can’t put on a website like that?’” McGhee said. “Right now, we’re officially staying out of that. If we have to deal with it, we will. But, boy, there’s a lot of clarification that needs to be put out there.”
Ashley Payne, a former Apalachee High School teacher, claims she was forced by administrators to resign in August after a parent discovered Payne’s Facebook page.
The page contained a profane word and pictures of the 24-year-old posing with alcoholic beverages. The controversy has since garnered national attention and set off debate regarding privacy issues.
Payne filed a lawsuit against the Barrow County School District a few weeks ago.
Some school systems, including Barrow County, are considering policies regarding their employee’s online behavior.
But Madison County is staying out of the fray right now.
“We don’t have a policy that specifically targets that,” McGhee said. “You’ve got your just general professional practices policy that says they’re supposed to behave appropriately, so that’s it.”
Basically, McGhee said Madison County School System employees know how they’re expected to behave. That includes any online activity.
“It’s kind of what your football coach says, ‘I don’t have a whole lot rules, just one — do right,’” McGhee said. “We expect our folks to do right. We expect our folks to know what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate.”
While the school system doesn’t want to get into monitoring online lives of teachers, McGhee said they should realize that posting personal information online has consequences.
“They (teachers) need to be cognizant of it,” he said. “They need to realize that if they put something out there on a site like that, it can be looked at and it can cause problems.”
Awareness is already out there concerning social networking risks. Colleges are warning graduates to carefully choose what content they include on their social network pages. Large companies, as part of the hiring process, will often investigate online profile of a prospective employee.
Still, the awareness doesn’t stop some from becoming online victims.
The Morgan County Citizen reported last week that someone started a Facebook page using the name of Morgan County High School football coach Bill Malone without the coach’s knowledge or permission.
The person claiming to be Malone started to “friend” other users.
The Morgan County Touchdown Club had to launch Facebook campaign alerting users that an imposter was using Malone’s name.
“That’s the scary thing,” McGhee said. “That’s like all the anonymous blogs. Anybody can say anything they want, and there’s no accountability to it, and that’s tough.”
While danger exists, social networking sites are becoming a popular method of distributing information, even among schools. In fact, Madison County High School even maintains its own Facebook page, which has 880 “fans.”
Like all things, social networking must be used with discretion, McGhee said.
“It’s a great communication tool, just teachers have got to realize that they’re in the public eye and behave accordingly, and the vast majority of them do that,” McGhee said.
