No Social Media Policy for Mansfield Schools

The Mansfield School Committee voted 4-0 (Vice Chair Lisa Losiewicz absent) on Tuesday against creating a social media policy.

“It’s been kicking around for a while,” Committee Chair Michael Trowbridge said. “I just wanted to put it to bed one way or another.”

A social media policy in a school dictates and advises the behavior of students, teachers and alumni on social networking Web sites. Mansfield had not come to any formal agreement of what the policy could or would have entailed, but a growing number of Massachusetts schools have similar policies concerning social media, but still many others, like Mansfield have not.

“Many schools have struggled with the fact that [the policy] must be negotiated,” Mansfield Superintendent Brenda Hodges said. “You get bogged down.”

Norton, for instance, , which states, among other stipulations, that students and teachers cannot communicate on social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter and also through other media, such as cell phones. Norton's policy also strongly advises against alumni and current students from corresponding.

The measure was not only to keep appropriate student-teacher boundaries in the digital world, but also to keep teachers' and administrators private lives private. For instance, a Facebook photo of a teacher drinking an alcoholic beverage, according to the Norton policy, would cross both above stipulations.

The school committee, while in agreement with most such policies in Massachusetts, agreed that while the logic is sound, Mansfield schools have not had an issue of this kind to merit such a policy.

“The thing is, if we had issues [with social media] it might be a different story, but we haven’t,” Trowbridge said.

“It’s kind of like we’d be doing it just to do it,” school committee member Kiera O’Neil said.