Teachers beware

By Anna Mitchell  

DECEMBER 17, 2009 4:25 p.m. (0)

You were drunk at a college party 10 years ago.

And someone had a camera.

Social networking sites – Facebook for most Internet users – have proven treacherous ground for conscientious employees who nevertheless enjoyed their youth. Facebook photos that well-meaning college buddies “tag” with your name are instantly accessible to you and all your carefully chosen friends.

Including, let’s say, your boss.

“Assuming you have privacy online is a myth,” said Mihaela Vorvoreanu, a professor in the graphics technology department at Purdue. “You don’t have it. That’s the safest thing to assume.”

Earlier this fall, a young teacher in Georgia – Ashley Payne – lost her job after her principal saw photos of her holding a beer. Payne was visiting the Guinness brewery in Dublin on vacation.

Greenville County Schools have for two decades maintained a policy that teachers can have a private life – so long as that private life doesn’t interfere with the classroom.

Earlier this week, the school board expanded its correct-behavior-when-not-on-the-clock policy to include material on the Internet.

Approved unanimously and set for final approval in the board’s regular meeting later this month, it holds “the personal life of an employee including the employee's personal use of non-District issued electronic equipment outside of working hours (such as through social networking sites and personal portrayal on the Internet), will be the concern of and warrant the attention of the Board if it impairs the employee's ability to be an effective teacher effectively perform his/her job responsibilities.”

The district’s staff attorney, Doug Web, said he deliberately left the wording vague to avoid “boxing himself in.”

“There’s a balance,” Web said. “There are First Amendment rights, but it can’t impair your ability to do your job.”

Sheila Gallagher is president of the South Carolina Education Association. She said Greenville is the first district she’s heard of to consider such a policy, though her home district (Florence 1) has posted warnings about online content.

“There are two concerns,” she said. “A person’s ability to live their life. Then there’s the whole issue around the profession you’ve chosen and what do your students see?”

Gallagher, on leave from her regular job as a health teacher, said she knows her students look up to her and watch her every move. Lecture a student about how she dresses falls on deaf ears, she said, when that student sees you online wearing a bikini.

“These kids go on the Web and they are looking for their teachers,” she said. “I’m in secondary education, so that’s what they are doing.”

Greenville school board members made no comments about the implications of their policy, but Vorvoreanu said it struck her as too vague and open to abuse as standards for acceptable behavior can vary widely. Judgment about material on the Web should be accompanied by an understanding – within reason – of its intended audience and context, she said.

“We are all going to clean up our profiles, polish and sanitize them to the extent they will be meaningless – without authenticity or personality,” she said.

Greenville Schools spokesman Oby Lyles said the policy’s bottom line is to make employees aware of that what happens outside school can affect how they are perceived inside.

“Our legal counsel felt a need to update the policy based on developing technologies,” he said.