- April 18, 2024
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Flagler County kids will soon be able to use the school district’s Internet network to “friend” their school friends on Facebook.
The social networking site will no longer be blocked on campuses under new technology guidelines approved unanimously at a School Board meeting Wednesday.
The change will also allow students to access other media-sharing and social networking websites from school, Technology Director Ryan Deising said.
“It’s really aligning the policy with what we’re doing already,” he said, noting that Twitter and YouTube are already accessible for school-related projects. “They use them for communicating about very appropriate things,” he said.
The policy change will also allow students and staff access to blogs, wikis and cloud services. District staff will continue to monitor use.
Teachers and staff can also ask the district to block access to individual webpages, and the School Board's policy manual contains a bulleted list of activities prohibited on the district’s network, including playing role-playing games, using profanity and using the Internet for illegal activity.
The new policy adds “sexting,” the practice of sending sexually suggestive text messages or images from a cell phone, to the list of prohibited activities.
School Board member Colleen Conklin asked the district to add an additional line prohibiting cyber-bullying, and to block the social-networking website ask.fm.
The website, where users can create accounts to anonymously ask and answer questions, has served as a platform for school bullies, including the girls who tormented 12-year-old Lakeland student Rebecca Ann Sedwick before her suicide earlier this month.
Conklin called the website’s content “vile” and urged parents to create an account on the website to monitor what their children are posting there.
“There’s nothing that they can get off of that that would be useful,” Conklin said. “There’s really not.”
The website is also dangerous because kids can be tracked on it, she said. "They think it's anonymous, but if you really want to know who somebody is, you can figure it out."
