The administration is still taking action after the blocking of Twitter occurred. See the news article about this here.
On Jan. 12, Principal Madelyn Ball sent a letter to the teachers about how the school is addressing the Twitter controversy.
Ball decided to separate the students who have gotten in trouble for inappropriate Twitter usage into “three different categories.” The first group includes kids who said inappropriate things to or about a teacher. The second group is composed of students who openly stated on Twitter that they were tweeting during class. The third group encompasses students who posted things about drugs, alcohol, or sex abuse.
Ball revealed that parents will be notified about everything. “When there is something that is shocking and has come to my attention, I have to share it with parents. Parents will be called and they will know what it is, and then it’s up to the parents with what they want to do with that information,” Ball said.
As of Jan. 30, “The students have been identified and we first dealt with the students that made inappropriate comments about teachers. We’re still in the process of dealing with students that wrote about drugs, alcohol, sex, things like that that we had to make their parents aware of what they were writing about. Not necessarily because this happened in school but because we operate under contract law. As an administration, if we know of a child writing about these sorts of things we have to share it with the parents,” Ball said.
For those students, no school disciplinary action was taken, however parents were called in and shown the tweets.
Thus far, the administration has given detentions to those students who have been identified and proven to be tweeting in class. Because tweets are date stamped only, the administration can only give detentions to students who explicitly state in their tweets that they are tweeting in class.
For those students who have tweeted inappropriately regarding teachers, the administration has sentenced them to suspensions and a disciplinary board in which they will “plead to go back to school,” according to Ball.
Even though the administration is taking action in regards to Twitter, Ball does not think that this will be the end for Internet abuse. “We have had these things with Facebook, and there will be other things,” Ball said.
“We shut down Twitter for now, I’m not going to say we shut down Twitter for good, but it’s shut down right now until we get a handle on this,” Ball said. To listen an audio of the interview with Ball, see above.
Other schools in the area have also had problems with inappropriate Internet usage. Archbishop Curley High School Technology Director Joseph Jancuk said that teachers don’t use Twitter in class, but some of them use Facebook. “Essentially students outside of school must keep Christian values and respect others,” Jancuk said.
Archbishop Curley High School Assistant Principal Jamey Becker said that students who tweet inappropriate things have the same penalties as if they had said the things that they tweeted in school. “Nothing major has ever happened, only some inappropriate student-to-student tweets,” Becker said.
“The only use of Twitter on campus is done by our communications department in conjunction with our media strategy. Twitter is not used in the classroom and social media is typically blocked on campus,” Calvert Hall High School Network Administrator Austin Ewachiw said.
“We strongly discourage the use of social media during school including Twitter and Facebook,” Mercy High School Director of Communications Tess Veloso said. She stated that the punishment is the issue of demerits, but so far, they have had no incidents regarding social media and Twitter.
Amanda Graziano is an Opinion Editor for The Patriot and jcpatriot.com.
Additional reporting by the Patriot staff.