Employee personal communication with students, in all forms including oral and nonverbal shall be appropriate and consistent with Board policy.  Personal communication shall be deemed to be inappropriate if such communication is sexual in nature; is sexually suggestive; suggests romantic activity with student or students; or is otherwise inconsistent with Board policy.  Violation of this provision will result in disciplinary action up to and including dismissal.

Communications between employees and students will be primarily direct, oral or written in nature.  Employee’s must use district provided forms of communication (such as email addresses, district-sponsored webpages, social networking sites, and other information sharing resources) when available. Exceptions to electronic communications outside of district provided resources must be requested in writing (citing the name of the student and the reason for the request) and approved by the Building Principal and Technology Department. (I.E. Sunday school teacher uses social networking to provide information about upcoming church-related events and/or non-school sponsored coach uses text messaging to communicate information with players.) Such notification is not required where the communication is between the teacher and his/her children or siblings.

A staff member’s supervisor may authorize a staff member to communicate with students using the staff member’s personal telephone numbers to organize or facilitate a district-sponsored class or activity if the communication is determined necessary or beneficial, if the district-sponsored form of communication is not available, and if the communication is related to the class or activity. The district will provide information to the parents/guardians of students participating in classes or activities for which personal electronic communications have been approved. Staff members will be required to send the communications simultaneously to the supervisor. Staff members are required to provide their supervisors with all education-related communications with district students upon request.

Employee’s communication with students and/or teacher’s electronic media must be made available to the student’s parents/guardians. 

The District does not have sufficient staff to monitor every communication between employees and students and does not, therefore, commit to monitoring such communication.  Nonetheless, where there is reason to believe that an employee has inappropriately communicated with a student(s) they may require the teacher to provide access to the specific communication in question.