Yorkville School District to draft guidelines for teachers' social media usage

If you’re a parent in the Yorkville School District, you might start seeing your child’s teacher online more often starting next school year.

District officials want teachers to start being more active on social media and on the web in interacting with students and parents, but they are drafting guidelines to keep everyone on the same page.

Kristine Liptrot, the district’s director of communications and community engagement, said all of the district’s buildings have their own Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, but that each school uses the platforms differently. And school buildings also have social media profiles for clubs, athletics, and other extracurriculars, she said.

“One of the things we’ve done with the new strategic plan that we adopted last year was to take a look at the types of communication that we’re using and be more consistent, from teacher to teacher from building to building across the district,” she said. “So if you’re a parent you are getting the same type of communication as a third grade parent in another building.”

Liptrot said the goal for next school year is to help "teachers figure out how to best communicate with their classrooms."

Before that process begins, Liptrot said the district wants to put policies in place related to teachers using social media.

“We do have a number of (teachers) who use social media now and use it responsibly, but for those who are a little more timid about getting involved in that, we wanted to give them some guidelines,” she said.

Anything the district puts on its official websites must now comply with new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines mandated by the Americans With Disabilities Act, Liptrot said.

“Those rules have gotten stricter just this year with the accessibility regulations,” she said. “So we wanted to make sure anything that was going out with the district’s name follows those accessibility procedures. We’re still doing some tweaking on some of that. So some of the plans to communicate may be delayed because we need to take a look at the teacher web pages now to make sure they’re accessible.”

The guidelines will also include how to use social media in their personal life versus professional life, Liptrot said. The guidelines will include what rules to put in place for people commenting on their profiles, like not using vulgarity or being respectful.

“We do allow comments on our site, which I know a lot of the other districts don’t do,” she said. “Our community has been very positive and considerate when replying.”

They will also have guidelines answering frequent questions on issues such as "friending" students, personal messaging students, and in general communicating with students via social media, she said.

Liptrot said the district also wants to ensure that teachers don't leave out parents who may not use social media platforms when they post important information.

“Facebook and Twitter are great, but not everybody is on Facebook or Twitter,” she said. “As a classroom teacher, you need to be able to communicate to all your parents.... we don’t want any parent to be left out of information because they might not subscribe to a social media platform."