Stephanie Jones

IMAGINE A MOTHER walks into your school administration office with her daughter’s cell phone records. There are multiple pages of calls and text messages from the same number. The parent tells you that she believes that the phone number belongs to a teacher.

You run a quick check and discover the text messages came from the student’s social studies teacher. You call the teacher into your office. He explains that he gives his cell phone number to all of his students to help with homework. You ask about this student specifically. Why would you have a 90-minute phone call with this student at 3 a.m. about homework?

The teacher claims the student called after a fight with her parents, and he just wanted to be supportive. He has a plausible explanation for each call or text at inappropriate times. You ask to see his text messages, but he refuses. You ask the parent to review the student’s text messages, but the student already has deleted them.

Blurred Lines

This scenario has become increasingly common for attorneys working with schools. There is no way to know if the teacher’s communication with this student is appropriate, although the timing of the communication, the extent of the communication and the teacher’s refusal to share the communication with you raises more red flags that you can count. You certainly cannot ignore the implications of the evidence in front of you, but you also have a teacher with employment rights and only circumstantial evidence to make a decision regarding potential discipline. It is a difficult conundrum.

Cell phone technology and social media have blurred the lines between the student-teacher relationship. Students hold more personal access to teachers than ever before. Twenty years ago, a student would never have communicated electronically with a teacher for homework help at home, let alone called, texted or e-mailed a teacher in the middle of the night to discuss family issues. This not only creates the potential that a student and teacher will end up involved in a relationship that neither expected (often the scenario above ends up being just that), but it also creates obstacles to managing classroom expectations and imposing discipline.

To prevent these issues from arising, school districts should enact policies that limit these practices so students, staff and school districts are all protected. The policy should inform staff of the expectation that all communications meet the TAP test: Transparent, Accessible, Professional. A communication that is transparent is one that anyone could read and believe was appropriate. A communication that is accessible can be recalled and shared with administration or parents whenever asked. A communication that is professional limits communications to appropriate topics within the student-teacher relationship and is a communication made at appropriate places and times.

Open Communication

In addition, school districts should seriously limit communication outside the district’s server and/or apps maintained in a district space — that is, no phone calls, social media platforms or apps that connect personal accounts of students and teachers.

School districts also might consider policies that mandate that teachers use only approved technology to communicate with students outside of school time. Apps like Group Me allow adults to communicate with students while being monitored by the school district and parents alike. That said, it is difficult to police staff members when they are using their own technology; yet doing so raises the risks exponentially. That is why it is important to include expectations like the TAP test in policy, as well as professional development opportunities for staff and students alike so all staff members are clearly informed that they can be disciplined for communications that do not meet the test.

In the end, just as if a student fails a test, school staff who fail the TAP test should expect to face consequences and administrators who oversee the policy must be ready to exact disciplinary measures. The risk today is just too high otherwise.

STEPHANIE JONES is a law partner at Kriha Boucek in Oakbrook Terrace, Ill. Twitter: @EdLawSteph1. Sara Boucek, also a partner at Kriha Boucek, contributed to this column.