Parents should share in the responsibility for making sure they and their kids act appropriately on the internet when doing school-related work or business, says the chair of the School District 43 board of education.
With the district moving toward personalized learning and more electronic devices being brought to school, the district needs a policy that clearly lays out expectations of students and parents, Melissa Hyndes said, and she would like to see that policy developed within a year.
"Parents need to fully understand what the expectations are of using a device and using technology within the school ground," she said.
The policy could also extend to email correspondence, which is subject to Freedom of Information rules, and thus public not private.
Appropriate use of the internet has long been a concern of the school district, which has been leading-edge in the province in terms of providing schools with wireless access. The district has a code of conduct and internet use policies, and is creating a Digital Citizenship guide, but Hyndes wants to see an "over-arching policy" that governs all internet content and said she would like to see it developed in concert with the district's new Learning Without Boundaries vision.
Among the many issues of which people need to be aware, she said, are privacy issues and cyberbullying between students.
"There needs to be things out there around accountability, things people should think about before they send that email or communication," said Hyndes, a Port Moody trustee.
There could be times when parents don't know what's going on and Hyndes said she hopes a policy would start that conversation.
If a child is "locked up in a room for five hours, you don't know what he's doing or she's doing, maybe you should know what they're doing," she said.
Parents will be involved in developing the new policy through District Parent Advisory Council representation, she said.
The district is also doing what it can to block inappropriate content from being downloaded with new tools that will filter it out. At a meeting Tuesday, the board was informed about ways the district will be protecting and optimizing its network.
But it doesn't have eyes everywhere.
Last year, SD43 officials were shocked to find pornographic images linked to commonly used school district search terms and had to get lawyers involved in getting the images removed. A man in the U.K. was apparently the source. A concerned parent reported the images and they were eventually removed.
