The Wrong Authority

How do you attempt to keep kids safe from the devastating impact of pervasive cyber-bullying?  

I would presume that it involves building lifelong healthy relationships with your kids, which includes teaching them about the both the dangers and benefits of online presence and how to interact healthily online, including setting boundaries in terms of both what you disclose and when you are on.  

Or, your school district could hire an outside firm to monitor your kids’ public online activity.

A search of the school district’s web site produced only a brief mention in the minutes of a meeting of this arrangement.  No definition is given for the nature of the services to be provided, what sorts of information will warrant being flagged, how that information will be shared with the school district, how it will be stored and for how long, and who will have access to it.  If the monitoring is going on only for students over the age of 13 (according to the news article) then parents needn’t even be made aware of this.  No mention in the district handbook would give any indication that it was occurring.  

Monitoring should occur.  But monitoring is the responsibility of the parents, not the school.  Parents have the best ability to interpret and contextualize what they see their child doing and saying online.  There is no indication of how this information might be used to further educate or reprimand a student.  

Kids need guidance, and that requires involvement and oversight, among many other things.  But they need these most from the people God gave them to provide it – their parents.