Survey+of+AUP+Language


 * A Survey of AUP Language in Pennsylvania District Policies (Fred)**

Presenter: Carrie Gardner, PhD Affiliation: Kutztown University

Origin of this workshop was a grad class she taught in which she found all of her students were classroom teachers. They asked her to change her syllabus as none of the things she intended to teach could be used in their classrooms as their districts blocked them. She could not believe that was so and assumed they were mistaken and asked them to go back and check. Again, answer came back these things were blocked - but no one had a clear idea of why. So she decided to check into AUP's in Pennsylvania's districts.

Collected a sampling of 20 of the 501 school districts in the state. She tried to get a sample from all geographic areas, from as many Intermediate Units as possible, from a variety of rural, urban and suburban, rich and poorer districts. These were not easily collected - she tried websites and found no consistency in how they were named or whether or not they appeared. This was her sample:


 * = School District of Philadelphia ||= Bethelehem Area School District ||= Avon Grove School District ||= Butler Area School District ||
 * = School District of Haverford Township ||= Rose Tree Media School District ||= Wilkes Barre Area School District ||= Uniontown Area School District ||
 * = Clarion Area School District ||= Jersey Shore Area School District ||= Easton Area School District ||= Mohawk Area School District ||
 * = Athens Area School District ||= Coudersport Area School District ||= Bradford Area School District ||= West Chester School District ||
 * = Northwestern School District ||= Moniteau School District ||= Gettysburg Area School District ||= Eastern Lancaster County School District ||

Dr. Gardner the went over the results of her study with lots of discussion added by the participants. The shortest policy she reviewed was 1 1/4 pages while the longest came in at 11. The average size of a policy was 4 1/2 pages. All of these policies explicitely discussed their right to monitor. She felt that is being up front and honest.

She said a quarter of the policies covered both adult employees and students. She questioned why employees are included as they are obligated to follow all policies so why must they sign this one? Many of the policies seemed to be following the "boiler plate" PSBA one which has not been updated or revised in years (I question this as we recently updated our policy and the PSBA one refers to fairly recent things.)


 * __**Parental Permission Forms**__ - half of her sample districts had a requirement for a signed permission form, half did not. Those that did tended to be smaller and more rural or isolated. Some were signed if the parent wished to opt out of allowing their child to use it, half had the signature in order to opt in. Some districts had their students sign forms every years. Others only had them sign it once and that was good for as long as the kid was in that school. She felt having signed forms was superfluous as by law every student in a public school in Pennsylvania MUST abide by all school policies by default. So what is the purpose of this added document?
 * __**Privilege versus Right**__ - Almost every policy she reviewed said that access to technology is a privilege and not a right which she thought was of dubious legality - especially where technology has become so ingrained in the curriculum. Since not all students have access at home how can they be denied in school???
 * __**Safe Environment**__ - Two of the twenty policies specifically stated they "will provide a safe environment" which she said ticked her off for some reason. Who is to decide what is and what is not "safe" on the internet? A number of other policies make statements like "we do not control the internet" etc. She said this was probably due to the input of solicitors essentially saying - we know there are dangerous things there and will do what we can to protect the children BUT we cannot guarantee anything.
 * __**Common activities that weren't acceptable**__ - Political activity; copyright / intellectual property violations; commercial activity or for-profit purposes; advertisement; chain letters, jokes, and personal communication; hate mail, discriminatory remarks, offensive or inflammatory communication; impersonation of another user, anonymity and pseudonyms; non-school activity; obscene, sexually explicit, pornographic activity; sharing passwords; harming the network; crimes under the criminal code; circumventing the filter; illegal activity.
 * __**Email Access**__ - Provide district email for students while others do not provide email accounts but students may use outside email systems; no email access allowed; no listservs. Her one pet peeve were policies (seven) that forbids the sending of emails that "annoy." she questioned how and who defines "annoy." She wishes that districts would use language that is understadable to a reasonable person. Many of the policies contained statements that the address was provided for school-use only.
 * **__Filtering__** - The government mandates the presence of filtering in schools but DOES NOT mandate the level a district filters and she finds most districts go overboard on it. She said that legally Districts ARE NOT being strictly held accountable by the courts in their enforcement of this. She said judges realize that an occasional naked photo does not make the district automatically liable. She would rather see these events being used as teachable moments.
 * **__Discipline__** - Removal of network privileges; school discipline code followed.
 * Time Restrictions -
 * Challenge Policy -
 * Date of creation/revision -

All policies she reviewed discussed who the rules were for. Most applied the policy to all users giving all the same access rights. A few had different levels of rights for teachers and students. One she particularly blasted had four levels of use. Level 1 was the tech staff who had unlimited, unfiltered access all the time. Level 2 included administrators, secretaries and the janitor. Level 3 was the teaching staff and Level 4 the students. She questioned WHY the janitor (and most secretaries) would or should have greater access than the professional staff.

As the session approached an end there was some discussion about how AUP's and CIPA based filtering both played a role in her initial problem with the grad class. She felt that students look at a lot of the restrictions brought about by CIPA filtering and district AUP's as yet another example that school is irrelevant to them.