Email Dangers for Teachers

Teachers that use their computer at school frequently begin to forget that when they work for a public taxpayer financed facility the equipment they are using is the property of the taxpayers of this country. A newspaper reporter can come into a school at any time and request to see the email that has been sent or received by anyone at the school. They do not need a court order to do this, but they do need to file a request for information. All email through such institutions is archived in some manner. Often it is not as hard to retrieve as you might think. In many large institutions, there is a weekly backup of the entire system at the school level or at the county or district level which could retain the records of emails and other files.

I was the network administrator for a large high school in my district for two years and I made a backup of the school system one time per week and more often as we neared the end of a semester. The backup tapes were not reused for months so there was always a rather lengthy amount of material that could be retrieved. In addition logs were kept on the system about log in and log out times for every computer on the system.

Each computer has a history file that retains a portion of the information for some period of time and the trash file is not dumped immediately. The important point is that email itself sent or received through a school system is not your personal property. I have seen emails that teachers have sent and received which was questionable. Most that would be questionable are more on the edge, where a teacher may talk about an administrator or fellow teacher in a less than desirable manner. Some have been much worse and I have warned teachers about such problems. In a few cases it required notification of administrators. Even more significant is the potential of saying something in email that could adversely affect a student's rights or privacy. Using your computer at school even after school hours for personal email is not advisable. If a person should write you something that is questionable, you should inform them that you do not want that type of communication in general and certainly not through school email. Certain kinds of infractions may require you to take more action. A teacher is under an obligation to report instances of potential child abuse and you may get some indication of this through email and then if you do not take action you become involved and are required to report the incident to the proper authorities and the proper authorities may not simply be administrators or staff at the school although this may be a good place to start.

I have had parents email me about problems in the home and then I would bring that to the attention of appropriate staff members at the school. Be careful about student using email. Usually this is restricted at school, but sometimes it can still happen. I was called to a room to review the use of a computer by a student that was communicating with other students and using Spanish throughout the process. The teacher in the room had no idea what the student was typing because they could not read Spanish.

Even in your home most email messages are actually saved by the service provider for years. If mandated by court order, they will be required to give those records to authorities. Be careful!