How a Private School Communication Platform Builds Trust and Transparency Beyond Social Media

Introduction

Social media has its place as a community outreach platform. When I looked into various schools’ community partnerships, I discovered many schools proudly showcasing their students, parents, teachers, and community partnerships on social media.

Posts on project-based learning, special days with grandparents, team sports days, field trips, and volunteer-driven events allow parents and the wider school and local community to celebrate everyday successes.

It is clear that social media today has its role in building connections and relationships. It is a toolset used is school’s marketing, effective for outreach in the community. But what about using social media for delivering essential information to every parent? The following types of issues may arise when social media is harnessed to be an everyday communicator.

• Will reminders of early dismissals reach each parent?
• Is the events calendar found?
• Does the anonymous nature of media create a ‘toxic’ environment?
• Do the shoutouts of students of the month (with names and pictures) violate FERPA?
• And what about any photographs of students from field trips; did parents consent to them?

We have a lot to cover, so let’s dive in!

Problem 1: Not Everyone is on Social Media

Not all parents are using social media. About 68% of adults in the US are on Facebook, and far fewer parents use other social media platforms. (Pew Research Center, 2024.)

While social media can be one supplemental source for receiving communication, schools cannot mandate parents to join a third-party platform with its own terms of use. Even the best social media tracking services don’t provide a window into who visits the school’s social media platform, and to what extent.

Problem 2: Post Visibility Is Unreliable on Social Media

Even parents who follow the school’s social media pages may miss updates in the media’s feed page if the social media platform’s algorithm does not prioritize them. The visibility of posts depends on likes, shares, and advertising dynamics rather than relevance or urgency. Facebook states, “Posts that you see higher in Feed are influenced by your activity and engagement with other content on Facebook. [—] The number of comments, likes and reactions a post receives and what kind of post it is (example: photo, video, status update) can also make it more likely to appear higher up in your Feed.” (Source)

The relevancy of social media’s algorithm is intended to bring content that users are interested in. Essential or even critical announcements may or may not fall under these criteria.

Problem 3: Social Media’s Anonymity Promotes Uncivil Online Behavior

When the community engages with the platform, identifying more as social media participants than as representatives of the school community, very different digital social norms may shape their online behavior, the general rules of what is adequate behavior in online interaction. (More on digital social norms.) 

The behavior may turn to incivility, which is enabled by the anonymous nature of social media. Consider the following statistic:  “89% of U.S. Internet users say anonymity allows people to be cruel or harass one another, and 83% think it makes it hard to trust what people share.” (Source.) In a school context, even one heated comment can quickly discourage teacher engagement or damage parent trust, shifting the tone of the whole community.

We often hear the phrase “ranting parents” to refer to toxic social media interactions between home and school. However, it’s important to understand the nature of social media, which pits communities against each other instead of dialogue. Per research, it appears almost impossible to have civil discussions on social media, and it’s a lesson learned for many.

I highly recommend reading the article, Civility and Trust in Social Media, Specifically, I’d like to point to the following quote: “When users are faced with sensitive and divisive issues (e.g., political views, cultural diversity, gender discrimination, and more generally any belief on matters of great importance, including health, education, and ethics), online discussions show a systematic tendency to take a turn for the worse, in two possible ways: either with an escalation of inflammatory comments against something or someone who is not part of the discussion, when most participants share the same general standpoint (a sort of online mob behavior, that leads to rabble-rousing); or with a rapid and aggressive back-and-forth of mutual accusations and insults among people with different views, when no consensus is apparent among the discussants.”

Problem 4: Posting Restrictions Don’t Belong To Social Media

Schools may tackle this anonymity-enabled incivility by restricting posting and commenting rights on social media. Posting restriction, however, is a double-edged sword, as social media is generally, especially among younger adults, regarded as a medium for active participation, whether actively commenting or creating content. Needing to restrict user rights is one of the signs that the posts likely did not belong on social media. Social media is regarded as a source of entertainment and participation by many, and hence restrictions in social media channels likely reduce interest in visiting these social pages.  Younger users especially approach social media through the lens of participatory culture. (Source.)

Problem 5: Privacy Concerns Are Prevalent in Social Media

“The best practice is not to publicly share any information about your students, including video, photos, and names, without written permission from their parents,” states the National Education Association. 

Posting pictures of children without parents’ consent to a public social media page is generally not advised, and content that includes names and refers to students’ grades violates FERPA. The best practice is to seek parental consent on all content referring to their children.

Summary

Social media platforms are designed for open participation and entertainment, not verified communication within a school community. On social media, schools cannot target messages to sub-set audiences such as classroom parents, post delivery cannot be verified, and toxic discussions may be hard to tame without fully closing all commenting, thereby reducing engagement.

How a Private School Communication Platform Addresses These Problems

So, how does a private school communication network consolidate these issues? Will incivility be prevented? Is a respectful tone established? Is the content found? Are posts being delivered? Let’s consider the following points that make a case for a private communication network.

1. Member verification: Select a private communication platform where each account is verified. Avoid platforms like Remind, where anyone with a QR code can access the network. Ensure parents, teachers, and staff are identified as members of the same community. 
2. Delivery reports: Ensure you can access delivery reports to know precisely who receives each post or announcement. 
3. Control settings and content monitoring: Select a platform with strong control settings to address incivility and keep comments meaningful.  For instance, in School Signals, you can set AI to automatically detect foul language and set posts and comments through admin moderation. Moderation is an expected feature of closed, civil networks. 
4. Pinpoint audience: Social media posts target everyone and are not optimal for news for smaller subsets. A strong communication platform allows flexibility in its settings to target specific audiences.  In School Signals, communication can be made district-wide, school-wide, or targeted to particular grades, classrooms, and groups.
5. No advertisements or selling information: A private school network should be excluded from third parties being able to buy or use data to advertise.
6. Student privacy: Parents need to be able to trust that communication is private and compliant with student privacy regulations. Even in a private network, schools can refrain from posting pictures of students and providing details if parents do not consent to pictures. The School Signals directory does not display student information (such as the child’s name) without the parent’s explicit permission.
7. A Unified Experience: School Signals combines communication with parent engagement features for a unified experience. For the school community, it’s reassuring to find all school communication and engagement in one designated place – messages, calendars, forms, documents, and volunteer opportunities.

Conclusion

Private school communication platforms provide the look and feel of open social media platforms while significantly reducing privacy concerns, solving delivery issues, and consolidating all parent communication and engagement under one roof. Schools selecting private networks indicate to the community that they care about student privacy, are intentional with their school communication strategy, and, rather than blasting, want to reach out and build school-home partnerships.

It is always a leap of faith to communicate, but research shows that not communicating is not a viable option either. As Epstein (1995) notes, “With frequent interactions between schools, families, and communities, more students are more likely to receive common messages from various people about the importance of school, of working hard, of thinking creatively, of helping one another, and of staying in school.”

A private network provides the safety net for the community to conduct communication privately while maintaining a civil tone.

References

Pew Research Center. (2024, Feb 2). 5 facts about how Americans use Facebook, two decades after its launch. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/02/5-facts-about-how-americans-use-facebook-two-decades-after-its-launch/

Heitmayer, M., & Schimmelpfennig, R. (2023). Netiquette as digital social norms. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2023.2188534

Smith, J. A., & Brown, L. M. (2019). Incivility and trust in online social media communities. Journal of Social Behavior, 45(2), 123–145. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jo.socbeh.2019.03.056

Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A. J., & Weigel, M. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century (Occasional paper). MacArthur Foundation. https://www.macfound.org/media/article_pdfs/jenkins_white_paper.pdf

National Education Association. (2023, Apr 4). Educators’ rights on social media. https://www.nea.org/resource-library/educators-rights-social-media

Epstein, J. L. (1995, May). School/family/community partnerships: Caring for the children we share. Phi Delta Kappan, 76(9), 701–712. Available from the Phi Delta Kappan archives: https://kappanonline.org/