How To Deal With Student Privacy Issues On Social Media

Every time I speak about using social media for schools I’m always asked about guidelines or best practices for posting student pictures online.

It’s a very important question and one that can be answered in a number of different ways depending upon your school community — here’s how we deal with student privacy at Sewickley Academy.

Parental Permission

We get parent’s permission to use their child’s image in our marketing materials. Every year there are a few families that do not give us their permission and these children are placed on a “Do Not Photo” List. We, of course, take this list very seriously and I keep a copy of it near my computer.

Best Practices

When we think of best practices with posting photos or videos we like to differentiate between content that we publish or content that we re-publish

Content We Publish

When I refer to content that we publish I mean anything (photos, videos, links to our news stories) that we create and post to social media. In this case I also take into consideration which division the child is in: Lower School, Middle School, or Senior School.