The Wilson County School Board is considering a policy that could penalize teachers for comments made on their personal social media pages.
This comes months after the district’s Teacher of the Year came under fire for posting something negative about a school board member.
“There’s obviously a policy need to adopt for social media,” Wilson County School Board Member, Greg Hohman said.
Hohman believes there should be a social media policy for teachers after a Wilson County teacher made a critical post about Hohman during his election campaign.
The policy he’s proposing, he says mimics what Rutherford County schools have in place.
Part of this policy includes that employees shall not use personal social networking sites for school or district purposes and employees are prohibited from posting inappropriate information that is likely to create a substantial disruption.
It later reads employees who are found in violation of this policy could be terminated.
FOX 17 News’ Kaitlin Miller asked, “Do you think that this proposal violates a teacher’s First Amendment right?”
Carrie Pfeiffer responded, “Oh as it’s written, yes.100%. It would violate it. If you try to, especially Section 9 that says a teacher could be terminated potentially for a comment that they made about a board member or a parent or something like that.”
Pfeiffer is a Wilson County parent and a former teacher and school board member.
Pfeiffer says teachers need to keep student information confidential, but she says when it comes to forming an opinion about something else teachers can do that on their personal accounts.
“It looks like it’s a continuation of an effort to remove a teacher,” JC Bowman emphasized.
Bowman with the Professional Educators of Tennessee says there are parts of this policy that are good for protecting students, but he adds there are other parts that could be challenged legally.
“We have a thing called an educator Bill of Rights and what we’re really doing is questioning an educator’s professional judgment and that’s where I think there’s an issue at play with that,” Bowman explained.
The spokesperson for Wilson County Schools says this proposal will be revisited later for more discussion, but nothing has been decided so far.
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