Principles Message
Hello Parents and Guardians,
As a principal in a middle school, my number one job is to create a school environment where both students and teachers feel safe (physically, emotionally, and mentally) to teach, learn, innovate, and socialize. I take my job very seriously, as does my staff members.
I can’t begin to describe how much time I spend every day dealing with issues that stem from unsupervised cell phone usage by our students. In the situations where I have to investigate Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms, I often worry about our students and what I find (highly inappropriate photos, videos, messages, social media usage, etc.). The things our students are willing to try and be a part of at such a young age gets worse and worse every year.
When I call parents to inform them of what is going on, I always ask them how often they look through their kids’ phones. Most of them say hardly ever. I work hard with my parents to fix the situation. I have often contacted the sheriff’s department to get some sites down that are mean and make fun of many of our students, creating an unsafe school environment on campus.
Let me remind you, it is your number one job as a parent to get in your kids’ way at all times! Go ahead. Open their bedroom door. Ask them for the phone to look at their activity. Kids do not deserve privacy without accountability. You own their devices…not them. You should be having hard conversations with them about their social media usage and the issues their choices have on other people in their lives.
And finally, do not let them take their phones into their rooms, shut their doors, and disappear for hours. Nothing good ever happens on the internet behind closed doors. The online world is by far the most dangerous place our students go to every day. We can’t assume that they will intuitively know how to navigate the dangers of the online world on their own.
You need to learn how to navigate their world. Inform yourself on how to use certain apps. Keep up with what apps that are the most downloaded in your App Store. Make your kid show you their content and conversations and explain to you what is going on. Then give them advice. Teach them how to block a person being mean instead of feeding into the situation.
If you are looking for apps to watch over your child’s usage, here are a few good ones:
BARK.US
ES.ET
MYSPY
Sincerely,
Renee Henderson
