Worcester Only Monitors Social Media of Students As Needed

Friday, March 13, 2015

Patrick Sargent, GoLocal Worcester Contributor

The Worcester Public Schools administration does not continuously monitor the social media of the public school students.

According to Worcester Public Schools (WPS) Safety Liaison Robert Pezzella, "The social media aspect, because of the new bullying law, we have to keep an eye on cyber bullying. We have students coming in and saying they’ve been bullied on Facebook, Instagram or on Twitter, and all these other social media sites. Parents come in with the same information as their kids, but we don’t monitor social media accounts.”

In a statement sent to GoLocal (which is the same statement that was printed in the Telegram and Gazette on Sunday), Superintendent Dr. Melinda Boone said, “We monitor social media as it relates to Worcester Public Schools regularly. As a large district with 44 schools, we do this in various ways, including receiving helpful tips from concerned stakeholders. If a situation seems troubling, or has the potential to disrupt the school day, we bring in school and safety officials to prevent it from happening.”

According to a study by the Center for Disease Control, 13.8% of students of more than 2,600 in Massachusetts that were surveyed in 2013 said they were being bullied through e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, websites, or texting.

18.7% of the 1,328 female students surveyed said they were being cyber-bullied, while only 9% of the 1,356 male students surveyed admitted to being bullied.

School Committee Brian O’Connell said, “The use of social media in schools is a distraction at its best. It certainly can be used to disseminate information which could be bullying, or denigrating or hostile to a particular student in ways that are certainly not healthy. When social media is used to focus on particular students in a negative way, and it could lead to incidents that could be a problem.”

According to Pezzella, the only other times that the administration would monitor social media is when it could be a gang issue or a really violent threat.

Pezzella said, “We will bring the police in after we investigate and we will ask them, ‘What can we do with the information we have?’ So we have to investigate, but that’s the only time from a safety perspective that we are at all involved in any kind of investigation of social media."

“I believe we are vigilant. We should be vigilant," said O'Connell. "When social media is being misused to bully a student or threaten a student or a school, the administration will taken action from preventing that to happen. And that’s pretty much the level of monitoring that is done. It’s incident-based.”