Every teacher wants to be the cool guy, the Robin-Williams-in-Dead-Poet’s-Society friend to students, but a court case from Connecticut offers a lesson to teachers-in-training: be careful when you buddy up to students online. While sites like MySpace make it easy to engage in casual contact with students, they also make it easy for the contact to cross professional red lines.
Jeffrey Spanierman’s teaching contract was not renewed after teaching English for several years at a high school in Ansonia, Connecticut, and he sued the school district over his release. The case began several years ago when Spanierman created a MySpace page under the name “Mr. Spiderman” and began friending students. When a guidance counselor eventually came across the page, she found that Spanierman had posted a ten-year old picture of himself on the page. In addition, the counselor saw “pictures of naked men with what she considered ‘inappropriate comments’ underneath them.”
by Nate Anderson
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