Loose Lips Sink Ships

social media have certainly changed the ease in which your words can come back to haunt you. In the past, if you wrote a letter to the editor, or spoke directly to a reporter, your words might be out in the public, but more or less limited by your own discretion (or lack of it).

Nowadays we have e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and these new media mean that a careless use of words can be seen around the town (and the globe for that matter) in a matter of minutes.

Because there is no “hard copy” we sometimes don’t think about how permanent a comment might become. I’m sure you have heard of examples where a board member, superintendent or other staff member posts something on Facebook – a thoughtless comment or a picture that really should not be made public and then the fallout hits. People have lost jobs, been forced to resign or been sued.

E-mail conversations, when made public cause serious breaches of trust. There is no such thing as total confidentiality and the ramifications of your comments being disclosed could seriously hurt you or your school district. There are examples of board members being required to turn in their personal (or work) computer for examination to see if confidentiality was violated or other laws broken.

I don’t have the space to discuss the issue of electronic media being used to circumvent the FOI laws; although that certainly is an important issue to be aware of, or the retention of records required by Federal law. In this article I just want you to be aware of the serious issue of speaking indiscreetly.

A very important role of board members is to serve as an impartial hearing panel in serious matters such as a personnel discipline issue, or a denial of education (expulsion) for a student. These are serious matters with serious consequences for those involved in the hearing. Those individuals have legal rights and hearings have to be set up to ensure impartiality and confidentiality.

Imagine being in a hearing involving a teacher and the teacher’s attorney asks one of the presiding board members,

Attorney: “Mr. Jones, isn’t it true that on April 2nd you were in the supermarket talking to a parent and you told the parent that this teacher was the worst teacher your child ever had?”

Board member: “How did you hear that?”

Attorney: “It doesn’t matter how we heard it, is it true?”

Board member: “Well, yes, but…. how did you hear that?”

This conversation actually happened in a hearing I was involved in many years ago and it really complicated an otherwise simple case. What should have been a 15-minute meeting turned into a multi-hour marathon. If this had been a termination hearing it could have jeopardized the board’s ability to govern appropriately.

My advice is to be very careful about what you say in public. Even prefacing a comment with, “I’m not speaking as a board member, but as a member of the public (or a parent, etc.)” only gets you so far. The public sees a board member speaking no matter what.

If you don’t want your comment to appear on the front page of the local newspaper or on TV, just don’t say it.