Parents, Guardians and Caregivers,
As the new school year begins to approach, we wanted to share some important information regarding social media and our students' usage. With the rise of students using social media, the Wilkes-Barre Area School District is working to ensure the mental and emotional wellbeing of students continue to be front of mind. We are writing to inform you regarding children’s use of social media outside of school during evenings and weekends, which carries over into our schools and disrupts valuable educational time. There are several groups of students using social media to be persistently unkind about other students on various social media platforms such as Snapchat, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and WhatsApp, to name a few. We understand that this has included sharing unkind comments, messages, self-harm actions, or pictures of students within our schools. This can lead to multiple issues outside of school, which could then carry over into our schools disrupting the educational process of our students.
In order to have a social media account, in most cases, students must be 13 years and over. However, we understand that some parents allow their children to have such accounts. If this is the case, we ask that you monitor your child’s social media accounts vigilantly. Please monitor the social media sites, phone and computer applications that are available to your children by way of the internet and smart phone/tablet technology. The well-being of our students and providing pertinent information to our parents to keep them safe is a part of our commitment to the whole child. Some suggestions for monitoring your child’s social media accounts would be:
- enacting parental controls on the phones and or consoles by checking privacy settings
- reviewing the messages, they send and the messages sent to them
- limiting access to these accounts, such as not allowing students to use them after a certain time or during the bedtime hours
- encouraging them to share or discuss openly the things they are doing on social media
- reminding students on how to treat one another, which will and can carry over into their everyday lives
We are asking for your partnership in dealing with this, as it is happening outside of school and being carried over into our schools. We thank you in advance for being the first line of defense in this matter. We feel if we if we work together in this matter, our children will have the best opportunity to achieve their educational goals.
Thank you so much for your cooperation.
Mr. Correll, Principal