A new law that goes into effect in Missouri this week makes it against the law for teachers to interact with students on social networking sites such as Facebook:
Teachers can be friendly with their students, but they can’t be their friends, at least when it comes to social networks such as Facebook. State Governor Jay Nixon has signed Senate Bill 54, which goes into effect on August 28, 2011 in the state of Missouri. In other words, later this month it will be illegal for students and teachers to be friends online, according to KSPR.
Senate Bill 54 is dubbed the Amy Hestir Student Protection Act, and aims to fight inappropriate contact between students and teachers, including protecting children from sexual misconduct by their educators. It is named after a Missouri public school student who was repeatedly molested by a teacher several decades ago. The Bill strengthens rules against schools that fail to report sexual abuse of students by employees, but at the same time it also adds other requirements, such as the social networking component.
The new law bans direct social networking contact between teachers and students in the hopes of setting more distinct boundaries on the relationships between the two. Section 162.069 of the bill explains the social networking part in a bit more detail:
This is one of those examples of our country imposing way to many laws. Sure there are the cases out there of teachers and students having inappropriate contact, but this is taking that to the extreme. I remember having teachers I was close with outside of school. Those teachers helped shape my life and I am forever thankful to them. In today’s America we won’t be able to see that because a few bad apples have ruined it.
What I also find interesting is that this is a Republican sponsored bill. Think about that for a minute. When we talk about imposing stricter gun control we always hear “well then only the outlaws will have guns”, yet the right has no problem imposing laws like this. It’s a double standard if there ever was one. Of course over writing of laws in this country is a habit that knows no boundary when it comes to left or right and it really exemplifies a serious problem in this country.
If you read through the text of this law, one thing really sticks out. The law bars any friendship, knowingly or not. What’s to prevent a student (or group of students) from finding a teacher on Facebook, creating a fake persona and becoming a friend with them? Let them build a fake relationship and then the student reveals to law enforcement that they have been talking to this teacher. Suddenly the teacher is arrested and their career in jeopardy. It might sound far fetched, but it really isn’t.
Our laws have become convoluted and confusing. No longer do our politicians believe that professionals can exhibit common sense, so they feel the need to put it in writing and make laws enforcing it. This does nothing to curtail the problem. Instead if a teacher wants to friend a student on Facebook for reasons they shouldn’t be, they still will and now the state will just have one additional charge to put against them. It really makes me miss the John McCain of 2000 who said “we need to enforce the laws we have”. Of course he was talking about gun control, but that same statement can be applied to every area of the law. Stop making new laws and enforce the ones we have. Of course when you have the lawyers writing the laws, we see the best stimulus package ever – one to keep the defense industry rolling in the cash!