Apr 03 2008
Beware of your email…it may be for the world to read.
Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune - Teacher e-mails made public Annotated
tags: management, policy, privacy, teaching
Teacher emails released to “make sure they’re doing their jobs.”
“Based on our interpretation of the current state law, the public interest demands those e-mails be released.”
Bubolz said in July he made the request to see if the teachers were doing their job “… the way it’s supposed to be done.”
“People will know this decision is out there,” Jonen said. “The effect will be any public employee that does a personal e-mail at work is subject to having that released.”
“There’s no misconduct at all; they don’t want the public to feel they were misusing resources,” she said. “These are e-mails they wrote to their friends, spouse or kids. It’s a little unsettling they will be for public view.”
Couple of key points to this in my mind.
- If they were sending personal email against district policy they really don’t have any recourse.
- If they didn’t do anything wrong (something the article fails to clarify) then their personal correspondence should not be publicly available (see item 1 for the counterpoint however).
- If this is the case and a member of the public can request the emails of a public servant (which is a bit of a stretch to define a teacher as) be made public then why can I say with great confidence that this is far less likely to happen to the school administration?
