Manatee
Seven children in Manatee County have been charged with threatening violence against their schools after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Some of those threats have been written, another was verbal. Others circulated on social media platforms.
Facebook was founded more than a decade ago, when only 8 percent of adults aged 18 to 29 were using at least one social media site, according to Pew Research Center. These sites led to alternative modes of communication that have taken hold of our attention span with Twitter, Tumblr, Snapchat, Reddit, YouTube and Instagram. The list goes on.
Most of the online threats to Manatee County schools appear to have been shared on Snapchat. None of the threats were determined to be credible.
With the inundation of ways to interact in the sea of social media, who is teaching children the safest ways to navigate the world online, and the real-life consequences attached to them?
Except for a few videos that students are asked to watch at the start of the school year, the Manatee school district does not have a social media curriculum.
“In the aftermath of Parkland, we will be reviewing basically everything to do with security for our students and staff, identifying kids who are alienated or in need of assistance, as well as educating students to the perils of posting threatening messages on social media,” said Mike Barber, spokesman for the School District of Manatee County.
It was clear to the district that “many students still have no concept of the life-altering consequences that can result from such threats,” he said.
At the beginning of the year, district schools show a variety of videos to students in elementary, middle and high schools about internet privacy. Two videos from the Institute for Responsible Online and Cell Phone Communication are played: an 11-minute video for elementary students and 27-minute video for secondary school students. Richard Guerry, the organization’s executive director, acts as the talking head to warn kids about the dangers of sexting, chatrooms, posting personal information online and the permanence of the internet.
Elementary students watch an additional video on internet safety from BrainPOP Jr. and secondary school students watch three videos of between 5 minutes and 7 minutes each produced by students in Southeast High School’s TV Production class, according to Barber. After watching the videos, which focus primarily on examples with Myspace and Facebook, students sign a piece of paper saying they’ve seen them and that’s the extent of formal teaching dedicated to online use, Barber added.
“There’s no instructional courses per se dealing with social media that I’ve become aware of,” he said.
One former district teacher thinks media literacy is the “most important lesson we can give our students.”
At Rowlett Middle Academy, a charter school in Bradenton, Joanne Torlucci takes pride in teaching her sixth- and seventh-graders living lessons on not blindly accepting everything they’re told.
With the proliferation of the idea of “fake news,” her Intro to Technology class touches on how students can identify outrageous headlines that trigger an emotional reaction and verify the stories themselves, whether on rumor fact checker Snopes or political debunker Politifact.
Torlucci uses real-life examples: A friend of hers shared a story on Facebook about a fleet of torched school buses in Parkland, expressing frustration after 17 people were killed in a Valentine’s Day high school shooting. The post had been shared hundreds of times, she said.
The story was true, but it happened in Parkland, Pennsylvania.
They discuss what makes people pass along these stories without second thought, but they don’t just talk about fake news. Some of her students who want to go to college on athletics scholarships learn how some have lost theirs because of what they post online, whether it’s a comment on Instagram or a picture on Snapchat.
“What you’re posting, expect it to be on a billboard on the side of a highway, because that’s what you’re doing,” Torlucci said.
She began incorporating some of these lessons into the research class she taught several years ago at Braden River Middle School.
“They wanted to talk about it. They weren’t really sure how they should be using it,” she said.
There has been a “sizable uptick” in how much time kids spend on social media, said Michael Spellman, a psychologist with Carter Psychology Center.
Paired with that, Spellman echoed the school district’s recent observation that children can’t truly predict the consequences of their actions.
“There’s a sense of immunity in adolescence,” he said, as well as anonymity.
He offered one suggestion for parents to get involved, through passively monitoring their children’s activity, but how they choose to track their kids’ activity and talk to them about social media can vary from child to child.
“The price of that comes in the form of trust,” he said.
Children depend on “a wide range of adults to guide them in life,” he said. “Navigating cyber space” is an “essential skill” that children will use throughout their lifetime.
“While the parents may bare the bulk of the responsibility for deciding how their child will be raised ... there’s a plethora of other adults who can help guide that system.”
Hannah Morse: 941-745-7055, @mannahhorse
This story was originally published March 01, 2018 1:44 PM.