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Please click the links
below to read more about the new U.S. Supreme Court Ruling, Rule 26,
and the procedures ACS has put in place to meet these requirements.
On December 1, 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled that schools, businesses, and
other organizations are required to keep tabs on all e-Mail, instant
messages (IM), and other digital communications produced by their employees.
To meet the requirements of the U. S. Supreme Court
ruling, ACS has put the following procedures in place...
1.
The OOT will begin archiving
all ACS e-mail
on January 1, 2009 at 12:01am. ACS will keep the archived data
for 12 months.
After the set time has elapsed, email communications may be
discarded unless notification of pending litigation or other good
cause exists for retaining email records.
2.
The ACS back-up solution (Jatheon
Archiving Server) not only saves and archives e-mail and
data for the Anderson County School System on a daily basis, the
system also allows for e-mail retrieval, search, and review by the
Director of Schools, Director of Technology, and the ACS Networking
Staff.
3.
E-mail
communication should be used in ACS for school / educational related
activities and for limited personal use.
Employees
may send personal e-mail communications, however, remember
that all e-mail communication will be backed-up and archived.
Because all
technology hardware, software, and bandwidth in the district belong
to ACS, our users have no reasonable expectation of privacy,
including the use of email communications.
4. It is the responsibility of the user to remove e-mail
communications from their inbox on a regular basis throughout the
school year, keeping in mind
all the possible ways to store data in ACS. (Please review the
information found on this site for specific back-up procedures
offered to
all ACS employees.)
5.
All e-mail communication is subject to search
and is the property of the Anderson County School system.
Deleting e-mail from your inbox does not delete the e-mail
from the ACS server and the ACS back-up copy. Once an e-mail has
been sent and / or received in your inbox, the e-mail
WILL become part of the archived copy. There is nothing
ACS can do to remove messages from the archival copy… that would be
a
violation of the ruling.
(Deleting
electronic communications has been compared to “virtual shredding”
by Alvin F. Lindsay, a partner with Hogan & Hartson, when he was
interviewed my eSchoolNews in 2007.)
6.
ACS has placed a spam filter online called
Barracuda
to help limit the
amount of spam our users receive. ACS will never prevent all
spam e-mail; however, we will do all that we can to keep spam e-mail
to a minimum. Employees should simply delete any spam e-mail
sent to their inbox remembering
to
never
reply to a spam message.
7.
ACS
employees should store only legal and professional content in their
e-mail, free from illegal data, student grades, and identifying
numbers (Ex: SS#, etc.)
(There is
no harm in e-mailing the Daily Absence List (generated in ACS
student management program to teachers each day.) ACS employees should never include information in an
e-mail concerning a student or employee which would identify or
highlight any type of personal, professional, or educational
information... in other words, DETAILS of an event, grade, or assignment.
It is appropriate to e-mail a parent and request a parent
conference, just save the details for the face to face conference.
8.
When communicating with other professional and / or parents
concerning the progress of a student, employees are strongly encouraged to
use other ACS products like
Blackboard,
Star Student,
and our new parent communication software called
ParentLink. These products also fall under the same ruling as written
communication and must be backed-up on a regular schedule.
(The OOT will maintain the back-up process for these products.) However,
these products differ due to the required secure password and are
products for the purpose of reporting student progress. Teachers
are now able to use the ParentLink software to e-mail or call parents with the
assurance they are e-mailing and / or calling the “real” parent or
guardian,
and not an on-line imposter. (Teachers,
click here to view examples for using
ParentLink
successfully.)
ParentLink also allows teachers to e-mail and or call individual parents and or
groups of parents using a phone and / or a computer.
Click Here for on-line ParentLink training,
suggestions, and handouts.
9.
All
ACS employees are to access the
ACS e-mail
through the ACS website. The use of Microsoft Desktop Outlook
2003 or 2007
is no longer permitted by employees. ACS up-graded the e-mail server to
Outlook Web Access
(OWA), which has all the features
of Desktop Outlook and more. The software Desktop
Outlook downloads a copy of the users e-mail to the desktop, thus creating an additional copy of the users e-mail.
10. Student information, of
any kind, should never be shared through an employee's
personal e-mail account.
This is to protect the rights of the student, parent, teacher,
principal, and Director of Schools. (Examples: Yahoo
e-mail, g-mail, Bell South, AOL, etc.)
11. Each ACS employee has 75 mb of
e-mail storage in their ACS e-mail account. Once a user's
inbox reaches this limit, the user's account will stop sending and
receiving e-mail communication until the user deletes enough e-mail
to place them under the district storage limit of 75 mb. Keep
in mind, storage limits include all items found in the inbox,
including your deleted folder, junk folder, and all other folders
found in the user's inbox.
Click here for more information.
Contact
Johanna Whitley,
Director of Technology if you need more information.
Posted: December 2, 2008 |