Times have changed.
Before Facebook and MySpace, children and teens called each other names to their faces. Before the Internet, students didn’t have access to pornography. Before cell phones, students couldn’t spread mean and hurtful gossip as quickly. Before computers, students couldn’t have their identities stolen.
“It’s becoming more apparent that … students (are) not exactly understanding that when they post something it’s free for everybody,” said Thor Bergland, student support liaison at Austin High School.
That’s why Austin Public School counselors organized cyber safety presentations for parents and students this week. A cyber safety presentation for adults will be held from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Monday at AHS’s Knowlton Auditorium. Students at Ellis Middle School and AHS will attend presentations on Tuesday.
Although students’ computer use is monitored at school, teachers and counselors are hearing about more and more incidents involving online harassment.
“It seems as though a lot of these conflicts are starting, or originating, a lot of it is coming from the Internet,” said Lea Oelfke, a counselor at Ellis. Oelfke organized the presentations after hearing Dave Eisenmann, a technology and media services director at Minnetonka Public Schools, give a talk about online safety at a state counselors’ conference last year.
Online bullying is just one aspect of the way technology is changing student life, and how school staff deals with student issues. Counselors have found most student issues tie into the Internet and technology, whether it be a fight that started between people on MySpace or students sending harassing text messages to one another, or even students sending inappropriate pictures of themselves.
“It usually spills over into a school environment,” Bergland said. “If you’re a victim, it can be a pretty intimidating place to be in the hallway.”
One public incident occurred several weeks ago involving a Facebook group titled “AHS Girls Suck,” where a group of students purposefully harassed several high school girls by calling them names and degrading them. The web page was quickly taken down after community members heard about it.
It’s tough for staff to help students with issues like the “AHS Girls Suck” web page because state education laws are murky when it comes to dealing with online incidents, according to Oelfke. Many of the incidents staff deal with start online but come into a school setting.
“The bottom line is there really aren’t any mandates that say that schools have to deal with that,” Oelfke said.
At the same time, school staff are being proactive when it comes to harassment, working with students to solve issues  that happen online and resolving conflict between students. Elementary school counselors introduced cyber bullying and cyber safety lessons to fourth and fifth graders this year and counselors district-wide will shift many of their lesson plans to include online safety and bullying components this fall.
Yet school staff can only do so much. That’s why school officials hope the cyber safety presentations will interest parents and community members to get involved and learn more about safeguarding their families when it comes to an online presence.
“The second Facebook entered the scene, the bullying statistics just went through the roof,” Oelfke said. “I think it all happened so fast, people haven’t had a chance to deal with it proactively.”
Until then, school officials will try to find ways to proactively deal with an ever-increasing technological presence in the classroom.
“As a community, we just need to be proactive and help each other out,” said Oelfke. “We’ve got to say, ‘Enough is enough’ and we need to be more proactive.”