Social Media for School Districts: Risks and Best Practices

Schools can use social media as a valuable communication channel, but knowing the risks involved and how to handle these channels of communication is crucial.

This article will cover everything you need to know about social media for school districts and K-12 education:

• The current social media landscape
• Laws and regulations governing social media in education
• Social media archiving and risk management
• A step-by-step guide to protecting your school’s privacy on social media

Why Social Media Matters for School Districts?

If your school wants stronger communication, higher engagement, and better student connection, social media can deliver all three when used the right way.

Here’s what that can look like in practice:

• Enhanced communication — School social media platforms can help your district to have a more direct and immediate communication between the school and its students and their parents. This helps with transparency, inclusivity, and a sense of community.
• Information sharing — Social media lets your school district reach students and staff in seconds with the latest information, timely updates, and emergency notifications, ensuring everyone in your school is well-informed.
• Showcasing your achievements — Your social media profiles can be a great platform to share your academic, sports, and artistic achievements, which paints a great picture of your school and boosts the morale of your students and staff.
• Learning beyond the classroom — 73% of students use social media to collaborate and learn. Social channels are great for sharing educational content and resources for your students to learn new topics from home.
• Community inputs — School social media platforms provide a space for your whole community to offer feedback and new ideas, and contribute to school-related matters, giving you a new perspective on what your community needs.

It’s clear that social media offers clear advantages, but it also comes with risks that schools need to understand and manage to use these platforms effectively and responsibly.

What a Social Media Strategy for Schools Should Include

A well-defined social media strategy for schools helps districts use social platforms consistently while reducing legal, privacy, and reputational risks.

This strategy should clearly define:

• Who can post on behalf of the district,
• Which platforms are approved, and
• What types of content are allowed.

It should also align with existing policies for records retention, student privacy, and staff conduct.

Just as important, the strategy should account for compliance requirements. That includes archiving official social media content, responding to public records requests, and ensuring posts do not disclose protected student information under FERPA.

Without a documented strategy, social media use often becomes reactive, inconsistent, and harder to defend during audits, complaints, or legal disputes.

The Unregulated World of Social Networks

Students spend much of their free time on social platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. These tools offer learning benefits, but misuse creates real risks for schools, especially cyberbullying, unsafe content sharing, and posts that can trigger legal or safety issues.

Schools that don’t actively monitor and address online behavior often face reputational, disciplinary, and compliance challenges.

While schools can’t monitor everything students do when not physically at school, they have a duty and a responsibility to work on prevention and mitigate potential risks.

Under the 2020 Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), schools receiving federal funding for technology are required to implement internet safety policies, including internet safety policies and content filtering designed to protect students from harmful materials.

Schools are not universally required to keep an eye on students’ social media activity outside of school hours, but many voluntarily implement social media monitoring systems to detect issues like cyberbullying, harassment, and self-harm early, as part of their broader duty to student safety.

But to implement these sorts of changes and technologies, you first need to understand the laws governing school districts’ social media privacy.

Understanding K-12 Privacy Laws and Regulations

As you might know, official school social media accounts can be considered public records and may fall under Open Records laws (like FOIA or state-level public records acts). This includes content posted by school districts, like updates on events, achievements, and announcements.

However, individual student social media accounts are not automatically considered public records, unless related to official school activities.

This brings us to some of the most important laws governing school social media:

FERPA and social media

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) protects the confidentiality of personally identifiable information (PII) in a student’s education records.

Although FERPA doesn’t specifically address social media, it’s crucial to understand that a school’s social media posts could violate FERPA if they disclose PII about students without proper consent.

For example, a post on the school’s Instagram page praising a student’s achievements might violate FERPA if it reveals personal details from the student’s educational record (like grades, disciplinary records, or other confidential info) without obtaining written consent from the parent or guardian.

COPPA and social media

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), enacted in 1998, protects the privacy of children under 13 by regulating how online services collect and use their personal information.

COPPA doesn’t specifically govern social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook, but it applies to school websites and online services used by schools that collect personal information from children under 13.

If your school district operates a website or uses third-party services to collect personal data, obtaining parental consent before collecting or sharing any personally identifiable information (PII) is required under COPPA.

For example, if a school uses online forms to collect student data for enrollment purposes, the school must obtain parental consent before gathering PII from children under 13.

Although the responsibility for ensuring parental consent lies with the school district, teachers are sometimes involved in the process. However, it is not the teacher’s role to provide consent on behalf of parents; rather, it’s the district’s responsibility to handle parental consent.

School districts’ policies and guidelines

When it comes to school social media, many school districts create their own policies to govern the use of official social media accounts. These policies outline how social media should and should not be used, including the potential consequences of misuse.

Such policies often include guidelines on how students’ data will be handled, specifying how information will be shared and ensuring compliance with privacy laws like FERPA. While some policies may detail how publicly available content will be monitored, the specifics of monitoring students’ personal social media accounts generally require separate, more complex guidelines due to privacy concerns.

Teachers are expected to adhere to the best practices laid out by their district regarding the use of social media, ensuring they follow appropriate communication standards and protect student privacy.

As such, the school district is an excellent starting point for guidance on social media best practices and ensuring the proper handling of student privacy.

Struggling with FERPA and FOIA requests?

Check out the best email and social media archiving solutions for K-12.

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The Importance of School Social Media Archiving

As regulations tighten and digital risk grows, social media archiving is no longer optional for school districts. It has become a core compliance and risk-management tool.

Why does archiving matter?

Social media messaging

Teachers and students collaborate and communicate daily, and they use a range of social media platforms like WhatsApp or Facebook groups, which may not be officially approved channels.

The issue is that these platforms don’t have the internal backup and archive capabilities that meet compliance standards.

During audits, lawsuits, or FOIA requests, school districts may be called on to provide records of discussions from these platforms, but very few have such records.

School districts that properly archive their social media records both protect themselves and their students and eliminate the risk of non-compliance.

Court evidence

Even with a data retention policy in place, not all digital records meet legal standards. If your district faces legal action, you may be required to produce social media communications as evidence. And even if you manage to find the data, it doesn’t mean you can prove it’s authentic.

Screenshots can be manipulated with AI or lack metadata, information like timestamps and user identification, which makes them difficult to defend in court.

This is where social media archiving solutions make a difference.

They provide:

• Secure, immutable record storage
• Automatic metadata capture
• Built-in integrity verification for legal defensibility

Without proper archiving, schools face ediscovery across multiple, fragmented platforms, inadmissible evidence due to missing metadata, and legal challenges if they can’t prove that the records are authentic and unaltered.

Consequences of non-compliance

Besides student and staff safety, compliance is the second most important reason for archiving your school’s social media.

Not complying with strict federal and state regulations can easily get you into a legal dispute and end with your school district needing to pay huge fines.

Here are a few examples of consequences for neglecting online content archiving:

• Spokane Public Schools — Charged $130,000 after failing to comply with 2009 public record requests and provide a request for their website content records.
• Honolulu Police Department — Charged for deleting Facebook comments and failing to provide archives. After two years of litigation, they were fined $31,000.

These are only a few examples and they could have been prevented if the agencies had an archiving solution at hand that could allow them to search and produce records of their content easily.

Managing Risks in School District Social Media With Archiving

As social media becomes a major communication channel, the risks grow with it. Yet while email is tightly governed in most districts, social platforms are often left under-managed.

Let’s first understand the risks of managing social media for your school districts:

• Regulatory and legal concerns — Social media use in schools brings with it a variety of laws, such as FERPA, COPPA, CIPA, and public records laws, that schools must follow. Keeping these laws in mind can be challenging when communicating or posting on social media.
• Reputation risks — A single social media post or message can potentially tarnish your school’s reputation. A misstep on social media could damage the district’s image and credibility.
• Privacy Concerns — Schools must walk a fine line between sharing relevant information and protecting student and staff privacy. The nature of social media makes it especially difficult to ensure FERPA compliance.
• Loss of control — Social media platforms are highly volatile. Once a post is made, the conversation can quickly spiral out of control, and you are no longer fully in charge of what is said or shared.

These are all legitimate issues that, if left unchecked, can result in negative consequences, but they shouldn’t hold you back from experiencing all the benefits of social media.

Eliminating Social Media Risks With Technology

Most districts already archive email for compliance, FOIA, and legal requests, so why wouldn’t you archive social media too?

With the advancements in archiving technology, archiving your school district’s social media channels should be just an additional step to full compliance and better risk management.

Having this kind of all-around archiving and monitoring system in place would let you enjoy all the benefits without the need to constantly worry and deal with the risks of improperly storing sensitive student data, divulging insider information, or breaking any laws.

Let’s look at the most important features your social media archiving solution of choice should have:

• Implementation — The social media archiving platform should be available either as an add-on to your email archiving software or as a standalone platform that retains only social media channels. It’s recommended to have both email and social media on one platform so that you can search both content types from the same system and screen
• Indexing — The solution needs to index various kinds of metadata, including time stamps. You should also be able to perform integrity checks to prove data authenticity.
• Keyword searches — The social media archive needs to support advanced searches for keywords matching multiple criteria (e.g., date ranges, name of the person who made a post, type of action)
• Alerts — The solution needs to be able to alert administrators of potentially harmful or dangerous social media behavior by automatically searching for pre-defined restricted keywords and phrases.
• Audit trails — If misuse ever happens, you need to have a full audit trail and report of actions every archive user took.

Besides automating compliance and speeding up ediscovery, social media archiving solutions come with a few benefits you might not have thought about:

• Act faster on harmful behavior by monitoring social media in real time and catching issues early.
• Build stronger evidence for student and staff investigations using verified social media records.
• Reduce manual workload and errors by automating routine monitoring tasks.
• Improve student safety by identifying abuse patterns and responding to incidents early.
• Lower storage costs by securely storing data in the cloud and retrieving it quickly when needed.

Protect your school district from compliance fines and penalties.

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How To Ensure Privacy and Compliance on Social Media

Let’s see how you can use social media in a responsible and compliant way and what measures you need to take to ensure student safety:

Research regulations

Before forming your social media policy, you must know which laws affect your school district and their requirements. The best way to do this is to explore an education compliance checklist, which will give you insights into what laws you need to worry about.

Create a clear social media archiving policy

Write down all points of communication and all communication channels that your staff and students are using. Explore what they’re used for, what information is exchanged, and what data you need to collect. This will help you determine what your archiving solution should capture.

Implement an archiving solution

Once you found an archiving solution that meets your requirements, start by implementing it in every one of your communication channels. Set up your custom retention policies, and assign appropriate roles to your team.

Educate your staff and students

Organize specialized training sessions for your compliance team, staff, and teachers about the use of social media, how to protect their and students’ privacy, as well as about your archiving policy and how it affects them. Communicate your policy to the students and their parents through your school’s website and other platforms, as well as in the classroom.

Track and improve

Keep in mind that just implementing the archiving solution and leaving it to work isn’t the best strategy. Laws can change, you might be capturing unnecessary information, and your current process could be suboptimal.

This is why you need to constantly reevaluate your archiving process and make improvements. Start tracking which data is most prevalent in your school, how your staff is using the archiving system and start optimizing.

Implementing a social media archiving system in your school district is the first step toward complete compliance, but it won’t solve your potential privacy issues.

Tips on How to Prevent Social Media Privacy Issues

Here are four tips to implement and prevent any social media privacy issues from happening in the first place:

Never post PII content without consent

Remember that Personally Identifiable Information (PII) can be any piece of information that can be used to reveal a person’s identity, including their name, birthplace, photos, and social security numbers.

Because these slip-ups can happen unintentionally, it’s important to establish clear rules and guidelines that prohibit staff from sharing personal information without proper consent from the student, parent, or guardian.

Review your posts

Before publishing on any social media channel, double-check every detail in the post.

Take a moment to review the photo or video and blur students’ faces, name tags, and any other identifying details. Then reread the caption to confirm it doesn’t reveal personal information or anything that could compromise privacy.

It’s a good practice to establish a clear social media workflow, starting with content creation, followed by a review from another staff member, and ending with publishing. This two-step review process ensures every post is checked by at least two people, reducing the risk of errors or privacy issues.

Limit account access

Have your social media accounts accessible only to the staff designated for maintaining your district’s social media communication and management.

Regularly audit social media content

Schedule routine audits of your social media accounts to spot and correct potential privacy issues early.

Regular reviews help uncover gaps in your processes and explain why issues occurred, giving you clear direction on how to improve both social media management and your archiving practices.

Summary of the Main Points

• Social media is necessary for K-12 schools, but it’s more problematic than email in terms of compliance and student misuse.
• Social media presence gives districts faster communication with parents and stakeholders, more transparency, a platform to share academic, sports, and artistic achievements, and involvement in the community.
• K-12 schools are governed by compliance laws like FERPA and need to be able to meet the state deadlines when producing records for Open Data/FOIA requests.
• To do so, schools need to retain social media records as they would any other public record: in a searchable and unalterable format, with all the relevant metadata.
• The risks of social media can best be handled through social media archiving software — systems that integrate with social media channels, capture all records in an evidentiary quality, and allow searching and alerting.
• Once a K-12 district implements social media archiving and monitoring, it’s important to educate staff and students on the school’s social media policy, review posts regularly, and define user access levels for staff.

FAQ

Do school districts need to archive social media content?

Yes. Posts, comments, and messages created on official school social media accounts may be considered public records under state open records laws. Archiving helps districts meet retention requirements and respond to FOIA or public records requests.

Does FERPA apply to social media posts made by schools?

FERPA does not specifically mention social media, but it does apply if a post discloses personally identifiable information from a student’s education record. Schools should obtain proper consent before sharing student-related information online.

Are schools required to monitor students’ personal social media accounts?

No. Schools are not universally required to monitor students’ personal social media activity outside of school hours. However, some districts voluntarily use monitoring tools to identify potential safety concerns, such as cyberbullying or threats, when there is a clear connection to school safety.

What types of social media content should be archived by school districts?

Districts should archive content from official social media accounts, including posts, comments, replies, direct messages, and edits or deletions. The exact scope depends on state records retention laws and district policies.

Why aren’t screenshots sufficient for legal or compliance purposes?

Screenshots do not include essential metadata such as timestamps, user IDs, or edit history. They can also be altered easily, which makes them unreliable for audits, public records requests, or court proceedings.

How does social media archiving support FOIA and public records requests?

Archiving creates a searchable, tamper-resistant record of social media activity. This allows school districts to locate, review, and produce records efficiently when responding to FOIA or state public records requests.

Can social media archiving help improve student safety?

Yes. When combined with monitoring and alerting, archived social media data can help districts identify patterns of harassment, threats, or concerning behavior earlier and respond more effectively.

How often should school districts review their social media policies and archiving practices?

Policies and archiving practices should be reviewed regularly, especially when laws change, new platforms are adopted, or communication habits shift. Periodic reviews help ensure ongoing compliance and reduce risk.

About the Author

Bojana Krstic

Bojana Krstic is the Marketing Director at Jatheon, where she leads strategic initiatives and creates content on data archiving, ediscovery, and compliance. When AFK, you’ll find her in the forest, discovering new music, or exploring the Adriatic.