School Board Bans TikTok Access, Discusses Classroom Cameras

But on Monday the school board unanimously passed a resolution prohibiting staff as well as students from accessing TikTok, or any other programs from its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance, on school-issued devices or internet connections.

The resolution also directs teachers to “avoid any requirement or suggestion” that students access TikTok or any other ByteDance apps for educational purposes. A Pew Research survey last year found that 67 percent of American teens use TikTok.

Board Chair Robert Levy placed the issue on the board’s agenda for consideration. He said that the measure is intended to protect students and staff from potential data harvesting.

“TikTok and ByteDance are very closely associated with the government of China as well as the Chinese Communist Party,” he said. “We have a concern that such things are not secure for our students. We have concerns that our students’ images are being digitized by foreign governments and are being utilized by foreign governments and that’s not what we want to do.”

Federal agencies are in the process of enacting a TikTok ban for government phones and other devices. A bipartisan push wrapped that ban into a massive congressional spending bill signed into law at the end of last year.

Superintendent Tim Locklair said that Moore County Schools staff have been blocked from access to TikTok as of Dec. 30, and that any staff who have installed the app on their school-issued devices have been directed to delete it.

“There certainly have been communications at the state government level as well about using TikTok on devices through the state,” said Locklair.

“As a result of that, reflecting on that and reviewing those network security concerns I made the decision working with our director for technology, to go ahead and filter out that access to TikTok for both students and staff.”

Administrators said that students are blocked from accessing all social media platforms — such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat — on their school-issued devices. Board member David Hensley had suggested writing that provision into the board’s TikTok resolution.

“Social media leads to many, many problems in our schools. It’s a distraction,” he said. “Some argue that it leads to fights and other disciplinary actions on our buses and our campuses and I tend to believe those people.”

Kendt Eklund, Moore County Schools’ director for technology, said that the district’s firewalls block elementary, middle and high school students from all social media access.

Staff and students who also attend Sandhills Community College can access other social media platforms. The wireless connection available to school visitors is set at the most restrictive level available to elementary school students.

While Moore County Schools may not facilitate access to TikTok or other social media through school-issued devices or internet connections, that doesn’t prevent them from using their personal phones with cellular data.

“We are not here trying to say that students don’t have the right to go on the apps that they want while they’re out of our purview,” said Levy. “That is a matter between their parents and themselves.”

During its work session earlier in the day, the board briefly discussed another proposal Levy introduced: installing video cameras in classrooms. He suggested that video footage could help adjudicate disciplinary issues and be a tool for evaluating teachers.

“We do have cameras in our common areas, quite a lot of our common areas, so the only question would be would we wish to place cameras in the classrooms,” he said.

“That may not be a system-wide thing; that may be simply cameras in our lower-performing schools so we can make sure that our students are doing their best, our teachers are doing their best and that there’s no ‘he said, she said.’”

Any extension of video recording to individual classrooms would likely require a commensurate expansion in the district’s technology infrastructure: the bandwidth for recording video and server capacity to store it for a set period of time.

“I don’t think we have the infrastructure or the technology at this point to do that, to keep memory like that, for every school and every classroom,” said board member Stacey Caldwell.

Caldwell said that since the proposal was attached to the school board’s agenda late last week, she’s been “flooded” with emails from teachers opposing it.

Hensley compared classroom cameras to body cameras worn by law enforcement officers, and suggested that video recordings would go a long way toward resolving “baseless accusations” against teachers. But he also said that constant recordings would allow administrators to get a more accurate sense of teachers’ day-to-day performance than they might get with occasional in-person visits.

The board has existing policies governing who can view video and audio recordings of students. Parents can view recordings that are determined to be a relevant “education record” of their student. Hensley said that the audience for classroom videos should be similarly limited.

“The footage has to only be available to administrators and law enforcement and shown to parents only if there’s a disciplinary issue or a good reason,” Hensley said.

“This cannot be footage that people can get via public records requests and whatnot. That would have to be an essential element of the program in order for us to get the trust and confidence of our teachers and staff.”

Levy referred further discussion of the proposal and exploration of potential costs to the school board’s budget and construction committees, both of which Hensley chairs.

“I would hope you take a hard look at it. One of our biggest problems that we’re having, especially in some of our low-performing schools, is discipline, and this would help solve the problem,” he said.

“I understand that teachers may have some misgivings about being photographed in their classrooms, but I think especially the younger teachers understand that we’re photographed all the time and there should be no expectation of privacy in a classroom at least so far as the educational community is concerned.”