Thanks to some encouragement from Matthew Tabor, I’m adding this note of clarification to this post and another I wrote back in February 2007 about email.

I agree with Matthew that formal documentation by teachers of various issues and situations is very important. I am not discouraging educators from taking the time to document situations thoroughly and properly. I wanting to highlight that as teachers write an email message, a word processing document, a note by hand, or anything else, it is important to remember the public nature of the document which is being crafted. Based on the actual examples of educator emails Celynda Brashner shared in her METC 2007 session on educational legal issues, it is clear some teachers have in the past not had this perception of email. She recounted multiple examples where comments were made which were not appropriate or professional in email, messages were inadvertently sent to all recipients rather than just a colleague, etc.

Again I want to encourage teachers to recognize the potentially public nature of email. I think this is an important and quite reasonable position to take. We need to be aware of the potential for litigation and the way the words we write can be utilized in court.

This depends largely on the state in which your district operates.

For example, in New York and Florida, archiving e-mail isn’t something that “some people” say should happen - and it certainly isn’t a conservative assessment of the situation. It’s the law.

In those states, e-mail within public schools is a matter of public record. Obviously there are restrictions on what can/can’t be made available via a Freedom of Information Law [or similar] request - I couldn’t have access to e-mails containing confidential information - but communication, as with other public institutions, is to be archived.

Public right-to-know, Sunshine, and FOIL acts pre-date the Enron fallout by decades.