Should schools provide students e-mail accounts?
Tuesday, February 28, 2006 at 09:29AM 
I received this e-mail from a district parent yesterday:
I was a little concerned when I noticed our 5th grade daughter remotely accessing her school email from home. Possibly I overlooked any information that informed us that she would have an email account. Could you provide that information to me again. Also could you briefly describe any threats to our home network and what is being done on the district side to keep her safe.
After verfying that was indeed a "real" parent, I responded:
We have been giving Mankato students e-mail address since about 1997. While accounts are established for them when they enroll as kindergarteners, they do not gain access until a teacher or librarian “activates” the account by giving them a password and showing them how to access the account. These e-mails are on our own internal mail sever and students access them through a web-based interface. Their e-mail username and password also give them access to their online storage space in the district.
We have given students e-mail addresses for a number of reasons:
1. E-mail is taught as an essential skill. E-mail use and safety is formally taught at 5th grade and reinforced in 8th grade in our library media curriculum. We have based our IL and Tech curriculum on the Minnesota Educational Media Organization’s Information Literacy and Technology Standards (base on the ISTE NETS Standards) that read:
II. Technology use
Standard: The student will select and use the appropriate technology for educational and personal goals.
Use communication programs/devices such as phones, fax, email, instant messaging, video teleconference, synchronous and asynchronous communication tools.
2. E-mail is used to communicate with teachers and peers. Students are encouraged to use e-mail to communicate for educational purposes with both their teachers and peers.
3. E-mail used to access experts. We recognize and value human experts as a vital information source for research assignments and projects. E-mail can be an effective and efficient means of contacting such experts.
We believe it is better for the school to give students e-mail accounts over which we have some control (monitoring, search of stored e-mail, ability to disable and change accounts) rather than ask students to use commercial accounts such as yahoo or gmail over which we have no control at all. This also gives us a chance to teach the safe and appropriate use of e-mail.
In terms of threats to one’s home network, there would be same risk than if your children were using a commercial e-mail account and they opened attachments that contain viruses or similar programs. We do filter at the firewall most attachments with extensions known to carry viruses (except those enabled through macros within Office documents.)
In terms of informing parents about student e-mail accounts, we could be doing a better job and I will be discussing this with our library media specialists how this happens at each building. I appreciate your bringing it to my attention.
If interested, I am looking for a parent for our district’s library/technology advisory committee and would be pleased to have you join us. We meet 4 afternoons per school year to work on policies, goal setting, and budgeting for the district.
All the very best and I hope this answers your questions. Feel free to give me a call if you’d like to discuss this further.
The irony is that very few students use their school e-mail address after about 6th grade, prefering their personal (and unregulated) accounts.
Does our district need to revist the wisdom giving e-mail addresses to students?
How does your school handle student e-mail accounts? Why or why don't you provide them? Has anyone used gaggle.net?
