Education Week - August 23, 2017 - 12

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Evolution of Sexting Challenges School Leaders
By Benjamin Herold
Philadelphia

For Jane Griffin, the principal at
Louisiana's Winnfield High, the moment came when one of her students
found a staff member's smartphone
lying on a desk, picked it up, and took
a picture of his own genitals.
For Shafta Collazo, an assistant
principal at Delaware's Woodbridge
Middle School, it came when a student got mad at his girlfriend and decided to "airdrop" compromising digital photos of her to dozens of other
children using a file-transfer service
for Mac devices.
And for Assistant Principal Deirdra Chandler, the realization that
responding to youth "sexting" is
now a part of the job, even for leaders of K-5 schools, came after one of
her young students at South Carolina's Erwin Elementary School
sent out sexual imagery of another
student to his friends.
"It's scary," said Chandler, one of
nearly 100 concerned school leaders
who packed into a conference room
here last month, during the annual
conference of the nation's principals,
to discuss the dangers of sexting.
This fraught new reality for U.S.
schools is regularly in the headlines,
and principals at the conference said
they're overwhelmed by the developmental, legal, and technological aspects of a phenomenon that's moving
faster than their ability to keep up.

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"It feels like I'm standing in front
of a freight train going at full speed,"
said Jay Hepperle, an assistant principal at North Dakota's Dickinson
High School, where he says he deals
with as many as two sexting-related
incidents a week.

How Big Is the Problem?
The term "sexting" generally refers to sending or receiving sexually
explicit or suggestive images, videos, or messages via a mobile device
or the internet.
Such activity is nothing new: Education Week has covered the dilemmas that youth sexting poses for
schools going back almost a decade.
Nor is sexting limited to students.
Educators at a number of schools
have landed in trouble for taking
and sharing sexual imagery.
But it's hard to find solid recent
data on the prevalence of the practice nationwide.
Back in 2009, the Pew Research
Center's Internet and American
Life project found that 4 percent of
cellphone-owning teenagers had sent
sexually explicit or suggestive photos
of themselves to someone else via a
text message, and 15 percent said
they had received such a message.
Subsequent smaller-scale studies
have typically found higher rates.
For many principals on the
ground, though, the problem feels
like it's accelerating at an alarming

rate. The dynamics around sexting
have changed, they say, thanks to
the rising ubiquity of smartphones,
and the advent of new social-media
platforms and apps such as Snapchat and Kik.
That means new worries about
children's safety and potential landmines for school leaders themselves.
Addressing the principals at the
conference, Kansas State University's Robert F. Hachiya issued a blunt
warning for those charged with investigating and responding to sextingrelated incidents.
"If you arrive in court," Hachiya told
the group, "you are going to get Monday-morning-quarterbacked to death."
There's the immediate worry of protecting children. Student victims may
need supports, such as counseling.
Sexting may also be considered bullying, harassment, or abuse. If that's
the case, said Hachiya, an assistant
professor of educational leadership,
principals are likely obligated under
federal laws, such as Title IX of the
Education Amendments of 1972, to
respond to an incident. In some situations, they may also be considered
mandatory reporters, with a legal responsibility to report potential abuse
to law-enforcement authorities.
There's also considerable pressure
to move quickly on investigations,
Hachiya said. But things can get
dicey quickly.
Often, the original taking and
sharing of sexual images is consen-

sual. But in a world where nearly
every child seems to have access to
a smartphone, multiple platforms
through which to distribute digital
content, crises can spread quickly,
Hachiya said.
Seizures and searches are often
parts of the effort to contain such
situations. When it comes to going
through students' phones and socialmedia accounts, though, principals
can quickly put themselves in a legal
gray area, Hachiya said.
A variety of court cases have
yielded no clear guidelines that cover
the full variety of situations schools
may face.
Then there's the thorniest problem
of all: laws related to pornography
and child pornography.

'A Very Scary Place to Be'
In some states, when a youth takes,
shares, or receives sexual images of
another minor, he or she can face
charges involving the production, distribution, or possession of child porn.
By taking what may seem like common-sense steps to preserve evidence,
Hachiya said, school administrators
can run into similar jeopardy.
Among the potentially problematic
administrative actions he described:
a principal who confiscates and holds
a device containing sexual images,
forwards or saves such images to his
or her own files or accounts, or even
shows sexted images to a fellow ad-

ministrator as part of trying to figure
out an appropriate response.
For principals such as Jemi Carlone, who said she faced "five pretty
serious incidents" last school year
at Louisiana's Belle Chasse High, it
makes for a treacherous landscape.
In one case, Carlone said, students at her school had shared
sexually explicit images via the
ephemeral-messaging app Snapchat. School administrators knew
they needed to gather evidence for
an eventual expulsion hearing. But
they didn't want to take a photo or
video of the images before they disappeared, because they didn't want
to risk being in possession of child
pornography themselves.
"I won't touch their phones at all,"
Carlone concluded. "We lock [the devices] up, wait for the police to come,
and say, 'OK, it's on you all now.' "
Immediately involving law enforcement is a smart step, Hachiya said.
Don't forward, copy, share, archive,
or otherwise possess any sexually
explicit or suggestive images, he advised. And don't overlook the importance of prevention-an approach
that some states are investing in,
through laws promoting the teaching
of "digital citizenship."
The reality, principals at the session said, is that there's no standard
playbook for managing sexting situations, which often leaves principals in
the unenviable position of figuring it
out as they go.
"To know that doing what we think
is right in the moment to protect kids
could cost us everything," Collazo
said, "is a very scary place to be."

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