Reply to Sidwell middle school thread comment deletions

Forum Index » Website Feedback

Reply to "Sidwell middle school thread comment deletions"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=jsteele][quote=Anonymous]Thanks for the response. Of course it’s your message board, but those are lame reasons IMO. First, the “former employee” was a senior administrator who made numerous public statements about the middle school, so I don’t see how that aspect of the discussion was off-topic. Second, is it really your view that senior administrators cannot be named in the independent school forum? We are not talking about teachers here; they are leaders and limited purpose public figures—in this instance, the principal of the middle school.[/quote]

I absolutely think that senior administrators should be named. Just not anonymously. If you have the courage of your convictions, don't hide behind anonymous posts. Similarly, I absolutely believe that in a thread about middle school homeroom assignments, discussion of a former employee who was not involved in assigning homerooms is off-topic.
[/quote]

Well, the discussion evolved into a broader discussion about the middle school, not just homeroom assignments. But you appear to have deleted those comments as well. Which is odd, since discussions on this message board often evolve in certain ways, without going “off-topic.” If you are going to enforce a view that any comments that are not strictly and narrowly responsive to OP are off-topic, that would certainly be a change for the independent school forum.

As to your view that people should only be able to name senior administrators (which in this instance I did not personally do) if they have the “courage” to identify themselves—respectfully, that makes no sense. As a general matter, this is an anonymous forum. And the forum is going to lose a lot of its value if parents have to identify themselves in order to discuss the actions of leaders in a particular school. [b]Just to take one hypothetical example, what if a parent wants to start a discussion about a senior administrator who is believed to retaliate against parents and/or their kids when the parents are viewed to be “difficult” or “complainers”? How would that discussion happen on this message board when someone has to identify themselves and risk (in their view) the exact retaliation that they have identified?[/b] And if they can’t identify the administrator(s), how useful can the discussion be? Are you distinguishing between “naming” an administrator and using that administrator’s initials for identification purposes? Because I recall that some comments with just initials were deleted as well.[/quote]

NP here.  The point Jeff is trying to make is that type of discussion is not welcome here.  If you want to have a forum like that to give anonymous posters places to vent against school leadership that they feel may be retaliative, you are welcome to start that type of board.  But Jeff does not want any type of discussion here, like what you've suggested, that could get the forum and Jeff into trouble.  If you have such a discussion and the person in question believes that the comments are libelous, Jeff could get into legal trouble for allowing such comments.

This is not a public forum, you have no right to have any type of discussion that you want on this forum.  You can abide by the rules and his moderation or you can leave to find another forum to have your discussion on.  Those are your options.  But trying to criticize Jeff for trying to prevent what could be libel is not productive.  Jeff has often removed posts of discussions that will not go over well with his advertisers, e.g. the people who actually pay for us to have this wonderful free forum for random discussion.  So, just note, that your negative comments about the school administrator are not welcome here.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics