During the St. Vrain Valley School District‘s school board’s meeting this week, our boss, Executive Director of Instructional Technology Joe McBreen, shared with the Board a draft of our freshly revised and significantly re-written policies regarding computers, responsible behavior, and the Internet. The policies are still in draft form, and will change a teeny bit between now and formal adoption by the Board, but we wanted to share those drafts with you now, both to keep you posted and to help you prepare for the changes they contain.

If you’d like to watch the Board conversation regarding the policies, here’s a link to that video. The portion of the meeting regarding these policies begins at the time code 119:20 where Joe discusses the policy drafts.

You can find the three policy drafts here:

EHC (Overall philosophy statement) PDF

EHC-R (Responsible Use Guidelines) PDF

EHC-E2 (Student Responsible Use) PDF

We are pretty excited about a couple of things in these revised policies. For one, we’ve tried to re-write them in simpler and easier to understand language. For another, we are starting each list of responsibilities with positive actions, rather than a big list of “Don’ts.” And, of course, we are emphasizing behaviors over specific technologies in all of the documents, as we know that technology will change, but responsible behaviors and high expectations shouldn’t. Also, you might notice that we’ll be moving, in the future, to allowing students and staff to connect their own personal devices to our network for educational purposes.

We’d love to hear what you think about these draft policies; again, we’re excited about them. Please drop us a line in the comments. Remember that these are still drafts until approved by the school board.

(Cross-posted from the St. Vrain Instructional Technology blog)