The primary function of a school, aside from educating children, is to protect their students. While we don’t have a serve and protect tagline, there really should be.

As an odd hybrid of a special educator and an advocate I see a lot of different perspectives and certainly, as a special educator, you tend to see a very different side of the people who are sworn to protect our most vulnerable students. When money and politics and self-interest enter the equation, it tends to mean kids come last.

Given the advances in technology, and especially artificial intelligence lately, I have become concerned by the rise in districts getting involved in branded content and self-promotion through social media. The fact so many schools are trying their hand at corporate branding is perhaps a sign of the times and the fact that the Horace Mann, post-Civil War model of education we’ve clung to is showing its age and its increasing irrelevance.

Given the foundational skills of reading, writing, and math are rarely taught in schools in favor of social exercises in box checking and jargon-laden fluff, it seems a desperate act to try and rebrand something that is simply not equipped to provide students with strong foundational skills and beyond.

The fact that social media and artificial intelligence are evolving so rapidly really means we should also have a discussion about what our schools are doing when it comes to their own social media and how that lines up with student and family privacy. Seemingly gone are the days of tasteful discretion in favor of schools dumping dozens of images of students and staff online.

There is a great deal of research and news articles and anecdotal evidence as to why this is not an advisable or safe practice. It is especially surprising given all of the efforts by schools to educate parents on ensuring their children are safe online.

It seems terribly disingenuous to extol the virtues of online safety and taking that moral high ground as educators, but then not having clear-cut procedures or policies in place for the educators to control, say, whether the material gathered for posts is safely accounted for, that staff are not taking photos of students with personal devices at random … and subsequently removing said imagery from personal devices.

We really need to have a conversation about policy and procedure around social media in our schools about our schools’ use of social media. It feels like drone shots of school buildings and Instagram accounts of the student council exist less for the benefit of students and more for the need of adults to promote a “business,” a justification for millions of invested taxpayer dollars.

Branded content and marketing should not come before student safety and privacy, and schools should revise and address their procedures and start putting students before their desire to market themselves.

Ben Tobin lives in Williamsburg.