School Board favors proposal that would create policy for e-mail

March 7, 2002

The School Board gave initial approval Tuesday night to its first policy on electronic mail, which has been a feature of school district computers as far back as 1995.

The policy, which needs final approval at the board's April 2 meeting, requires that e-mail messages be preserved for public review — necessary under Florida law — and that employees use work e-mail only for school-related business and educational purposes.

The school district installed a new e-mail server in January that makes it relatively easy to copy and save e-mail documents. It also makes it easy to sort them by date and sender.

Until now, school district personnel have been working under a verbal directive that they save the e-mail they create, either by printing a paper copy or by saving it to a computer disk.