Persuasive Essay Example: Should Schools Monitor Students Online?

Do you use your cell phone out or in school? If you don’t, do you think that teachers and principals should be allowed to monitor what you do online out of school? Some schools look at students' social media and some even ask for your password. They should be allowed to do this, it is for the safety of the school and to teach students not to cyber bully.

Schools need to monitor students' social media so they can keep the school and other students safe. The article states “ Lastly, schools should have the right to punish students for online activity because doing so might save lives.” If schools watch what the students do online, they could find things like, “Don’t come to school today”, or “ Watch out lily, I'm going to beat you up today”. If schools see this on the students' social media, they can try preventing it from happening. The article says “If a school catches a student bullying someone online before the police do, the student is less likely to end up in legal trouble. “ which is protecting the student from getting in more trouble than if the cops found it. So with schools monitoring their students, they are keeping everyone safe. In the passage it says “ Second, inappropriate online activity often comes in the form of cyberbullying.”  Cyberbullying is something that leads to bad things in the end. If schools watch what students post, they can punish them for doing it. Most say that is the parents job, but almost all the parents of the kids cyberbullying don’t care or don’t know. The article states “ Fourteen states have passed anti-cyberbullying laws, and other states are considering them”. So it is illegal to cyberbully, but police can’t always find every person cyberbullying. If the school were to find some of them, it would help. In the end, it is safer for schools to keep an eye on students' social media. Is all that really true or right? Yes, it is.

The passage says “Imagine teachers checking students’ cell phones or spying on their afterschool conversations.” Some of the conversations on students' phones are private, for example, it could be about a family member dying, someone has a disease or even their parents getting divorced. If a teacher read that, it would most likely embarrass the students. It would also probably make it awkward if the teacher is theirs. In the article it states “Finally, the role of educators is to teach, not to monitor kids outside the classroom.” It isn’t the admistaters job to be a student's parent. It’s their job to make sure the students are doing the right thing in school, not out of school. It could also be a form of therapy for students, putting their feelings online. The school probably would not know that, and punish a student for what they are thinking. So it is an invasion of privacy to look at a student's private life. All of these are veiled points, but safety is more important.

Schools should be allowed to monitor students' online life out of school, for their safety and others. Students need privacy, but need to be safe more. They also need to be punished for cyberbullying other people. It's better for the school to look, not the police that would be way worse. Schools need to look at your social media, not to invade privacy, but to make sure you're not bullying others or getting bullied.