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As PTA Groups Move Online, So Does Dissension
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Karin Leszczynski, vice president of the Churchill PTSA, said the group chose not to launch an interactive e-mail list because "people post things, and it's not accurate, and then it can serve to inflame things." She says almost no one but Sartucci has complained.
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E-mail lists vary widely in how closely they are monitored for content that is offensive, legally sensitive or otherwise contrary to "netiquette." Sometimes posts are reviewed before publication, sometimes not.
"There are only the sketchiest of rules about it," said Reid Goldstein, chairman of the Parent Advisory Committee at H-B Woodlawn.
H-B Woodlawn's 425-member e-mail group, normally quiet, exploded with more than 100 comments in 2006 over the hip flasks. Rick Keller, the moderator, chided some parents who sent uncivil comments to one another, not through the group site but in personal e-mails.
"Apologies were made and, I think, we ended with a stronger sense of community than when the issue began," Keller said in an e-mail.
List subscribers tend to recoil at the mere hint of censorship or surveillance by outsiders.
Parents in Fairfax County's gifted-education community gasped when comments from Carol Horn, the county coordinator of gifted education, were posted recently to the e-mail discussion group of the Fairfax County Association for the Gifted. They feared she was monitoring the group, which many parents consider private, although anyone can subscribe, said Louise Epstein, the gifted association's president.
When a parent at Walter Johnson High in Bethesda posted to the school's PTSA list about a vandalism problem last month from her BlackBerry, the device generated a salutation that identified her as an assistant state's attorney. Another parent pounced: "Why," she wrote, "is a county prosecutor monitoring the WJPTSA listserve?"
Many subscribers expect "an element of privacy," said Tom Murphy, PTSA president at Walter Johnson, even though their posts are read by hundreds. "I try to explain to parents, once you hit that send key, you put something into the public domain."
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