AUP and Use of School's Domain

[Mickey Chavannes]

Do any of you have specific wording in you AUP that indicates your school's domain and email addresses are property of the district and any use of the domain and email addresses, such as in signing up for non-school approved websites, may be subject to the district accessing that account?

My issue is, we have students use our email address to sign up for Facebook, Twitter, etc. Periodically we receive notifications from Gaggle saying user XYZ has sent an inappropriate message through our server causing us to investigate. In my research, it seems that if we do not have something specifically addressing how our email addresses can be used, and we access that student's account, we could be putting ourselves in a legal mess.

This stemmed from a student who opened a Twitter account and was using it to solicit and send inappropriate images. Because he used his school's email address, we were then able to alert his parents to address the matter. We have also been able to get others help on personal matters when they turned to Facebook to post their feelings.

Thanks