Education Chat

E-Mail Headaches: How Schools are Coping

Our guests examined the complex legal and logistical challenges associated with the use of e-mail by students, teachers, and administrators.

September 26, 2007

E-Mail Headaches: How Schools are Coping

Guests:
Kim A. Rice
, the chief information officer for the Boston public schools; Jay Attiya, the network manager for the Middletown, N.J., school district; and Linda Sharp, the director of cyber security for the digital-district project at the Consortium for School Networking.

Michelle Davis (Moderator):

Welcome to today’s live chat with Jay Attiya, the network manager for the Middletown, N.J. school district, Kim A. Rice, the chief information officer for the Boston public schools and Linda Sharp, the director of the Consortium for School Networking. We’ll be talking about the issues that e-mail use raises for school districts from privacy concerns to security and including the new obligations presented by the revised Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. We’ve got a lot of good questions already waiting, so let’s get started.

Question from Mike Russ, Director of Technology, Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corp.:

How important is it to be able to archive voicemail and IM as compared to e-mail? Has anyone evaluated the “solutions” that are out there to archive e-mail? I’m sure a lot of them are going to be priced much higher than school districts are use to seeing.

Linda Sharp:

The law states that you must archive designated documents or electronically stored information including writings, drawings, graphs, charts, photographs, sound recordings, images or other data or data compilations. Broadly interpreted that could mean voicemail and IM. I would certainly contact your district attorney for his interpretation. There are many companies that archive, it is wise to compare the prices and services for outside vendors versus the time and resources necessary if you do it within the district. Depending upon the size of the district and the resources available, it will make a difference.

Question from Susanna Lorenz Department Chair Franklin Academy:

Small businesses and other private organizations often hire technology consultants on a retainer or as-needed basis to oversee their computer/networking needs. Security and new technological products are evolving at such a pace that school districts’ in-house tech support cannot keep up -- given the rapidity of these changes and the massive workload that tech staff have on a daily basis. Why don’t school districts use technology consultants to develop security systems and sophisticated networks to address the demand? It seems that school districts are just re-inventing the wheel every time they need to adopt changes that businesses take for granted. Districts could easily utilize structures already developed for businesses and non-profits. They would also be cutting costs because consultants don’t generate additional overhead such as healthcare and retirement costs.

Linda Sharp:

It is very hard for districts to have personnel in place with the expertise needed to keep their districts secure and operating efficiently. This is especially true of smaller districts. One option is to hire consultants; they are expensive, but do save personnel costs. Another option is for small districts to work together sharing expertise and information. Also, I found that some businesses will work with districts and provide the time and expertise as a community donation or goodwill gesture.

Question from Craig Nansen, District Technology Coordinator:

Are nightly backups sufficient? (Mail received and deleted the same day will not be archived.)

Jay Attiya:

Nightly backups would not be sufficient to address the FRCP policy. It would be similar to creating a word document, printing it, delivering it and then destroying all copies of it. This does not remove the responsibility of having to produce the document in a legal proceeding. The same would hold true with e-mail. If it is sent through your e-mail server than it must be archived based on your retention policies.

Question from Joyce Standing, Product Manager, Education infilearn.com:

Where can I learn more about the federal archiving requirements?

Linda Sharp:

The best thing to do is to consult your district attorney. But there is easy reading at http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/Rule34.htm and http://www.nsba.org/site/docs/40500/40411.pdf

Question from Anna, teacher:

What is the best way for districts to deal with junk mail that clogs up the e-mail system? In my district we are seeing our own e-mail addresses used (without our permission) to send inappropriate content to others in our district. It’s like our e-mail addresses have been highjacked by some weirdo out there! How do we combat this?

Kim A. Rice:

The best way to prevent junk mail from clogging the email system, in our experience, is to manage it centrally. Unfortunately, we have seen this kind of activity attempted as well, but having it come through a central server validates the user and catches when large numbers of emails are sent, ie spam.

Question from Debbie Cline-Eck, Technology Director, Wissahickon School District:

Who should monitor e-mail activity? Classroom teacher, principals, guidance, technology? Any opinions?

Jay Attiya:

I think email activity should be monitored by the Tech department because it requires some level of adminstrative access to the network and mail servers. There are programs available that can monitor emails for particular words and phrases and automatically send an email alert if triggered.

Question from April Chapman, parent, Public Elementary School:

Are there any rules or regulations governing the use of Yahoo Groups or other social networking software for communication among various school community members that have common issues (ex. parents in one class or across a grade, parents involved in an afterschool program). Does it make a difference if no school administrators or teachers in the groups vs. participation by school administrators or teachers -- are there any rules and regulations to be aware of when putting these groups together?

Linda Sharp:

These rules are primarily focused on companies, government agencies, school districts and any organization that might be sued. If you interpret this widely, I assume that parents could be sued, but I think it would depend upon the type of e-mail and purpose of the group. As with schools, if this is a formal group, even without school personnel participation, I would follow general rules about archiving the e-mail.

Question from Jeanne Ludt, School Board Member, Souhegan High School:

Is it ever appropriate for the school board to use a parent e-mail delivery system to educate parents regarding a budget? In the state of New Hampshire, school district budgets are presented to and voted on by local taxpayers. We don’t want to tell people how to vote but find it a useful tool to help educate parents about anything within the budget that may be new or is impacting an increase. The legal guidelines we’ve seen are very gray. I’m wondering if there is a model policy somewhere that we could use as a guide for writing policy on our use of the parental e-mail list.

Linda Sharp:

I don’t know of a model policy that covers this topic. In schools in our area, a district is not allowed to send out information that is considered political - regardless of the format. If you have similar laws, then I would consult an attorney before emailing anything that is part of an election.

Question from Sharon O’Connor Riehle, Technology Director, Cretin-Derham Hall High School:

How do the new guidelines affect private schools?

Linda Sharp:

Please have your school attorney answer this for you. The law specifically states school districts, not individual schools, but I would interpret the law to be any school that could be sued.

Question from Wil Wong, Technology Coordinator, Academy of the Pacific:

Are non-profit private schools bound by these federal requirements as well? What procedure/software is suggested for archiving all digital files on computers and does this include student lab computers as well? Is the federal government funding any of these projects?

Jay Attiya:

Since I work for a public school district, I haven’t looked into what the federal requirements are for private schools. I think it really comes down to how protected what want to be. The more information you can produce during a law suit, the better you can be protected. There are many vendors that offer backup solutions, each one with a slightly varying procedure. My base line would be to default all saved documents to a networked folder using Group Policies (if you are a Windows shop) so you don’t have to worry about the files on individual computers. Using this procedure it wouldn’t matter where the computer is used. To my knowledge the Fed Gov’t is not providing funding.

Question from Joanne Arvay, Technology Coordinator, Scotch Plains-Fanwood SD:

What do you do in the case when e-mail is sent to a school domain address but is automatically forwarded to a personal e-mail account (AOL, Yahoo, etc.)?

Jay Attiya:

The way our email archival software will be set up, it will capture all messages in or out of our e-mail server. Therefore forwarded messages will still be captured and archived. There are very few users that have this setup. It is used for the occasional outside instructional contractor that works in our building on a daily basis.

Question from Allan Algar, MS Science & Tech, American International School of Islamabad:

Are there schools or districts that are contracting e-mail and storage out to public companies that monitor services and maintain servers to meet these new standards?

Jay Attiya:

There are companies that provide these services but I never considered them since I had no intentions of outsourcing our email. I found that the larger the district, the less cost effective are these services. The cost per mailbox becomes too prohibitive. For reference, we maintain 1500 mailboxes for staff. We do not provide email services for students at this time.

Question from Carolyn Ross, Superintendent of Schools, Churchill County School District:

Can you share policies and administrative regulations that are effective now regarding the use of e-mails? How are other districts restricting e-mails among staff? What training do others provide to all staff regarding e-mails?

Kim A. Rice:

I’d be happy to share our policies with anyone that would like to have them. We have an acceptable use policy (AUP) that we have a committee made up of teachers, administrators, parents, students and tech folk revise every year. Many of our schools have gone “paperless” -- meaning that all memos that come out from the principal, etc are only being done via email. The bi-weekly superintendent’s notice also only is sent via email. I am not sure how other districts may be restricting email among staff. What I can tell you is that we state that our BPS mail should be use for BPS business, not personal business and encourage them to get a personal account (like gmail) for their personal communications. It keeps it clean. We recently upgraded to Microsoft Exchange, so we have been doing centralized training for folks with the new tools. This has given us an opportunity to revisit policies and acceptable practices with email.

Question from J. Terrill, school nurse, summersville elementary:

As a school nurse am I supposed to keep a printout of each e-mail I send if it is health related, or should I even use e-mail for health related questions or information? Thank You.

Jay Attiya:

The answer depends on whether your district is archiving all email at this time and what kind of email system you use. For instance, in a Microsoft Exchange email environment using Microsoft Outlook as the email client, all sent emails should be automatically saved in your Sent Items folder. However you may not be able to keep all such sent items indefinetly due to mailbox limits your school may impose. In thatv case you may well be served to print out all sent emails for your own and schools protection. If your question is in regards to whether you should be legally using email to send health related messages, I do not know the answer.

Question from Jing Zhang, Information Specialist, Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute:

Do you think the requirement for archiving e-mail is too much for public school systems? Even at top universities, archiving e-mail is still a big challenge. There is no general agreement between IT industry and archive profession about this yet. Thanks.

Linda Sharp:

Unfortunately, I don’t think schools have an option. It is pretty clear that school districts are included in the law requiring archiving of data including email.

Question from Margaret Sorensen, PhD Candidate, Walden University:

As a working parent, I am concerned with convincing the local district to enhance the use of e-mail to build better communication with parents. Is there some danger that the recent requirements will make some teachers EVEN LESS likely to use this valuable tool? As it is, the district does not require teachers to have/use a district e-mail address (somehow, I just don’t think it’s professional to use a hotmail account), there is no Web availability of contact e-mails and some teachers just refuse.

Jay Attiya:

You bring up an interesting point. I will be curious myself if email usage will decrease since teachers know all messages will be archived. I personnaly think we will not see much of a decrease of legitimate messages because our staff manual has stated for several years that all electronic documents and communications are subject to review when appropriate and that there is no implied privacy when utilizing our computers. Where I hope to see a decrease is in the use of our email system of personal messages. In particular emails that contain attachments of personal pictures. These types of message currently take up much room in our email infrastructure. I would not mind if staff used a Hotmail account to send personal messages. I don’t know if you can mandate that everyone use email. All you can do is make sure you send emails to all staff that they would be interested in reading so that they get used to using the system.

Question from Craig Nansen, District Technology Coordinator, Minot Public Schools:

Does all mail have to be archived? (Personal e-mail, spam, non-essential messages, etc.) If only essential e-mail must be archived, can each person be made responsible to back up their own e-mail, just as they are expected to keep copies of paper records?

Kim A. Rice:

The oversimplified answer is YES, all email records must be archived. The question is then, what is a record? We are wrestling with this very question. In terms of volume of email, we hope because of our filtering systems that we have excluded spam from the equation & we encourage personal email to be done with their personal email accounts -- so the question then boils down to whether or not the email communication is a record -- and it seems that currently there is not consensus as to what that means. For this reason, it looks like we are going to be establishing a set of policies & procedures centrally to back up & store all email.

Question from Donald Gordon, Hillsboro ISD, Tech Director:

How long does e-mail have to be retained? If our policy states only one year are we safe?

Linda Sharp:

This is one of the gray areas that is causing a lot of discussion. There is not a timeline defined in the law. This is something that will probably be solved in a court case. If your district has a defined policy, that is a great start.

Question from Debbie Cline-Eck, Technology Director, Wissahickon School District:

When students are asked to use e-mail for class work, can they (should they?) use their own personal e-mail or should we require them to use a district assigned (filtered and monitored) e-mail address?

Kim A. Rice:

My recommendation is that students use their district-assigned e-mail accounts when possible. We strongly discourage, and sometimes even block, accessing hotmail-type Web sites to access personal e-mail. This is due to spam/inappropriate content that then they may access while in school on our network which could be a violation of our Acceptable Use Policy and result in losing network privileges.

Question from Marjee Chmiel, Associate Director of Instructional Design, PBS TeacherLine:

Are there any efforts in your school or district toward implementing mandatory courses in internet safety/ digital savvy/ media literacy? I guess I am biased in that I think education is the answer to everything. We don’t teach children how to use this technology responsibly and as a result, the current generation joining the workforce is finding itself haunted by inapporpriate Facebook profiles and a lack of ethics surrounding work email accounts.

Jay Attiya:

We do teach such information to students starting in our elememtary schools. I agree that we need to educate students in the proper use of technology and the Internet in particular. I don’t think the answer is to simply block all bad things. This practice alliviates the responsibilty of the teacher to monitor the Internet activities of their students and to educate students on proper use and edicate.

Question from Gina Arreola, Dean of Students:

What are your suggestions for best practices in monitoring students’ e-mail usage?

Linda Sharp:

There are some good commercial products that do a good job of monitoring e-mail usage. If a school can afford it, it would be an easier alternative than trying to do self monitoring.

Question from June Dodge, Volunteer, Parent Communications, High Tech High Schools:

What are some suggested programs to use for email blasts (to parents)? We have been using MailMan for the various Parent Associations and Schools to use to communicate with parents.

Kim A. Rice:

The ‘easy’ way to set up blasts to parents to create a listserv and carefully manage it. We have begun exploring GovDelivery which is an e-mail subscription management system that would allow for parents to subscribe to various e-mail notices or newsletters.

Question from Cynthia Blanchard, Teacher, Old Town High School:

We have policies in place to keep student information from being posted online, which is completely necessary for privacy. An interpretation of those policies, at our school at least, has been extended to cover e-mail correspondence. We are not supposed to refer to any student by their full name in any e-mail or it would be a violation of the privacy policy. In my mind at least, e-mail is different than being online, especially since this specifically applies to our interschool correspondence with other teachers and administrators, which is a password protected system. For instance, you can’t send an e-mail asking for Johnny Doe’s homework to be sent down to the office, you ask for J. Doe’s homework. If there are similar names you have to also list their student ID. I’m wondering if such safeguards are necessary, since it takes that much longer to write and decipher what can turn into very coded messages.

Linda Sharp:

I can understand your concern with these coded e-mails. I have not heard of other schools going to that extreme. Keeping information secure is the responsibility of the district, but most do it with hardware and software solutions as well as strong use policies.

Question from C. Benedict assistant principal, Port Jervis:

According to school law, what discipline would be appropriate, as a result of a tenured teacher that projected an e-mail they were generating that contained hostile and defaming information about a staff member, parent and administrator on a smartboard in front of a class of students?

Linda Sharp:

I apologize, but if you want school law, it would be appropriate to contact your district attorney. I would assume you should use exactly the same policy and discipline that you have in place if the teacher projected anything that your school felt was hostile and defaming. E-mail really shouldn’t be considered as a separate issue.

Question from Craig Nansen, District Technology Coordinator, Minot Public Schools:

Does all mail have to be archived? (Personal e-mail, spam, non-essential messages, etc.) If only essential e-mail must be archived, can each person be made responsible to back up their own e-mail, just as they are expected to keep copies of paper records?

Jay Attiya:

The safest approach is to archive anything. This way you do not have to sift through any messages to determine their content. I think it is a Murphy’s Law that the one message you don’t archive will be the very one you need the most. :) When it comes to technology, I am a fan of taking the responsibility away from the user whenever possible. You will always have some staff that are more technically challenged than others. Leaving it up to the individual only opens up the possibility of having incomplete records to retrieve when required. The difference between e-mails and paper records is that the technology exists to be able to capture all messages, where there is no technology to automatically capture all written documents in a central repository.

Question from John Thompson, Associate Professor, Buffalo State College:

Are there model policies that speak to how e-mail can and cannot be used?

Linda Sharp:

I know some districts have student use policies that include e-mail. I don’t have a list, but if you contact the districts that are advanced in student technology use, such as Fairfax County, Virginia or Blue Valley in Kansas, they may be able to share their policies.

Question from Craig Nansen, District Technology Coordinator, Minot Public Schools:

Is it an option for school districts to not support an e-mail server, have everyone use a personal e-mail account, and have them responsible to archive their own e-mail.

Kim A. Rice:

That’s an interesting question. Is it an option? I guess it could be but it sounds like a liability for the district to leave all that to the end users. If you want to ensure 100% of your teachers have and use e-mail and want to capitalize on that use, then I don’t think I would recommend it.

Question from Joe Petrosino, EdD Vo Tech:

The logistical issues associated with electronic communication can be very complex,how can we establish a climate of trust with allof the stakeholders?

Linda Sharp:

I believe the best way to build trust is through education and communication. If all stakeholders understand the rules and regulations that are requited of a school and district, as well as the reason they are expected to follow the rules, the more likely there is to be trust and an understanding of why it is important to work together.

Question from Jason Faucon, Systems Administrator, Wissahickon SD:

Jay Attiya, you mentioned e-mail archival software that can archive any e-mail in or out of your system, can you be specific as to what you are using?

Jay Attiya:

I am implementing a program from a company called CommVault. I have been using their product to perform my nightly regular backups for the past three years. I added some modules to work with my Exchange e-mail servers utilizing the journaling functionality of Exchange. Journaling sets up a mailbox that receives a copy of any activity that goes through the Exchange Information Store. Commvault is then scheduled to “sweep” this journal mailbox periodically and move the contents to my storage media.

Question from CTE director, Beth Smith, Fountain Hills High School:

What filtering software is being used? Any difference in filtering at different grade levels? How to balance control with usability?

Kim A. Rice:

We do not filter differently across grade levels. We utilize MailMarshall to filter out spam, but in general have limited our content filtering to inappropriate language.

Question from Marios Savvides, Systems Designer, Ministry of Education & Culture, Republic of Cyprus:

In the European Union environment, no legislation exist or even a common administration policy regarding archiving requirements on electronic documents, especially on e-mails. But currently the Ministry of Education & Culture is implementing a Learning Management System (LMS) that will provide synchronous and asynchronous communication tools between teachers, students, parents and administrators. So does the US Federal archiving requirements distinguishes between synchronous and asynchronous communication archiving, for what time span must the archiving be kept and at which format they must be kept?

Linda Sharp:

I wish I had those answers for you. The law is very vague and only states that adminstrators are obligated to take steps to safeguard information that directly relates to an actual lawsuit or one that is resonably likely to occur. There is no timeline stated. It is up to schools to determine (hopefully with an attorney) how long to archive the information and exactly what type of information. Unfortunately, it is very hard to determine when you could be sued and what information you need to produce.

Question from Greg Cohen, Learning Support Specialist, SIATech:

To what extent is a school responsible for student e-mail that 1)violates laws and 2)gets the student into trouble (a scam, predator, etc.)?

Kim A. Rice:

Responsible is a very weighted word. I would recommend working with your school’s legal adviser to help you answer specific questions as they arise. I would also strongly recommend that you work with your legal adviser to answer these questions in general and get a written policy for your school or district.

Question from Jerry Leskiv, System Admin FCESC:

What is the retention period for e-mail and do they need to be archived? What’s the best way to encrypt files on teacher laptops and at the same time sync them to the server when connected to domain? Thanks

Kim A. Rice:

We are currently working on our retention policies for e-mail and we have many unresolved questions. We currently do not encrypt e-mail on teacher’s laptops, rather teachers have to log into their machines.

Question from Diane, English Teacher, a Rhode Island High School:

Our school began using e-mail as a source of communication between teachers and administrators several years ago. Union reps would post information for all teachers per the directive of our union president. Recently one teacher who was in line for a department head position was told that when she served as a union rep and relayed information per the union president via e-mail through our list serve, she was borderline insubordinate, and this was the reason that she did not get the job as department head. How do other schools handle these type of situations? (Currently, individual teachers have now been denied access to post anything except through the principal.)

Kim A. Rice:

This sounds more like an HR issue than a technology one -- but isn’t that usually the case. I would recommend having documented policies on e-mail usage and the use of listservs.

Question from Sam, Administrator:

Do the FRCP electronic retention requirements require maintaining e-mails as student records?

Jay Attiya:

If I can interpret your question correctly, you are asking if the FRCP requirements say you need to retain emails the same length of time that you are required to save student records. My interprtation of the FRCP is that it does not state how long you have to retain emails, merely that you have a policy and you stick to it. For instance, if your stated policy is to keep all messages for 90 days, you cannot delete messages before 90 days because they pertain to a particulr case. In addition, once you are notified of a pending litigation, you are required to keep all messages that may pertain to the case beyond your stated policy until the case is resolved. The answer boils down to how much protection can you afford. The more archives you have, the more likely you will be able to provide an adequate defense in case of litigation.

Question from Richard Melson, Associate Dir. IT, Dayton Public Schools:

Has the National School Board association produced any suggested policy language for school districts?

Linda Sharp:

I have asked and not yet received an answer to this question. There is a good article in their Inquiry and Analysis newsletter from April 2007. The Web site is provided in a previous question asking for more information.

Question from Ryan Gravette, Technology Director, IDLA:

How does the new court case affect data destruction policies. Does it in affect not allow for data destruction policies, or does it allow for destruction of data according to pre-established policy as long as data being destroyed is not in ongoing legal action? Do the online e-mails need to be treated any differently than the paper communication that occurred before we had e-mail?

Kim A. Rice:

Sounds like you are having the same kinds of conversations that we are in Boston. We are unclear about the true impact and the extent to which all emails are documents of record. What we are doing is clearly establishing our back up policies, procedures, and retention schedules -- in sync with our paper records -- and are having them reviewed by our legal advisors. We had been collaborating with Orange County on this and would be more than happy to share our results when we finish them.

Question from John Thompson, Associate Professor, Buffalo State College:

Did the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure really directly impact all K-12 schools in the U.S.?

Linda Sharp:

From everything I have read it includes schools along with companies and government agencies. Basically, I think it includes any entity that might be sued and we know public schools fall in that category.

Question from Maxine Endy, Adj Lecturer, Albright College, PA:

How can teachers check on the penpal e-mails their students are sending?

Kim A. Rice:

Checking student e-mail depends on what kind of e-mail system that you have and what kind of access you have to your students’ accounts. Not knowing what system you are using, I would recommend that you require that students cc you on their e-mails with their penpals.

Question from Chris Carman, Teacher/tech support, Kent Roosevelt High School:

Hi! Many of our teachers post assignments on our blogging software on our school Web site. If a teacher posts a message on their blog and then deletes it, are we in violation of the law if we haven’t archived it before it’s deleted? Also, if a teacher posts an assignment as a PDF, does that also have to be archived in perpetuity? Thanks!

Linda Sharp:

That is a hard question. I am not the expert, but it seems that assignments would be less likely to be called as evidence is a court case. As for archiving in perpituity - the new rule doesn’t state a timeline. I think with the work of an attorney, you should be able to determine a good faith time frame that is part of your normal operations.

Question from Craig Nansen, District Technology Coordinator, Minot Public Schools:

How can we be responsible to archive e-mail sent or received via gmail, yahoo mail, hotmail, etc.?

Kim A. Rice:

We provide Boston Public School e-mail accounts and require that all business to be done with that.

Question from Rik Jowers, Tech, Falls Church:

Is there a site which describes how to archive e-mail based on these new requirements?

Linda Sharp:

I am not aware of a site. Unfortunately, each district seems to be working on this issue alone. It would make sense to have common information site, but many schools and attorneys appear to be interpreting the law independently.

Question from Jerry Leskiv, System Admin FCESC:

We have a lot of teachers working remotely and in schools. What is the best way to implement security as to when they call to have their password reset. How do we know it is definitely them. Also, I was wondering what is the best way to encrypt files when teachers use laptops and to unencrypt them as well.

Kim A. Rice:

Password reset can be quite time consuming. We are working to establish an automated process that is associated with their e-mail account--but many fear that they are in fact asking about their e-mail account password. We have a site-based administrator that has the authority to reset passwords, so the person is a known entity. If for some reason that is not an option, we will print their username and password and have that delivered to the school.

Question from Daniel T. Assisi, Director of IT for Camino Nuevo Charter Academy Schools:

How does the legislation affect charter schools? If charter schools are sometimes referred to as a separate district within a district, how would they be subject to these requirements?

Linda Sharp:

Please check with an attorney, but I think that if a charter school has the ability to be sued, they are required to archive. The law doesn’t specifically state school districts, it states an entity that could be sued.

Question from Michael Walker, Secondary Technology Integrationist, Edina Public Schools:

What products would you recommend for filtered, archived student e-mail?

Kim A. Rice:

We are currently using Microsoft Exchange and establishing our archival processes centrally to our storage area network. We have established a gateway that filters e-mail (junk/spam,etc).

Question from Jeff Williams, Technology Coordinator, Gettysburg School District:

How long do we legally have to keep e-mail archived?

Kim A. Rice:

Nothing I have read states a firm timeline. That is one of the issues that will probably eventually be settled in a court case. I have read that you need to archive and monitor to ensure it is accomplishing the goals.

Michelle Davis (Moderator):

That’s all the time we have for today. Thanks so much to Jay Attiya, Kim Rice, and Linda Sharp, and thanks to all the readers for their thoughtful questions. The transcript will be posted shortly on edweek.org/chat.

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