Springfield High School provides students with a school sponsored e-mail account that is available for their use for academic purposes.
This school e-mail account can only send and receive e-mail from and to the following domain names; @ssd.k12.pa.us, @ssdstudent.org, @turnitin.com,@.edu, and @.gov. The reason for this limitation is to provide a safe electronic communications resource for our students. E-mail that is sent to or from addresses that are outside of these domain names is blocked and referred to an administrator for review and appropriate action.
This e-mail account is not meant to replace personal student e-mail addresses. In fact, students are encouraged to maintain a personal account and to use the school account only for school related matters. In addition to providing a consistent e-mail address for our students, this e-mail account is meant to provide students with a more practical understanding of the differences between a personal and academic/professional e-mail account that most people do not get prior to entering college or the work force.
Both the actual e-mail and attachments of the school sponsored e-mail account are able to be monitored for a variety of inappropriate activities in order to protect the well being of our students. The e-mail provider (Gaggle.net) provides a filtering mechanism that limits what domains e-mail can be sent to or received from, detects and ranks inappropriate text and attachments, and blocks some types of files from being sent and received. This monitoring may extend to the Google application services that are also provided through Gaggle.
It is important to note that when an e-mail is blocked and sent to an administrator, the entirety of the e-mail is available for review even if the e-mail originated from an outside source.
In this age of technological advancement, it is important for students to understand that their expectation of privacy may change depending on the circumstances that they in and the tools being used. We respect the need for privacy and wish to foster a desire to protect that privacy within our students; this is why we encourage students to keep and use personal e-mail accounts that are separate from the school. It is our hope that, by reinforcing the differences between academic/professional/ and private, that our students will avoid some of the pitfalls that may await them when they graduate.