Move to ban Milford student phone recordings deemed redundant

A proposed policy to prohibit Milford School District students from taking audio and video recordings in school buildings turned out to be redundant and was tabled at the school board meeting Monday night.

Tabling the policy means the board took no action and it won’t be revisited unless a board member asks for it to be.

The idea of addressing recordings was proposed by Laura Manges, the district’s director of human resources, during the board’s September meeting.

Board member Matt Bucher expressed concern about the proposal and said he was against its adoption.

“I’m inclined not to support this policy, and my reasoning is pretty simple,” he said. “We already have it in the code of conduct that electronic devices of any kind are not to be used by students during the school day within the school properties within the buildings.”

“So the argument is not per se that this is an unreasonable policy, it’s that it’s a duplicate policy, and we don’t want to clutter?” asked board member Adam Brownstein, to which Bucher confirmed his position. 

Bucher said adopting this new policy would be redundant.

“I can’t see a peripheral reason to have an additional policy,” he said. “If we just enforce the policies that we already have on the books, there’s no need to do an additional policy saying the same thing and saying ‘Well, this time we really mean it.’”

Bucher said there wasn’t any particular event or incident that led to the policy proposal.

But the district has every right to exercise a recording ban during the school day within its buildings. 

Students have the responsibility of reading and understanding the code of conduct, he said, and school staff have the responsibility of enforcing it. 

Other board members acknowledged the proposal is somewhat of a duplicate policy.

“Let’s not bother with the policy,” Bucher said. “Let’s just enforce the policy we already have, which is many years old.”