NJ Principal Asks Parents To Ban Social Networking
Benjamin Franklin Middle School Chief Says Students Should Be Cut Off From Facebook, Text Messaging — RIDGEWOOD, N.J. (CBS) ― A controversial proposal has students horrified at a Bergen County middle school on Wednesday.
Context & Ripple Effects
The timing of this plea matters as much as the plea itself. Benjamin Franklin Middle School's principal in Ridgewood is asking parents — not students, not teachers — to impose a ban on Facebook and text messaging at home, an acknowledgment that school codes of conduct stop at the property line while the platforms do not.
First-order effects
- Parents of Benjamin Franklin Middle School students must now decide individually whether to enforce a household-wide cutoff from Facebook and texting, with no institutional backing and full visibility into their children's social standing at stake.
- Students at the Bergen County school lose what is effectively their primary peer-communication channel if families comply, which is precisely why the proposal has drawn immediate pushback from the affected kids.
Second-order effects
- Other New Jersey administrators will judge whether parent-side enforcement can succeed where school authority ends, making Ridgewood a test case for off-campus social media policy without any regulatory change.
- Facebook's week of aggressive expansion — the F8 developer conference on April 21 and the April 27 launch of Instant Personalization with an opt-out rather than opt-in default — puts the company directly opposite this kind of restriction, and analysts already argue it is too late to effectively regulate the platform after its data-opening changes.
Third-order effects
- If enforcement of minors' social media use keeps migrating from institutions to households, the durable levers become platform default settings and parental tools rather than school policy — a structural gap between where children are regulated and where the services operate.
The trend: As social networks extend past the boundaries of school authority, control over children's online lives is shifting from classroom rules toward parental enforcement and platform default settings.