All social media accounts connected to Lincoln Public Schools (LPS) will soon be converted to Class Intercom, a social media publishing platform operated by LPS District Office. After a local company was recently subject to a cyber attack and held for ransom, many new rules were put in place to help keep all LPS students, staff and schools safe from future ambushes. Attacks on school districts similar to this have become prevalent nationwide, which has put an even greater emphasis on keeping LPS protected.

“As LPS continues to grow, more schools and school organizations are adding social media to their communications toolbox,” LPS Communications Director Mindy Burbach said. “We needed a platform that allowed us to keep all of the social media accounts securely in one place, while also allowing every staff member the ability to contribute to their organization [or] school’s social media accounts. Class Intercom allows us to do this.”

All social media content must run through a series of checks made by this system, and may only be entered by LPS staff members. While there may be a concern about the speed and efficiency of posting through this, Burbach says it will actually result in the complete opposite.

“Class Intercom will actually make the process more efficient. Once the account administrator approves the content it can be scheduled or posted. It allows more [people] to post to social media faster and scheduled at a time that targets the audience they are trying to reach without having a whole bunch of posts at the same time,” Burbach said.

However, Class Intercom will prevent students from being able to publish directly to these accounts themselves. Burbach understands digital citizenship is an important skill to learn for students wanting to go into modern communications fields, and recognizes Class Intercom can cause students to miss out on these lessons.

“Once we get all of the social media accounts identified and loaded into Class Intercom, LPS may explore how we can streamline the process of students being able to post to school social media accounts through Class Intercom,” she said.

For now, students are still able to formulate posts; they just can’t directly access social media accounts to send it out on those platforms. 

Although this is recent news for many LPS associated groups, attempts to better secure internet privacy is something the District has been working on for some time now. Locating and moving all LPS social media accounts to Class Intercom has been no easy chore.

“We have been working to move social media accounts to Class Intercom since 2017,” Burbach said. “We have been able to make significant progress in getting all schools on board and now we are moving to clubs [and] organizations.” 

So far, 250 club and organization social media accounts in LPS have been identified and are on schedule to be converted over to Class Intercom. 

“This will help us ensure that our staff and students are following Board policies on social media management and protect students, staff and LPS data infrastructure,” Burbach said. “Any account found currently to be in violation of Board policies and regulations will be corrected and we will move forward.”