By ANDY GARDNER

MASSENA -- The Board of Education and Superintendent of Schools Pat Brady are taking steps to attempt anti-bullying community outreach and to improve overall communication on what is going on at school.

On Thursday, they voted unanimously to hire a communication specialist for eight hours per week at $5,000 per year.

“What can we do as aboard to better inform the community as to what’s out there?” Trustee Rhonda Rodriguez said during an anti-bullying forum that drew no public comment. “There’s a communications gap going on out there.”

Brady said he thinks buffing their social media presence could help inform the public.

“Part of outreach to the community to increase our communication … IT staff do a great job but don’t always have time to keep up with the website and social media,” he said when talking about why he recommended the hire. “It’s a minimal cost to increase our communication with the public … have a better social media presence then we’ve had in the past, that’s where the public is these days.”

He said the schools have “bully boxes” and anonymous tip lines where people can report bullying. Several district administrators said they are used frequently.

Brady said that also applies to off-campus incidents, which he says are governed by the so-called “Tinker Standard.”

He says that is case law that dictates out-of-school bullying can be handled in-house, if the disruption spills onto school grounds.

“It has to be a substantial disruption before it can be seen as discipline … that’s evolving, that’s part of case law that continues to evolve, as does with social media,” Brady said.

He noted in an effort to curb in-school cyberbullying, there are policies in place restricting what technology can be used during the school day and how.

He also pointed to their information technology (IT) department applying filters to certain websites.

“They’re very diligent when it comes to this filtering so there isn’t content in the hands of students that should not be,” Brady said.

The controls are so strict that during an executive session, a North Country This Week reporter attempted to access Facebook on his personal laptop using the district’s guest wi-fi and was denied access to the site.