[Steven Smith]

Not sure if it strictly follows the YPP rules, but as it relates to something like the "chit-chat" forum...

(Disclaimer: This is a personal opinion on good practices, not any statement on whether they comply with the new YPP)

In terms of social media, email, forums, etc... just keep it either public or through a group email that several have access to. We commonly send email to our kids, either as a group or to a single student. We always copy our team Gmail account which is a record of the email, and it auto-forwards to 4 mentors (3 male, 1 female). The key here is to minimize strictly 1 on 1 interactions in off hours. In 99.9%+ of cases, it would be perfectly fine. However, in at least a few percent, it might look/sound a little funny, and human nature sometimes leads us to assume the worst.

A few "crazy" scenarios that can be avoided:
Imagine you are dropping a student off after a meeting on a regular basis. A parent in financial trouble decides to fabricate a story and raise a civil lawsuit claiming harassment. Can you defend yourself? Do you have any concrete proof?

A younger student has a crush on an adult mentor and begins talking to them in off hours. The mentor thinks the relationship is platonic/mentorship, but the younger student feels it is a "boyfriend/girlfriend" connection. The student decides to make a move, and it gets noticed by another adult who raises the flag. Now, all text messages between the two are subject to review. The older mentor never intended anything, but how would the text messages look in retrospect? Is there anything said that when looked at in a new context could appear inappropriate?

Or... you are on a team that just thinks "this could never happen to us" and doesn't place much value in the YPP rules. You unfortunately do get into a bad situation where an adult becomes involved with a vulnerable high school student. How much good is required to be done to offset such a bad thing? What does this mean for the future of your program?


Long story short, I think the right answer is somewhere between the written rules and ignoring the topic altogether. If you try to stifle any form of interaction, you lose much of what makes FIRST such a great program. However, don't put yourself into a situation that might be hard to explain. The simplest solution IMHO is to always have a second person involved (preferably in a documented way like email). In most cases, everyone says "I never would have thought that person would do ______". However, I can't think of many (any) cases where a child predator managed to pull something off with a 2nd person in the room.