Why Team-Social Apps Struggle with SB 848 Oversight

Team social media accounts are now a standard part of school athletics and activities. They are used to share schedules, celebrate student achievements, communicate with families, and promote school programs. In many cases, these accounts are explicitly sanctioned by schools, even if day-to-day control is delegated to coaches or volunteers.

Under Ed Code § 32100 as amended by SB 848, any digital tool used in athletics and activities functions as a nonclassroom environment, and schools are expected to ensure that environment is easily supervised. Team social media accounts fall squarely within that expectation, even though they operate very differently from purpose-built school communication systems.

What is less commonly acknowledged is that nearly all major social platforms—Instagram, Facebook, X, and others—include built-in direct messaging that schools cannot meaningfully disable, audit, or centrally govern. This is not a failure of school policy or staff intent. It is a structural limitation of platforms designed for individual use, not institutional oversight.

As a result, schools often find themselves in an uncomfortable middle ground: team accounts are officially recognized, widely used, and sometimes encouraged, yet the most sensitive communication channel attached to those accounts operates outside institutional control. Policies may prohibit staff–student direct messaging via social media, but enforcement typically relies on individual compliance rather than technical control or institutional visibility.

This article does not argue that schools must eliminate social media use, nor does it assume that perfect control is possible. Instead, it examines the limited, imperfect options schools actually have—and the trade-offs involved—when attempting to govern team social media accounts in a way that aligns with modern expectations around staff–student communication.

The Practical Options Schools Actually Have

When schools take staff–student communication governance seriously, there are only a few realistic ways to approach team social media accounts:

• Do not sanction team social media accounts at all
• Prohibit staff from operating team accounts
• Place team accounts under parent or booster control
• Retain school ownership of accounts while limiting staff access to posting only

Each option carries trade-offs. None eliminates risk, and none can make social media direct messages a staff–student channel that is easily supervised, as required by SB 848. The real distinction is how much of the environment the institution can govern—and where it draws the line by moving staff–student communication into systems designed for supervision.

Option 1: Do Not Sanction Team Social Media Accounts

Under this approach, schools decline to officially recognize or endorse team social media accounts. Accounts may exist, but they are not considered part of the school’s communication infrastructure.

This option is structurally clean. By avoiding formal sanctioning, the school avoids institutional responsibility for how the accounts are used.

In practice, however, teams often maintain accounts informally. Coaches, parents, or students create and operate them without visibility or oversight. Communication still occurs, including direct messaging, but outside any defined governance framework. When issues arise, schools may have limited ability to access records, enforce standards, or demonstrate reasonable controls.

This approach reduces formal responsibility but often increases practical opacity.

Option 2: Prohibit Staff from Operating Team Accounts

This approach allows team accounts to exist while prohibiting staff from creating, managing, or posting to them. The intent is to prevent staff–student interaction via social media while preserving a team’s public presence.

This approach draws a clear behavioral boundary for staff and aligns well with policy language. It can reduce the likelihood of direct staff–student messaging when followed consistently.

Its effectiveness depends heavily on compliance. Enforcement is difficult to verify, and accounts may still be operated informally with staff involvement. Additionally, schools may struggle to maintain consistent messaging, continuity, and accountability when staff are excluded from platforms that are central to community engagement.

Option 3: Place Team Accounts Under Parent or Booster Control

In this model, team social media accounts are managed by parents, booster clubs, or other non-staff volunteers. Schools may acknowledge the accounts but treat them as externally operated.

This approach shifts operational control away from staff and reduces direct staff–student communication through social media. It is commonly used where booster organizations are active and well-organized.

However, governance remains limited. Direct messaging features still exist, content standards vary, and schools may have little recourse if issues arise. Account ownership, continuity, and accountability can also become complicated as volunteers change over time.

Responsibility may be diffused, but institutional oversight remains minimal.

Option 4: Retain School Ownership with Posting-Only Access

Under this approach, the school retains ownership and administrative control of team social media accounts. Staff and volunteers are granted limited access to publish content but are not permitted to engage in direct messaging.

This model prioritizes institutional ownership, access control, and continuity. It allows schools to define who can post, revoke access when roles change, and reduce exposure from unmanaged direct messages.

The trade-offs are operational. Setup can be time consuming and complex, platform capabilities vary, and posting workflows may be less flexible than native social media use. While this approach does not eliminate all risk—platform limitations still apply—it keeps the most sensitive communication channel outside individual control.

This option emphasizes governance over convenience.

Implementing a School-Owned Model in Practice

In practice, retaining institutional control over team social media accounts requires centralized publishing rather than direct use of native social media apps. There is no reliable way to preserve school ownership, manage access over time, and prevent off-platform messaging while still allowing individual staff to log directly into platform accounts.

Centralized publishing tools separate content creation from account control. They draw a clear boundary between public‑facing posts and any one‑to‑one staff–student communication—which should occur in systems the district can actually supervise. The institution owns the accounts, manages access centrally, and grants coaches or volunteers permission to submit or publish posts without exposing them to platform-level direct messaging, follower interactions, or account credentials. When roles change, access can be revoked without transferring logins or rebuilding accounts.

FanAngel was designed around this model. It allows schools to connect official team social media accounts, assign and revoke posting permissions, and publish content while keeping account ownership and control with the institution—not the individual staff member using it. Team social accounts function as outward‑facing, school‑owned channels, while staff–student one‑to‑one communication takes place inside FanAngel’s supervised environment rather than through social media DMs.

This model is not frictionless. Social media APIs are inconsistent, posting workflows are less flexible than native apps, and setup requires deliberate coordination. That complexity is unavoidable. It is the cost of treating team social media as an institutional communication channel rather than a personal convenience. For schools that prioritize governance, continuity, and enforceable oversight, centralized publishing is not the easiest option—but it is the only one that scales responsibly.

Drawing the Boundary

Social media platforms were not designed for institutional oversight, but schools are still responsible for deciding how staff–student communication is governed. Under SB 848, that responsibility includes being explicit about which digital environments can be made easily supervised—and which cannot.

Team social media accounts will never provide the level of supervision SB 848 expects for staff–student one-to-one communication. The governance decision, therefore, is where to draw the boundary: use social media for outward-facing, school-owned messaging, and keep staff–student interaction inside systems the institution can actually supervise.

This is rarely a day-one change. But avoiding the decision altogether leaves schools relying on policy and individual intent to compensate for environments that were never designed to be governed.

When schools talk about supervising staff–student communication, the conversation often breaks down around one question:

What do you do about direct messages?

Under Ed Code § 32100, staff–student direct messages are not informal side channels. They are digital nonclassroom environments sponsored by the school and expected to be easily supervised.

Many platforms implicitly respond by avoiding DMs, discouraging their use, or allowing them while relying on message logs for post-hoc investigation. In real extracurricular settings, those approaches prove unreliable — because they do not keep staff–student direct messages easily supervised as a matter of routine operation.

Sports and activities involving highly technical, individualized instruction—pole vault, hurdles, quarterback development, diving, tennis, and similar disciplines—require focused, private exchange for video clips, detailed feedback, technique corrections, and timing cues. 

Any solution removing or restricting DMs may seem to reduce the risk of misconduct, but it also handicaps the coach-athlete dynamic and may push necessary 1:1 communication into unapproved channels like text messages.

Allowing DMs through a platform that enables logging and post-hoc investigation is a common starting point. It gives staff the channel they need for 1:1 communication while providing admins a record to review during investigations.

‍But logging alone is reactive: it relies on students or mandated reporters identifying a problem first–meaning investigations can only begin after harm may have already occurred. 

Approaches that rely on after-the-fact reconstruction do not keep staff–student communication easily supervised in routine operation.

What’s been missing is a way to allow necessary 1:1 communication without treating oversight as an after-the-fact exercise.

FanAngel has designed a new approach for Schools to have 3 layers of supervision over necessary DMs.

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Level 1: Message Moderation (Baseline Safety)

The first layer of supervision is automated content moderation.

This layer is designed to stop clearly inappropriate or harmful messages before they are delivered.

Unlike logging or retrospective review, it focuses on immediate prevention at the message level.

But not all harmful content is contained in a single message. Sometimes misconduct happens subtly over time. This is where levels 2 and 3 come in.

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Level 2: Routine Visibility into Direct Messages

Level 2 addresses the gap that remains after baseline moderation: private messages are invisible until someone knows to look for them.

This level introduces routine administrative visibility. That doesn’t mean reading every message — it means ensuring that 1:1 communication is never happening without institutional awareness.

The shift here is from retrievability to awareness. Instead of relying on the ability to reconstruct conversations after a concern is raised, administrators maintain ongoing visibility into how direct messaging is being used across programs.

This is not random reading.
It is not constant monitoring.
It is a design choice that ensures private communication remains connected to institutional oversight.

With Level 2 in place, administrators can maintain situational awareness, notice patterns that warrant follow-up, and access message history when context is needed.

Level 2 gives administrators the information they need to act on what they see. But even engaged administrators can’t manually monitor every relationship over weeks and months.

That’s where Level 3 comes in.

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Level 3: Pattern-Based Supervision

Level 3 addresses the reality that most risk in staff–student communication becomes clear only over days or weeks.

It emerges gradually — through changes in frequency, timing, tone, or dependency.

Pattern-based supervision focuses on relationships, not individual messages. Its purpose is not to judge intent or trigger discipline, but to surface situations that warrant human attention while context still exists.

This is not automated judgment.
It is not disciplinary action.
It is early visibility.

By identifying deviations from typical communication patterns, administrators can ask better questions sooner, provide guidance when appropriate, and intervene before concerns escalate into incidents.

Together, these three levels form a system of supervision that allows necessary 1:1 communication to continue — while raising the standard for oversight from reactive to defensible, and bringing direct messages into an institutionally supervised digital nonclassroom environment.

Why This Matters for Real Coaching

For coaches in highly technical disciplines, private communication is part of doing the job well.

A pole vaulter reviewing a plant angle. A quarterback breaking down footwork. A diver adjusting takeoff timing.

Eliminating these conversations may feel safer, but in practice it makes effective coaching harder and often pushes necessary communication outside approved channels.

FanAngel’s approach does not eliminate direct messages. It supervises them with intent.

By combining moderation, routine visibility, and pattern-based awareness, FanAngel supports one on one coaching  while maintaining oversight that schools can explain, sustain, and defend.

Supervision as a System, Not a Reaction

Supervision is not a single feature or a log file, nor is it something that begins only after a complaint is raised.

Effective supervision is a condition the system maintains—one that reflects how communication actually happens, especially in extracurricular environments where risk and value coexist. 

That is the practical meaning of Ed Code § 32100’s expectation that digital nonclassroom environments be easily supervised.

FanAngel was built for that reality.

Why tools like Band and SportsYou often feel “good enough” — until governance actually matters.

Why These Tools Are Appealing

Team-social apps feel like a natural fit for athletics and extracurriculars. They’re familiar. Students already know how to use them. Coaches can post once and reach an entire team.

That familiarity is why many schools are now wondering whether these tools are sufficient under SB 848.

In practice, they aren’t.

This isn’t because the apps are poorly built or because staff behave irresponsibly. It’s because their underlying design makes reliable oversight difficult to sustain at scale.

SB 848 doesn’t ask whether communication exists.

It asks whether schools can supervise, retrieve, and review it reliably — without relying on perfect human behavior.

That’s where team-social architectures begin to break down.

The Core Design Mismatch

Most team-social apps are built around what designers call a social graph — an architecture that models users and their direct connections.

Once that structure exists, side conversations are no longer an edge case.

They are incentivized by the design.

Group conversations naturally lead to one-to-one replies, private follow-up conversations, and direct messages that feel informal and harmless in the moment. None of this reflects misconduct. It’s simply how social systems work.

From a school’s perspective, however, each of those paths creates another place communication can live, often outside an administrator’s direct line of sight.

The result is not misconduct — it’s fragmentation.

Logging Messages Isn’t the Same as Oversight

Many platforms respond to compliance questions by emphasizing that they can log messages.

Logging is necessary — but it is not sufficient.

SB 848 doesn’t ask whether messages are technically stored somewhere.

It asks whether schools can produce complete records promptly, confidently, and without guesswork.

That distinction matters.

A system can log messages and still fail when an administrator needs to answer basic questions:

• Can all staff–student communication involving a specific coach be retrieved without asking them?
  
  
• Can private messages be reviewed without staff cooperation?
  
  
• Can the school be confident that no relevant communication is missing because it lived in a side channel no one knew to check?
  
  

When records are scattered across group threads, private DMs, and reply chains, retrieval becomes conditional. Oversight becomes reactive. Confidence erodes.

Configuration Is Not Governance

Some team-social tools offer configuration options to restrict features like direct messaging. Those controls help — but they are not governance.

Governance answers a harder question: What happens when configuration drifts, staff change, or usage deviates from policy?

In real school environments, communication systems are rarely configured once and left untouched. Teams are created and retired. Coaches rotate. Permissions change mid-season. New staff are onboarded under time pressure. Over time, settings become inconsistent and difficult to audit.

At that point, compliance depends less on the platform and more on the people managing it.

A system aligned with SB 848 assumes configuration will never be perfect — and still preserves institutional oversight when it isn’t.

The question isn’t whether risky features can be disabled.

It’s whether the school remains in control even when configuration is imperfect.

Administrators don’t encounter these issues in theory. They encounter them when records are requested, staff have moved on, or context has already been lost.

The Structural Conclusion

Team-social apps were designed to facilitate interaction, not to support durable oversight.

Even when thoughtfully configured and well-intentioned, they rely on fragmented records, conditional visibility, and consistent human behavior. That mismatch is structural — not a matter of policy, training, or better settings.

For schools responsible for compliance, auditability, and record production under SB 848, team-social apps are simply not built for the job.