When parents break the rules, should other parents report them?

Each school-day afternoon during the school year, the pick-up line at a particular public grade school can wind out of the school parking lot and onto the shoulder of the entering street for at least a half a mile. The school has no official school buses, so parents must arrange to pick up their children after school.

Because so many cars are moving in and out of the parking lot, the officials at the school have made their best effort to impose safety regulations on all students and drivers to ensure that the pick-ups are safe. One of the rules hammered home to parents is that once they are in line, they are asked to refrain from speaking on their cellphones. From a safety perspective, this lessens the chance of distracted drivers holding up the line or inadvertently rolling into the car ahead of them. It also helps ensure that the flow of cars continues to move. (In this public school's state, it's illegal to text while driving, but not illegal to speak on your cellphone.)

Often, parents are not great about following the no cellphones in line rule. The teachers or staff monitoring the line do their best to remind parents, but, well, they're not always successful.

Recently, a parent reports that when she was home one evening checking her Facebook newsfeed, she clicked on the unofficial page for her child's school. Often that site is full of announcements about upcoming events and relevant bits of information about the school. But tonight, she came across a link to a short video that was posted by one of the other parents to promote her small business.

"It didn't seem entirely appropriate to have this post on the unofficial school Facebook pages," writes that parent who noticed the post. "But that's not what concerned me the most."

On the video, the parent was clearly taping her announcement while sitting in the front seat of her car. She announced to the viewers that she was taping as she was sitting in the pickup line for her child's school.

"She was using her cellphone and then posted the video to the Facebook group," writes the parent who noticed the post.

"Am I obligated to tell school officials about this?" asks the parent. It struck her as a flagrant violation of the rules.

There's no obligation to report the parent. If the observer is concerned that the taping posed a safety threat or that it could have disrupted the pick-up procedure, the right thing would be to post a comment in response to the video letting the poster know this. If the view believes that promoting a business on the unofficial school site is inappropriate, the right thing is to message the site's administrator and ask for the post to be removed. But the right thing and the thoughtful thing for the parent making the video while on the pick-up line is to reconsider doing such things in the future and instead wait until she is not in line to record the post. 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 

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