Can Classroom Communication Platforms Govern Extracurriculars Under SB 848?

SB 848 materially changed what schools are expected to govern. Under California Ed Code § 32100, the digital tools used for athletics and extracurricular activities are treated as nonclassroom environments the school is responsible for maintaining as easily supervised, with administrative visibility, access, and control over staff–student communication.

School leaders confronting SB 848 compliance start with a reasonable question:

Can existing classroom communication platforms — like ParentSquare, SchoolMessenger, and Apptegy — govern extracurricular communication under SB 848?

It’s a reasonable instinct. These systems are trusted, SIS-integrated, and already embedded in daily school operations.

But SB 848 makes a different test unavoidable — not familiarity or adoption, but whether adult–student digital communication can be easily supervised in practice, at scale, across informal, high-volume extracurricular environments like athletics and activities.

That test exposes limits that classroom communication platforms were never designed to address.

Why This Question Persists — and Why It’s the Wrong Starting Point

Schools return to this question not because classroom platforms are weak, but because they work well where communication is structured and predictable.

Extracurricular settings are neither.

Athletics and activities operate outside bell schedules, involve rotating adults and volunteers, and depend on fast, informal communication. Coaches initiate contact. Messages spike around travel, injuries, schedule changes, discipline, and performance. Conversations don’t stay neatly scoped to instruction.

The mistake is assuming this is an execution problem — something better training or clearer policy can fix.

It isn’t.

This is a design mismatch, not a usage failure.

The Design Mismatch: Stability vs. Fluidity

Classroom communication platforms are built around stable relationships and predictable rhythms. Teachers have defined enrollment. Communication flows primarily from school to family or teacher to class. Oversight assumes messages are occasional, contextual, and can be reconstructed when needed, rather than designed for continuous, proactive supervision.

Extracurricular communication violates every one of those assumptions.

Teams change constantly. Coaches and advisors rotate far more frequently than classroom teachers, and many are part-time, seasonal, or volunteer adults. Adults message students directly, often one-to-one. Conversations happen nights, weekends, and off campus. The volume is higher, the tone is more informal, and the stakes are different.

Under these conditions, governance depends on whether communication is easily supervised by design — not on user behavior or after-the-fact reconstruction.

Attempts to adapt classroom platforms for extracurriculars typically rely on constructs like private groups or rooms. In practice, those constructs assume stable rosters, infrequent reconfiguration, and staff who already live inside the system — assumptions that rarely hold in athletics and activities. Coaches turn over, students cycle seasonally, and groups must be rebuilt, permissions rechecked, and training repeated. What appears manageable in theory becomes operationally brittle in real extracurricular environments — not because the platform is poorly built, but because it was never designed to keep high-churn, 1:1-heavy communication easily supervised at scale.

This mismatch isn’t theoretical. In practice, schools rarely rely on classroom platforms alone for extracurricular coordination — a signal that workflow fit, not policy intent, is driving tool choice. Instead, coaches and teams routinely turn to separate tools built around group dynamics and rapid coordination — long before SB 848 entered the picture.

What This Means for Platform Decisions

This is not an argument that schools must abandon their primary communication platforms.

It is an argument that extracurricular communication requires system design those platforms were never built to provide.‍

Configuration and add-ons can reduce friction at the margins, but they do not change the underlying design assumptions of a platform built for classroom-wide or family communication rather than extracurricular staff–student interaction.

For schools evaluating how to govern staff–student communication under SB 848, the relevant question is no longer whether a platform is widely adopted or already in place.

The question is whether the system was designed to keep digital nonclassroom environments “easily supervised” in practice — even as teams, seasons, and staff change.

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