Does anyone create google classrooms for their counselors or other staff who are not teachers?

[Tank]

We have a counselor, who used to be an 8th grade teacher, asking for their own google classroom.  I've moved into the security facing side of IT for our district and things I read from CISA and reviewing NIST lend me the strong argument that this would be an abuse of google classroom functionality, and open a whole can of worms for staff to request their own classrooms to communicate with students.  This counselor wants the entire 8th-grade list of students in one classroom so they can post polls, distribute information, utilize the assignment features, etc.  (I first went down the path of WHY they need it - can they just email pdfs, or is there more to it? since we already have distribution groups by grade level, etc.)

The teacher-gone-counselor is tech-savvy and I believe GClassroom could be a benefit, but having all those students in a single Google classroom concerns me.  What if this staff member's account was compromised, or their device was compromised, due to negligence while they step out of the room, etc?   All of our Google classrooms sync with our Student monitoring solution (Aristotle K12) and it could be a serious disaster too if that were triggered mid-day, ending all other 8th-grade teachers' sessions if he started his own, etc.

I guess another wound here is the "Well they got access, why can't I?" mentality if we give it to one staff member who is not in a teaching role.  I don't even know if Google has guidelines prohibiting Classroom use when not in a teacher role - but I wanted to reach out here and see if anyone has some suggestions or concerns about this.  

We do NOT have MFA enabled yet - but it is on the docket.  I have not had any help getting MFA pushed out to staff or getting any of the higher-ups to solidify a plan or even have a worthwhile discussion about MFA yet.  

Am I being too paranoid about the security side of things - or is there really no such this as being too paranoid about having great security, while still focusing on convenience for our end users?

[steve]

Yes, we create grade level (and other groups) for counselors and other support staff, they find it useful for student communication. We have MFA enforced for all staff, so the security concerns you have aren't an issue for us.

[Kim_Nilsson]

Hiya @Tank ,

That's not at all uncommon, having large Classrooms for mass-communication, usually one-way only. With students not able to post or comment in the Classroom stream, only privately with the staff member - if there are "assignments".

Security wise... any school staff with a Workspace account already have access to all the user information about all students in the entire organisation, and so do all students (as it is very rare that admins restrict the Directory) so you are not really accomplishing anything by saying No.

Also, in most districts around the world, staff can create their own Classrooms, and add anyone they want to them, so they wouldn't even ask anyone if they needed something like this.

[jsb_tech]

Almost every team, organization, committee, and club in our District has a Google Classroom that is associated with them. I prefer this than other methods of communication like mass texting (e.g. Remind). One benefit we see in using Google Classroom is that all the communication lives in our domain and not out in the wild (e.g. personal email accounts, cell phones).