A Guide for Parents and Teachers: What Campus Boards Are and How to Use Them Well
Your students or children probably already use their school’s campus board. Here is what it is, how it can help adults too, how to find it and what to do if you have a concern.
At the start of every school year, many parents and teachers hear the same phrase for the first time: “I saw it on the campus board.” For students, the board is a familiar part of school life. For adults, it can seem like a closed world, sometimes useful, sometimes a little worrying and usually hard to locate.
This guide is for those adults. It explains what campus boards are, how they can help you, how to find the right one and what to do if something concerns you.
What a campus board is
A campus board is a student-run social media account for one school. Students send messages to the account, often anonymously, and the operators, who are students themselves, publish them for everyone who follows the board. Typical posts include lost and found, questions, notices, thanks, encouragement and everyday campus life.
Most boards run on QQ and WeChat, the messaging platforms almost every student in China uses. Some also have accounts on Xiaohongshu (RED), a lifestyle sharing app, or Bilibili, a video platform popular with young people. A board is not an official school channel. It is closer to a student-run noticeboard that the whole school can read.
What boards are good for
Used well, a campus board can be helpful to adults as well as students:
- Lost and found. Water bottles, keys, cards and school uniforms are reunited with their owners every day through boards.
- Questions. New students and families can ask practical questions about school life and get quick answers from people who know.
- Notices. Boards often help spread information about activities and events, alongside, not instead of, official school channels.
- A sense of the school. Following a board gives parents and new teachers a feel for what students care about, worry about and enjoy.
How to find your school’s board
Because boards sit on different platforms under names that do not always match the school’s official name, searching can be frustrating. The Fuzhou Campus Board Alliance runs a free directory for this. Follow our WeChat official account, 福州校园墙联盟 (Fuzhou Campus Board Alliance), and send the school’s name as a message. The automatic reply gives the board’s contact details if it is listed.
The directory currently lists 230 campus board contacts for more than 150 schools in Fuzhou. It is not complete, and contacts change when operators graduate. If your school is missing, asking a student or class group is the next best step, and telling us helps the next family.
Raising a concern
Sometimes adults see a post they are unhappy about: personal information about a child, an unkind comment or a claim that seems untrue. The quickest route is usually to contact the board directly through the platform it uses and ask the operators to review or remove the post. Most boards respond better to a calm, specific request than to a general complaint.
If a post suggests that a student may be in danger or is being seriously bullied, please also tell the school straight away, and in an emergency contact the police or emergency services. A student-run account is not the right place to resolve a safety issue on its own.
The alliance is a non-governmental, non-profit network of campus boards. It cannot remove posts from boards it does not run, and it does not speak for schools. But it can help you reach a board’s operators, and it welcomes feedback that helps improve the shared Campus Board Guidelines. You can reach us through our WeChat official account or official QQ, 2066750182.
Healthy expectations
It helps to keep a few things in mind. Boards are run by students, usually in their spare time, so replies may take a while and standards vary between schools. They are not an official source, so important information should always be confirmed with the school. And anonymous posting means some posts will be clumsy, emotional or simply wrong.
Most boards, most of the time, are friendly and useful places. The best thing adults can do is understand them, use them for what they are good at and, when something goes wrong, respond in a way that helps students learn to run them better.
