Website blockage success is limited
A student can watch videos on how to make meth on YouTube.
The intent is that the new Sequoia Union High School District internet blocking software protects students from potentially harmful content. While that works, there are still loopholes.
Dating profiles on loveaprisoner.com, registering for Neo-Nazis Unite, and buying “game changing” DNA pills on Infowars are areas of the internet that are not blocked. Satire on the Onion was blocked for “adult content” and the Huffington Post news site was inaccessible before September of this year.
The inconsistent blocking can cause challenges for the school population.
“My class was assigned to research race in America as it pertains to the justice system in conjunction with the novel Native Son and as students began researching articles that had to do with how different races were treated by the justice system, they found that there were a slew of sights that were completely blocked to them. Iit was haphazard and random,” said Denise Steward, an AS English and AVID teacher.
The blocker has proven to be a mild hassle in students’ educational experiences, as students regularly face issues with the blocker’s restriction of access to various websites they actually need.
“I contact my club members through social media,” said Annika Nambiar, a junior. “It’s really inconvenient when the sites I need to use for that are blocked.”
The blocking also affects homework, research, and general in-class projects.
“I was trying to do research for an English project and I got inconvenienced by the software,” said Nico Franchi, a junior.
As of early September, Huffington Post was one of the sites reopened to the students of Sequoia Union. A generally credible news source, Huffington Post’s unavailability was an obvious accident.
“If we get information about specific blocked sites, we can fix that,” said Principal Ralph Crame.
The incident illustrated how issues that would potentially arise from the blocking software would be solved: little-by-little, site-by-site.
Aside from the sheer depth of the internet making that legitimately impossible, it sparks the question as to why administrators would try to block any news or resources at all.
The intent is to protect.
In Steward’s opinion, along with other adults, teachers, and administrators, when it comes to minors, protecting them from actually dangerous and harmful content is completely logical and necessary.
“I think that the blocking software has come about from a genuine need to protect our students from all kinds of internet dangers - pedophiles, people that would stalk you, just dangerous places for students to be. We want to make the internet safety a priority because you need to be able to do your research and do your school stuff without the fear of falling into some of these traps where you get misinformation or you become prey for someone else. The software was designed with that in mind,” said Steward.
Not to mention that it is the duty of school officials to make instruction safe and focused for students.
“It’s our job to make sure students are safe and are not viewing inappropriate content that distracts from learning,” said Crame.
Regardless of whether or not Carlmont students and staff want to implement the website blocks, the Sequoia Union High School District receives federal funding for the network and other technology, so the district must follow CIPA guidelines.
“A large part of my role is ensuring safety for both students and staff,” said Bob Fishtrom, the director of instructional technology for the district. “Essentially, we must filter what users do and where users go on the internet. Inappropriate and non-education-based websites are generally blocked to ensure safety and not to ever compromise the performance of the network and services.”
It sounds like censorship or a violation of individual freedoms, but after some dissension, laws were enacted with the specific purpose to protect adults who are protecting students.
The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) was passed in 1998. It was intended to protect children from pornography and nudity on the internet, but it was eliminated as of 2009.
Former President of the Journalism Education Association H. L. Hall thought that school administrators would look at COPA as a way to justify censorship, which would infringe on students’ rights to use the internet for actually valid research.
However, the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), signed into law in 2000, provides schools with protection from the Federal Communications Commission to block or filter internet access on computers that are accessed by minors. The filtering applies to pictures that are obscene, pornographical, or generally harmful to minors, as deemed by school administrators.
But the problem with internet censorship of any kind is that the internet is huge, and actually dangerous sites slip through the cracks.
Within the Sequoia Union High School District, the KKK recruitment page is blocked due to “intolerance” and “hate” and the Daily Stormer is blocked with a warning that the site may be fostering attackers. However, any student can click through the “Neo-Nazis Unite” page or read Breitbart.
Furthermore, the software is not even fully protective of the websites it does filter.
On borrowed school computers outside of school Wi-Fi, all websites are unblocked.
The XVPN phone app gets around the blocks of Snapchat and Instagram.
Plus, kids can get creative; websites to teach students how to get around website blockers are not blocked.
“We understand students sometimes find ways around our filters; we also understand they more often than not can access these sites away from our campuses. However, when they are on campus, we want them to be responsible digital citizens and use the technology productively for their academics and in life,” said Fishtrom.
Blocking content is logical to protect young people, but it potentially creates strife among students and teachers, and it is not always effective in blocking dangerous content.
According to Nambiar, the solution to the limits of the internet block would be to teach students to respectfully utilize their materials; it is not a question of protection but education.
“We could be taking a more constructive, less inconvenient approach by teaching students about properly using the technology we’re given,” said Nambiar. “High school students are not always seen as the most mature, but it’s clear that the blocking [software] is not as effective as we’d like it to be, so maybe we could try something different.”