Every student in State College Area School District has seen the error message when visiting sites: “Looks like this page isn’t allowed”. Students constantly run into this problem and are beginning to see it more and more, whether materials are harmful or not. This issue has gone too far.
When researching for a project or simply trying to kill time after finishing class work students try to research something else to do, play an online game, or maybe watch a video, but when they find something– it’s blocked. This is the school’s way of keeping us on task or so they think. But this is just an excuse for students to waste time doing other things, like going on their phones.
Freshman Iris Murray-Wright gave a strong insight into her experiences with school online restriction.
“I think they are too strict and they don’t help students stay on track,” Murray-Wright said.
It’s only a problem when trying to kill time. While researching for a project or homework, students also get denied in the same way. Sometimes they don’t even have the opportunity to be denied; results for the topic are just not visible on their school devices.
The official policy that the school district is currently enforcing is: “Guidelines requiring schools to block students’ access to “inappropriate matter on the internet […] Securely Filter helps to ensure that all such content is blocked.”
Their reasoning behind these policies is: “To ensure that kids are protected from all forms of inappropriate and malicious content on the internet, we have segmented our database into a range of categories, including Pornography, Drugs, Gambling, Social Media, Hate, Games, Social Networking, etc.”
Blocking too many categories that keep up with the world is creating a problem for young minds, inevitably harming education.
The school aligns to enforce its online acceptable use policy which claims that “the district also recognizes the need for responsible, ethical use of these resources in the support of curriculum development.” But, we see this being disregarded considering there is never any option of us showing them we can use the chromebooks properly and responsibly.
A famous internet activist, John Perry Barlow, commented on children’s internet through his “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace”.
“A society that prevents its children from accessing information is a society that fears them,” Barlow said.
Just because the school chooses to block websites, doesn’t immediately mean that homework is going to get done and books are going to get read. Students just choose to disobey the rules because they have no other choice. Teaching responsible internet use is more effective.
Sophomore Claire Slocum shared her thoughts on this issue and how she has been directly affected by her class and assignments.
“I’ve been blocked by websites specifically for my architecture class and had to research floor plans at home on a separate account. I understand if it’s specific websites, but it’s everything and it makes it hard to research,” Slocum said. “Either way, people are already going to be distracted no matter what.”
Not only has the school been blocking sites, but they are keeping students in the dark about the reasoning behind it. Students feel powerless and frustrated by excessive website restrictions. State High should allow students and teachers more input in deciding what gets blocked.
This excessive blocking is truly counterproductive and not the answer. Instead of full blocks, there are other alternatives, like putting a warning filter on certain types of websites that could be triggering or not appropriate in a school atmosphere.
