Filtering limits Internet site access in schools

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

A child's hands work a computer keyboard at Tobe Turpen Elementary School on Thursday afternoon. The McKinley County School District has spent 76 million dollars in the past 10 years on computers and other equipment, about a third of the total budget for the state of New Mexico. [Photo by Brian Leddy/Independent]

GALLUP — With every pupil within the local county public school district having access to a wide range of computers daily at the school, what’s to keep Johnny or Jill from getting onto Web sites that show things they really shouldn’t be seeing.

That’s a problem that the district’s technology departments has had to tackle from the day the first computer at the first school in the Gallup-McKinley County School District was linked up to the Internet.

“We make a good-faith effort to block out those sites,” said David Oakes, the district’s technology director.

This is a problem being faced by schools throughout the country and all have some sort of filtering device on them to block sites that show risqué images or provide details like how to build a bomb.

The districts are required to provide this protection through the Children’s Internet Protection Act and while no filtering device is perfect, Oakes said he feels the district does a good job in keeping pupils from going onto inappropriate sites.

But the district doesn’t rely just on the filtering devices. Teachers have said repeatedly at school board meetings in the past that they also monitor what their pupils look at and read on the computers and if something they feel is inappropriate comes up, they tell the pupil to log off that Web site.

“We usually have better filtering devices than most of the kids have on their home computers,” one teacher said at a school board meeting last year.

But even bringing your own laptop to school, as many pupils do nowadays, won't allow you to get on blocked sites, said Oakes.

In order to get on the Internet at any of the schools, pupils are required to go through the school's server, which automatically puts them under the school's filtering program, he said.

The filtering devices are upgraded on a regular basis as new sites are discovered that need to be blocked.

The problem that teachers have complained about in the past is that the filtering devices may be too good and are blocking sites that their pupils need access to in order to get their assignments done.

A good example of this is for pupils who want to do research papers on breast cancer. As can be imagined, any site with the word breast is automatically blocked so Oakes said in cases like this, the teacher has to notify the principal of their school and the principal then contacts the technology department to have certain Web sites unblocked.

But the district has learned, said Oakes, that in these kinds of cases, the teacher has to be monitored as well.
Principals are directed, said Oakes, to ask the teacher in these kinds of situation exactly why the Web site is being asked to be unblocked.

The reason: There have been cases, Oakes said, where it was discovered that the request for the Web site being unblocked was “for the viewing pleasure of the teacher” and had nothing to do with classroom assignments.