Administrators need to do what the public tells them is necessary to keeping students safe. If the District Council Committee feels this the district needs the filtering then we do the filtering. What you need is a reliable system by which teachers can have websites they need for class reviewed, then unblocked. Quick turnaround (one or two days) is very necessary for this because teachers don’t go looking for sites they’ll use in the future that often, they want it now.

Taking the security of students using the Internet does not have to be an all or nothing proposition. If you have a workable reliable way to request specific sites to be unblocked, your teachers truly report objectionable site to the system administrator, and students are taught how to use site properly and what to do if problems occur then the security will act as a blanket not a noose.

Thanks. I appreciate both your perspective as a current K-12 educator and your willingness to think critically about (and contest) my blather!

I think the point that I’m trying to make in this post and past posts is that when we operate from the One Percent Principle, we often give up more than we gain. We still may decide to do it, but we should at least think critically about it first, weighing the actual (not perceived) risk, our responsibilities to provide appropriate and safe instruction, and our responsibilities to not unnecessarily trammel on students’ rights or interests. I think we have a lot of anecdotal and other evidence that these critical conversations are not occurring in many school systems.

I agree with you that filtering systems should have robust, effective, efficient mechanisms for blocking and unblocking. I’m not sure I agree that a 1- or 2-day turnaround satisfies that criteria. I’d rather see teachers with the ability to instantly and selectively block or unblock for short periods of time (e.g., a day or two, or even an hour or two). However, that’s just my personal preference and may be unworkable given current filtering systems (I don’t know ’cause I’m at a university where we don’t filter anything because of deeply-held beliefs about freedom of information).

I don’t want my local schools wasting time, energy, or money on low-risk issues when more prevalent, higher-cost issues aren’t being addressed adequately. For example, which ultimately is causing more harm to schools/society – the few kids that get contacted by online predators during school time or the massive numbers of high school dropouts that we have? I would argue that we should spend less time, money, and energy on the former and more on the latter (and, incidentally, so would Barry Glassner, author of The Culture of Fear).