The Light Speed blocking system for KHS has been in effect for several years, causing students distress and frustration when websites and images are blocked. The Kirkwood Call voted unanimously that this blocking system is too severe and should be changed for the good of the student body.
You are sitting in English class listening to the teacher drone about the latest in-class project part of the upcoming final. The class rushes to the library computers, wanting to get the project over with as soon as possible before the day-before-it’s-due panic attack occurs. So when you get on the Internet to search a picture of a star and half the images are blocked, you don’t want to call the teacher over. No academic rejection hurts worse than access denied.
Although the Internet is a sea of information with new data pouring in every minute, the school’s filtering system is not going to help anyone. Students have to do research on those computers daily, and when pictures of trees on Google Images get censored, learning something new is more difficult to accomplish. Plus, no student wants to have to call his/her teacher over several times to unblock Youtube for the required multi-media portion of the project.
According to Michael Gavin, junior principal, Light Speed, the KHS filtering system, is based off of a federal law called the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), schools that receive funding for the Internet must take measures to keep offensive content off of their computers. While this is reasonable, there are flaws in the law. Anything on the Internet can be offensive, even topics discussed in classrooms. For example, when a science teacher was trying to look up ‘climax community,’ an innocent biology term relating to an area that has been deforested, ‘climax’ was a blocked word. Not even typing in a password and user name manually could get the information.
Nowadays, a little electronic device called a cell phone exists, and most students own this handy piece of technology. If a student was feeling rebellious and was planning on searching something inappropriate they would not be ignorant enough to do it on one of the district’s computers. As logical as a filtering system may seem to the federal government, Light Speed does not keep students from doing what they want.
Not to mention, students are young adults. Yes, some people do not know what maturity really means, but this is high school, not middle or elementary school. In college and the working world, it will be up to the students to focus and not let themselves get distracted by silly blogs and gaming websites. Filtering this much on computers is not going to teach anyone to restrain themselves from tempting situations.
While high school is a jungle of rejection, being rejected by something so important and vital to everyday learning is not easy to accept. The system should definitely still exist, but the administration should re-filter and unblock harmless words and websites.
