Group+2+Memo

To: Superintendent

From: Mickey Cliver, Diego Onuchic, Norberto Salazar

Subject: Filtering In Schools

As parents in the school district it is our belief that internet filtering for the grades of kindergarten to 8th grade should be implemented. It is necessary to monitor what students of that age are looking at online. One method to restrict Internet access in these grades could be to use [|Whitelist Filtering]. When the teacher gives an assignment or lecture where the students are required to use the Internet, the teacher could go in and select beforehand which websites relative to the class material will be allowed to pass through the filter. In the high schools I think we should support a real narrow use of category filtering of hate sights, pornographic sites, and possible social networks ([|Category Filtering]). This would allow the schools to filter certain types of sites that are know to be inappropriate. Other than that, high school students should have the most access to the internet. It has also come to our attention that "Some programs allow parents to create different levels of Internet access based on the varying ages of children in the family "[|To Filter or Not] ". We feel that this same software can be put to use in the school so that the high school students can be more at liberty to search the web. There are also the teacher's computers to consider. We do think that each teachers' computer stations could be password protected without any filter. It is not our place to tell a teacher what he or she may look up online. We are only responsible for our children. While we agree with critics of filtering that most filters can often be too general, blocking out approved information (such as the sex of an animal), this problem can be easily overridden if the programming of filters is done correctly. Another idea is to put computers in an area that can be monitored. It’s unrealistic to expect school districts to pay to have an employee stand over every student as they are on the internet, but I think the computers should be loosely monitored. As explained in the article [|‘Shifting from “Blocking” to “Watching”’] by Nancy Willard.