Students Seek Freedom Online

Staff Editorial
12.20.07

We’ve all been through the bloody torture that is a research project. Notes on top of notes taken off of articles found from SIRS, Google and, sadly, Wikipedia fill our menial college-ruled notebooks. The research must be done by the end of the hour; we’re racing the clock. And then it happens. Websense finds an error and our quick, successful research has come to a grinding halt.

Now there could be two things going on here. The site could actually be inappropriate and it’s good if it gets blocked. Or the site isn’t really inappropriate and is just censored for potential trouble. We all know the ins and outs of the school’s lovely Websense Internet filter. It protects us from a lot of crazy stuff out there, but that protection comes with a serious price.

“It’s all part of the Children’s Internet Protection Act, or CIPA,” Papillion-La Vista’s director of information technologies John Willoz said. “The school gets federal aid from the government for putting a web filter in place.”

The way the Websense filter works is by blocking categories of potentially problematic web site categories. Categories like “weapons” or “gay or lesbian or bisexual interest” (not necessarily pornography) are blocked because they could cause an issue. This is wrong. If any students do a research project on gay rights, they better know their information before going to class because the site for GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance, is blocked, as are myriad other homosexual lifestyle web sites that are neither inappropriate nor harmful.

The Websense filter not only restricts our right to relevant information concerning current hot topics in our nation, but it separates the heterosexual from the homosexual in a downright offensive manner. Try to access heterosexual web sites. Many of those, however offensive in word and picture, are allowed to slide right through Websense. Just because a site contains information on homosexuality does not render it offensive in any way. And as Willoz said, the school gets federal aid for having a filter. It’s not right to disrespect homosexuals and treat them differently by blocking them and other students from reading up on an alternative lifestyle for a few thousand dollars of federal aid wasted on over-priced social studies DVDs and pencils.

However, there is one way to get through the filter. If a student finds a sight he wishes to access, he or she must submit the site to be unblocked to the school’s technology specialist. From there, the tech person may or may not pass it on to a principal, who may or may not call the district technology office to unblock it. It all depends on if they find it necessary to unblock.

“When it gets to my office, it takes about 10 minutes to unblock a site,” Willoz said.
But how long must it take to get through our school’s bureaucracy? A student shouldn’t have to limbo under red tape to get inoffensive material at a public school computer. School is a place where we should leave our prejudices at the door and accept our fellow students for who they are.