Every student has most definitely at one point or another searched up something or clicked on a link using a device or an account issued by the school and found that the content has been blocked by the district’s internet filter policy. This filter is put in place on every school-issued Chromebook because of the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) which stipulates that schools and libraries must restrict access to obscene or harmful content over the internet, particularly pornographic or explicit content, in order to receive discounts for internet access or internal connections through the E-rate program.
There are a select few who have somehow been able to get around the restrictions and use the internet freely without having certain websites or domains blocked on the school-issued Chromebooks. With this freedom, students are not looking up the kind of content that CIPA tries to “protect” them from, rather, they are searching up games and other non-academic things they can distract themselves with.
“They are sometimes able to bypass [the restrictions],” Farima Tavana (9) said. “There’s one where people literally play games that aren’t even on the Chromebooks, like, they’re blocked when you try to look them up.”
The intention of CIPA and its effects on students and teachers do not exactly align in most cases, as many people at this school feel that the effectiveness and efficacy of these restrictions fall flat when it comes to fulfilling their purpose. Some of the things that are blocked seem completely benign and innocuous according to teachers, but the filter will not allow for students to be shown the content anyway.
“There are some instances, especially last year and this year, where teachers would want to show us a video, but it gets blocked, even though there was nothing wrong with it,” Tavana said.
Despite the honest intentions of CIPA, educational material that has been approved and cleared by teachers still gets blocked, which proves to be problematic for students and teachers. In fact, a lot of content gets blocked for seemingly arbitrary reasons. The filter is not meticulous; it sometimes blocks websites that are completely school-appropriate.
“I don’t have a major issue with [the restrictions], but sometimes it does become a problem when I have to open certain apps to do homework or the lessons, and [the Chromebook] automatically doesn’t go to them,” Amelia Waroff (11) said.
The same sentiment is echoed by many students who struggle to work with CIPA restrictions.
“They do block a lot of things that get in the way of education, for example, when doing group projects and you need to put in a specific YouTube video,” Dan Pham (11) said. “I had one on the Olympics. They blocked many videos of the Olympics, so I could not put the video into my Google Slides.”
Everyone is in the same boat, wrestling with the restrictions. Although CIPA does practically keep students safe from the harms of the internet, it also inhibits certain educational functions of the technology and devices that are used by the school. There is not much that can be done about the issues CIPA brings up, as it is district policy, but so long as the internet is used in the classroom, CIPA will follow closely behind under most circumstances.
