Blocked by your friendly county technology department

Teachers struggle with filtering software that stops reporters from doing their jobs

by Gary Clites

Originally published in the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund’s Adviser Update, Spring 2007

Fred Phelps is the pastor of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas.  He and his family have become infamous for their belief that the American war dead in Iraq are being killed because God has turned against the nation due to its sinfulness.  With his children, grandchildren and followers he travels the country attending the funerals of servicemen who have died in battle and loudly accuses them of being sinners and actively works to disrupt their services.

Newspaper and yearbook adviser Kristine Dekat works at Topeka West High School where six members of the Phelps family attend school and picket outside the school every Thursday during lunch.  Her students decided to do a feature on the Phelps’.  When her students went online to try to research the story from their newsroom, she was surprised to find most of the sites relating to the story blocked by her county’s Internet filtering software. Thus, she faced the irony of her school’s firewall blocking access to a legitimate news story going on in their school building.

Increasingly, educators and student reporters are finding their access to the information and technological advantages offered by the ‘net cut off by often draconian Internet filtering software that takes control of the information superhighway away from the teacher and puts it in the hands of county technology staff with little or no training in what educators do in the classroom.

Teachers writing on the Journalism Education Association’s JEAHelp listserv have catalogued a raft of issues with filtering.  Most common are complaints that Internet social sites like Myspace and Facebook, an important part of the lives of most teens today and thus a very appropriate subject of discussion for student journalists, are blocked. But many districts go much farther.  Teachers report losing access to all references to world religions; all e-mail and communications sites; to whole news sources like ABC, NBC and CNN; and even to the JEA itself along with other state and national journalism education sites including those dealing with the First Amendment.  

Some school systems have gone so far as to ban all images from their versions of the Internet.  Jennifer Ashley teaches photojournalism at ** in **.  She reports that when students (not her reporters, I should note) in her school were banned from porn sites, they quickly learned that if they searched the web using Spanish terms for body parts, the porn popped back up.  Rather than punishing specific students, the school district’s response was to block all photos.  “It’s aggravating,” she said.  “Try teaching photojournalism but without the ability to show pictures.”  Tim Morley, yearbook adviser at Inland Lakes High School in Indian River, Michigan, wrote on JEAHelp that his system’s firewall blocks any photos with a certain percentage of skin tones “Goodbye photos of sandy beaches and portraits of the president downloaded from government websites,” he said, “but Robert Mapplethorpe black and white images are free to peruse.”

There are actually a number of different ways filtering software block Internet access.  More elementary programs simply look for words or phrases the makers deem inappropriate, while others search for subtleties like skin tone and pattern recognition which tries to take into account the context of the material.  Pretty much all the programs, however, allow school systems to block broad categories of programs like chat, I.M., or newsgroups.  All of them also allow the schools to ban specific sites the Technology Coordinator deems dangerous.  Most allow the person in charge to set a level of protection.

Since most school systems make no distinction between the level they choose for high schools and elementary schools, this leads to problems.  Carol Singletary, yearbook adviser at Clovis High School in Clovis, New Mexico, said, “Although the randomly available pornography on the Internet is worrisome, restricting everything for everybody is even more worrisome.  School filters should be adjusted based on grade level. High school students need to learn to be savvy web browsers, and blocking them from everything is counterproductive.”

Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, noted that the legality of such programs is little in doubt:  “It seems pretty clear that schools can place filters on school computers to restrict access to pornographic material.  The problem is that most filters intentionally go far beyond that, often attempting to restrict access to what some minimum wage filter company employee decides is inappropriate.”  That said, the 1999 Federal Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), requires that any school receiving federal funds install and operate anti-pornography filters on their computers or risk losing that funding. 

Goodman noted that if a system’s filtering software can be shown to engage in “viewpoint discrimination,” allowing, say, pro abortion sites through while blocking anti-abortion sites, then that would qualify as unconstitutional.  “My sense is that every Internet filter being marketed to schools today engages in just that kind of viewpoint discrimination,” he concluded.

Barring a prolonged Supreme Court battle, what’s a publications adviser to do?  While some of the teachers I talked to found their school systems intractable on the issue, others found space for negotiation.  Some teachers have gotten specific sites unblocked by making a good argument, while others have gone further.  Chad Rummel, newspaper and yearbook adviser at Oakton High School in Vienna, Virginia explained, “I have built a good and trusting relationship with my school technology officer.  Because of this, I am allowed one computer in my classroom that I can and do monitor constantly, that is not filtered so my students can do research that may be banned by the school.”

Singletary agrees, “I finally obtained permission from our Tech. Department to allow me the option of overriding the blocks temporarily.  This has allowed me to open sites which provide useful information for my students.” 

With CIPA a fact of life, it is unlikely Internet filters will go away.  Those teachers who have succeeded in regaining access they’d lost have done so by fighting the good fight and taking their cases to the right authorities.  “Know that filtering can be lifted on a per-computer basis,” advised Rummel.  “It doesn’t have to apply to the whole school.  Have the conversation with your students about rights and responsibilities as you would any privilege afforded to a journalism student.  When you and your students are ready, ask to have the ban lifted in small doses.  Remember, this is a teachable moment for your students and for your technology officer.”

© Gary Clites, 2007