Published: July 11, 2008 12:31 am      

ROY-HART: District discusses Internet filtering

MIDDLEPORT — Recent Royalton-Hartland graduate Steven Hagen made a presentation Thursday night to the Board of Education that has some of the members talking about the district’s Internet filtering technology.

Hagen said the current filtering system restricts the number of Web sites, including some search engines like Google, that students can access with school computers. Roy-Hart uses a filtering system called SonicWALL.

Part of Hagen’s presentation involved comments from students and teachers about how the filtering makes research for school work harder. Even with the difficulties it poses, Hagen said the filters are needed in an educational setting.

“You need filtering. The law says so; common sense says so,” Hagen said.

Hagen mentioned different military, governmental and political sites that are blocked under the district’s filters. He also said in his presentation that filters hurt students in future studies by narrowing informational sources. When students leave Roy-Hart for college, they will have to find information from a variety of sources and determine which is good and which is incorrect information, Hagen said.

A search engine is a Web site that allows the user to look up a subject and receive a list of other Web sites where information can be found. Google, one of the most popular engines, cannot be used on a district computer.

If the school allowed Google to pass an Internet filter, that wouldn’t mean that all the sites listed on a Google search would be accessible to students, Hagen said.

Board member Joseph Czach asked if it would be possible to allow students to use Google, citing his own experience of how finding information on the Internet helped him at work.

“Search engines are a very powerful tool to find information,” he said.

Superintendent Paul Bona said there were two obstacles in the district’s way: cost and younger children. All of the computers in the district run through the same server, and therefore, the same filter. The safeguards are there to protect the younger students, and the district can’t afford a different server for each of the schools.

“It is certainly a challenge for us,” Bona said. “We can’t sacrifice the children on the other end that you want to so vigorously protect. So we have to find a middle road. I agree wholeheartedly that our students should have access, but in a responsible fashion.”

Bona added that sites are moved to the allowed Web sites list daily. There is a formal process teachers go through to open sites on district computers.

To allow a Web site that currently isn’t on the district’s “white list” of allowed sites, a request has to be sent to SonicWALL. The response time is about three days.

On another topic, in the public forum, two residents spoke about their concern over kindergarten class sizes. The district has five teachers and 114 students registered for now, meaning class sizes would average 22 or 23 students per class. Resident Patricia DiBenedetto said the board should not wait but hire a teacher now, and give that teacher time to prepare for the fall.

“Let’s not do like last year and wait until the last meeting in August and give the teacher no time to get ready,” she said.

The enrollment numbers could change, but as far as hiring a new teacher is concerned, school board president Patricia Riegle said the board can’t just hire somebody. It needs a recommendation from the district’s administrative staff, she said.