The Bainbridge (Wash.) school board has added the category of “militant/extremist” to the stop-list of nudity, sexually explicit, and “gross depiction” sites that Cyber Patrol already bars from student computers. The decision to add the single content category came after officials considered a parent advisory group’s request to ban eight additional sections of Cyber Patrol’s stop-list. “We should establish filters only where we have problems,” Superintendent Steve Rowley explained at the December 13 meeting, such as sites “where bomb-making information might be available.”
The community wants “more restrictive filtering than we voted here tonight,” protested school-board member Ken Breiland, who cast the only dissenting vote. “If we were asked by parents, ‘Do we want kids to join a Satanic cult?’ of course we would say ‘no,’” board member Bruce Weiland replied, adding that the real question is, “What is the risk of wholesale blocking?”
The board also recommended that students be assigned an Internet logon password so “the district will be able to tell whether the [unacceptable] hits are five kids trying 15 times a day or 75 kids trying once,” board member Susan Sivitz stated, according to the December 19 Bainbridge Review.
Posted December 31, 2001.