Kids Online in Schools
Internet Problem Issues for Schools
While the Internet is a terrific educational tool, its use in schools does pose some problems. In addition to the issues parents face with children who access the Internet from home, there are a few issues that are specific to schools. These include what personal information the school may post on its website about the students, use of children’s intellectual property and the intellectual property of third parties, and how to judge the difference between a bogus resource and a credible one. They also include hacking, plagiarism, and whether the school can discipline students for what they do on a personal website designed and posted from home. Last but not least, a chain e-mail that circulates among the students can crash a school’s entire system.
All of us are excited to send Grandma and Grandpa the photo of our child winning the local sports trophy or getting the debate award. Dog-eared clippings from our town paper are cherished and carefully glued into scrapbooks to show our grandchildren.
So what’s the harm in posting the same photo at the school website?
First of all, a website isn’t a local newspaper. It’s available to more than 500 million people worldwide. And the people who might use this information to reach your children aren’t neighbors who are worried about what their neighbors think. They are strangers to your family and your community. (Polly Klaas was targeted from a mailing list compiled for marketing to teenagers in a particular zip code area. Her killer bought this list of girls between certain ages and chose her at random from the list. The list contained her address, name, and age.)
Although the FBI has not yet encountered a case of a child molester targeting a child they found at a school website, they worry (and so do I) that someone will use this information to target a child. Just think for a moment. Children who appear on a school’s website are at that school from 8:30 A.M. to 3 P.M. every day. It’s easy to find them during those hours and when they are walking to and from school, especially if you know their name and have a printout of their photo in your hand. “Mary, can I talk to you a minute?” How many of our children wouldn’t respond to someone who knew their name?
Children’s Pictures and Personal Information
So I recommend that a school use photos of children only after they get the parents’ consent, and only in groups of five or more. I also recommend that they not identify the children by name, only by the group: “Ms. Smith’s fourth grade class” or the “Volleyball Club,” for instance. This makes perfect sense when you think about it. We’d never let anyone post our child’s photo on a highway billboard, would we? We need to think of the Internet as a giant billboard posted on the largest superhighway in the world. If we wouldn’t allow something about our children to appear there, we shouldn’t allow it to be posted online.
Last year, when I was speaking to a group of parents at a local tech high school, I realized that even bright and well-intentioned teachers don’t realize the risks involved in sharing their students’ personal contact information online. As I was going through my standard speech on why children shouldn’t be posting personal-contact information in online profiles or on their websites, a parent of a teenager timidly raised her hand. “Does that mean that our children shouldn’t be completing their assignment of building an autobiographical website, with their e-mail addresses, photos, and hobbies?”
Apparently the teacher had assigned the students the task of building a personal website. The teacher had no idea of the risks involved, and immediately changed the assignment, having the teenagers build an autobiographical website without the personal-contact information, and with only first names. It was just as informative, but safer.
Children’s Creative Works
Kids have always been creative when it comes to avoiding schoolwork. They spend hours avoiding twenty minutes’ worth of work. While most of us were limited to finding a smarter older sibling or friend to help us with schoolwork (or better yet, do it for us), our cyberkids can now surf the hundreds of sites that sell term papers to teens online. And they don’t even have to retype them; they can just download them, typed and illustrated—ready to go.
Plagiarism
Many of the smarter teachers I know have bookmarked these sites so they can routinely compare the student’s submitted term papers with those they find online. Since most of these sites provide the term papers only for a fee, check out your credit card statements and make sure you’re not subsidizing your children’s plagiarism.
Off-School Websites
Just as kids have circulated derogatory jokes and drawings of teachers over the generations, these digital kids circulate their jokes, insults, and drawings using the power of the Web, where they can be viewed by everyone. They then share the URL (Web address) of the site, so fellow classmates can appreciate their work. Often the URL ends up in the hands of a teacher. Teachers and administrators who are the target of the site report it, and threaten to file a lawsuit or to report it to the police. The school then feels compelled to do something. Typically the child is suspended or expelled, or college recommendations are withdrawn.
But several times the ACLU has taken these schools to court for disciplining a child for actions taken off-premises, and in most cases the school has lost the lawsuit. It can be a very costly mistake—a school system may have to pay $50,000 or more in damages when it exceeds its authority in this area. So what’s a school to do? I would suggest they take their lead from a very experienced school superintendent.
A teenager in that high school, after getting angry with certain teachers and administrators, lashed out by posting some pretty vulgar and insulting things about them on a personal website. He wrote the site from home and posted it online. It wasn’t posted on the school’s server, but was available to everyone with Internet access once they had the URL. URLs of classmates’ sites get passed around quickly, and many of the kids in the school accessed the site from the school’s computers.
When the word got back to the teachers and administrators, they were understandably furious. They sought help from the police, who threatened to charge the teenager with harassment (but they wouldn’t have been able to make that charge stick).
Everyone involved seemed to lose their head, but the superintendent managed to keep his. He recognized that this wasn’t a school matter, and that the parents needed to be involved. He called in the parents, who were appalled and took this situation as seriously as they should have. Together they worked out a suitable apology and a way to handle the case without blowing it out of proportion. The press had a field day. This superintendent stood firm against the anger of the teachers and the pressures of the community. He was right.
Months later he shared something with me. He told me that he had met the young teenager at a school event, and the student apologized once again. He also thanked the superintendent for handling the situation with grace. The boy had acted out in anger, and hadn’t thought about the consequences of his anger. Eventually, even the teachers came around. I was sorry my children were already out of high school—they would have benefited from attending a school system run by such a patient and wise administrator. We could use many more like him.
Linking to Off-School Sites
If a school links to off-school sites, it needs to review them to make sure they are appropriate for students’ use. Many children’s sites are now using bridge pages to provide a transition from the protected environment to the Web or off-site sites. PBS Kids is a very good example of how a bridge page can work. Essentially bridge pages say, “You are now leaving our site. While we have provided certain sites that we think will be of interest to you, you should know before proceeding that these sites are not endorsed by us, may not treat your personal information responsibly, and may have changed since we reviewed them for appropriateness. Once you decide to proceed, you’re on your own. So surf safely.” (Of course, they do this more artfully, but the essential issues are covered.)
Even if your school decides that a bridge page isn’t for them, the school should disclose to parents that children can access nonschool sites, and that although the school reviewed those sites to determine if they were appropriate at the time the links were set up, sites can change, or may no longer be operational, and the school cannot control what happens at those sites. The school has to be sure to tell the parents and kids that use of those sites is at their own risk. For these reasons, it might be better not to link to off-school sites unless the school intends to maintain those links regularly.
Death Threats/Bomb Threats
Littleton didn’t invent bomb threats. Innovative kids have been making school bomb threats for years, especially when the weather is good or they haven’t studied enough for a scheduled exam. (When I was young, we used to have someone pull the fire alarm.) But, since the Columbine/Littleton tragedy, bomb threats in schools have increased dramatically.
One county in Maryland was plagued with a bomb threat a day following the Littleton tragedy. Newspapers would repeatedly call me, trying to find ways of locating bomb threats online that threatened a particular school or location. Threats increased during the time the state standardized tests were scheduled in Maryland. (See? these kids aren’t so different from us, are they?) And the threats that were specific to Maryland moved like wildfire across the country, becoming threats even to school systems that held their testing at different times. (The game of telephone can be particularly deadly online when rumors spread rapidly across the world, frightening people needlessly.)
Many schools now have well-developed safe-school teams who handle offline risks, like offline bomb threats, weapons brought to school, gangs, violent students, and protests. Some schools also use online filtering programs that are managed off-premises on third-party proxy servers. These programs provide monthly reports to a school about what sites its students have tried to access from their blocked lists. Typically, their blocked lists include bomb-building sites. Yet none of the schools I talked with review this information and share it with the safe-school team.
It would be easy enough for these reports to be shared, then compared with offline information on file with the safe-school teams. Schools need to know who is trying repeatedly to access bomb-building sites, so they can use this information to help handle the offline risks. It’s information they already have—but aren’t using.
These reports can be used for other safety purposes as well. One of the biggest problems schools face is not knowing when students are making threats online. Students’ websites are typically not picked up by the search engines, and finding a site that isn’t listed on a search engine, unless you know its domain name, is like finding a needle in the virtual Internet haystack.
When a student builds a controversial or provocative website, usually the only ones who know about it are other students, who use the school computers to access the site. These reports can tell you when there is a sudden popularity of a certain site at a school. They should be regularly reviewed. It’s the only way of spotting a student’s website early. It’s also one of the few ways a school’s administration can use information to prevent violence in schools, because it can identify students who are crying out for help in advance.
Restricting Noncurriculum Speech
Schools have an extraordinary amount of freedom in choosing school materials, textbooks, and curriculum programs. This extends to their ability to select materials and restrict speech and free expression in noncurriculum matters as well. The courts have given schools a broad ability to select and censor speech, as long as the well-being and potential safety of the students is at stake.
Although the courts held that a school in the 1960s erred in not permitting students to wear black armbands protesting the Vietnam War (the school defended its decision by saying the armbands could have led to student violence), school administrators have since been permitted to restrict student newspaper stories and student meetings.
But if a school has created an open forum, such as an editorial program or a website that permits community members to express comments, it can’t later restrict opinions they don’t like. The forum is either closed and easily restricted, or open and outside of the school’s ability to regulate. School systems need to think about the ramifications of opening discussions to community groups, where it impacts their right to control content at their websites.
Pen Pal Programs
One of the best ways of pairing students with other students around the world is through pen pal programs. School-to-school programs are the safest way of allowing students to communicate with strangers online. We need more of these programs, and we can only hope your child’s school will help create them. Unless schools are part of a school-to-school pen pal program, parents should be informed about the pen pal program in the acceptable-use policy, and given the choice of having their children participate. There are many risks relating to nonschool pen pal programs, as I discuss in the pen pal section.
