To censor or not to censor: This is the question puzzling schools across Northern California After all my ranting and raving about protecting our children's impressionable brains, I was surprised to find out most schools in California do not use Internet filters, including Chico Unified School District. As for the reason, "Legal counsel warned us against it," CUSD's Information Services Supervisor Steve Viertell ambiguously informed me. All the schools in the district from K-12 offer Internet access to their students, whether it be in each classroom, or in lab settings, and all usage is supervised by lab assistants and teachers. If students manage to further their education while the supervisor is preoccupied, there will be elementary and high-school hell to pay. "Currently, we treat our Internet usage problems the same as disciplinary problems," Viertell said. All the students are required to sign an agreement promising they understand the rules of what is appropriate for them to view, and that they understand the consequences. As expected, Chico State University does not implement Internet filters either.  The staff members say that they don't have the right to limit what the students can and cannot view. This I can understand, because for the most part, college students are mostly adults. "We couldn't and honestly don't want to get involved with censoring. Chico State is considered a public area and to censor would be invading First Amendment Rights," said Jerry Ringel, manager of student computing at Chico State. Ringel and staff recently installed Surfwatch for testing purposes on 20 of the university's computers, and plan on installing the blocker on all of the search stations in the library over the summer. The main purpose of installing Surfwatch is to block all chat room and game access. "We already have these rules posted, but our staff still gets complaints about people spending hours online in chat rooms. We don't have enough computers available for people to be doing that," Ringel said. Ringel believes Internet filters can be effective for parents and in academic settings for K-12 kids, but doesn't extend that belief to college-level students. "As of now, there's nothing (at Chico State) to stop a 6-year-old from coming in and looking up pornographic material, but I think we'd get in more trouble if we tried to prevent this type of access," he said. Next

Bird Incident (intro) Bird Incident (part 2) How to block porn on America Online Articles, facts and more information on filters A guide to Internet filter facts: http://www.filteringfacts.org/fight.htm A guide to understanding how filters really work: http://www.filteringfacts.org/howfilt.htm An argument against filters: http://www.filteringfacts.org/antifilt.htm An updated overview of which filters are the best: http://www.filteringfacts.org/filters.htm

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