Blocked: New restrictions on school-issued MacBooks have been taken too far

As you open your MacBook and scroll through the Canvas homepage, you see your latest AP Gov. assignment with a link to a YouTube video about the first presidential debate. But when you try to click on the link, the site goes dark grey and the alarming red bar pops up once again: blocked.

The new restrictions on the school-issued MacBooks have been taken too far.

It’s understandable to want to keep students from using their school computers to scroll through OnlyFans during class or look up porn, but with restrictions like verbatim searches and image censoring, the excessive blocking does more harm than good.

Administration forgets that the sites students use to learn aren’t just Canvas and smsd.org — we need access to sites for online newspapers, college admissions and copy editing tools. Just because they aren’t built into SMSD’s criteria for what needs to be taught in a certain class doesn’t mean there isn’t educational value to them or that we shouldn’t be given access to the information. We still need these resources for research, whether for homework or staying informed.

As teenagers, we already have access to and are exposed to “adult” things, whether that be from a conversation overheard in the Hen House line or somewhere down the Twitter rabbit-hole. Sure, it might not all be things schools would want us finding on their issued devices, but they can’t stop us from being exposed to these things outside of school. So, it only hurts the students when necessary sites are included in these broad restrictions.

They may define sex education as “mature content,” but as high school students, we have the right to be exposed to that. If we’re not able to learn about it on the school computers that we’re supposed to be using to expand our knowledge, we’ll remain uneducated and continue to miss out on the reliable sources we should be looking to.

In a year like 2020 with a never-ending stream of new information regarding everything from the pandemic to the presidential election — especially as many seniors are preparing to vote — we have the right to access this information.

And with the restrictions heightened heavily in a year like this, where students are completely virtual and relying so heavily on technology for their education, it really does limit our education. At a time when we can’t even freely ask teachers questions, we also can’t use outside websites to do the personal research for class because of these unnecessary restrictions.

The district can’t assume we’ll have other places to access that information — not all students have other computers at home to look up the information that SMSD has deemed “inappropriate” to us. If we can’t keep ourselves educated on things from the most recent news updates surrounding Black Lives Matter to news images provided from sites like Shutterstock because the content is too “mature,” where are we supposed to access this information?

As educators, it’s the district’s responsibility to give us the opportunity to learn about whatever matters we find pressing today, regardless of how it fits into their blocking criteria.

And it’s not just the more mature content that’s blocked from us. Websites like smestudentstore.weebly.com, the student store’s url, were originally blocked, and still are for some — even though there’s no harmful content to it. Originally, you couldn’t even read the online upload of the print paper for The Harbinger on issuu.com, and you still can’t access many of the videos or ads — the site doesn’t feature nudity or drug use, so why is it blocked?

Blocking Netflix during school hours so that students aren’t watching “How to Get Away With Murder” during their virtual physics class is one thing, but blocking any website categorized in a non-school-related manner takes it too far.

If they don’t want us distracted during class, they can use the same format they use for Netflix, blocking the website until 4 p.m. so that students can’t access it during class.

Even the live streamings of the SMSD board meetings are blocked, not allowing students to hear what’s being discussed because it’s categorized as “too mature,” even though the information being talked about is more relevant to them than the SMSD employees discussing it.

Sure, some websites like NPR and a handful of college admission sites that were originally blocked have now been fixed, and students are glad the district is taking the time to fix these, but every day, new necessary sites that students depend on are discovered to be blocked, highlighting clear issues in the district’s restrictions criteria. 

The image censoring has also been taken too far. We can’t even find a picture of East when looking up Shawnee Mission East. They may be trying to censor inappropriate images, but in the process they’ve kept us from being able to see things that can help our understanding of classes like diagrams for biology concepts or different displays of graphs for statistics. 

It’s the exact precautions they’re taking to keep us more focused and present in school that are causing the most problems. 

Teachers who’ve posted links to articles they need to access for assignments are asking their class to access them from their phones. Students working on research projects are unable to access any of the information they need to complete the assignment because, even though they have no “inappropriate” content to them, they’re categorized that way due to the district’s severe restrictions.

If SMSD gives us MacBooks with the intent of them being educational tools, they need to allow us to use them for actual education. 

The filtering of what information we can and can’t have access to doesn’t need to be removed, but adjustments need to be made. There’s nothing harmful to a high school student’s education about listening to music on Spotify or looking for breaking news on Twitter, and the district needs to acknowledge that.