The internet is a vast world of it’s own with information on anything your mind could desire to know. It’s an amazing tool to use, that should be utilized; however, we recognize it also had a dark side.

Austin ISD has always had some kind of web restriction in place to deter students from being distracted from their education by playing games or coming across inappropriate content like pornography or drug paraphernalia.

While this seems like an important safety measure, it also restricts websites that are not harmful.

In the past teachers could allow students to view restricted YouTube videos if the teacher deemed them to be of educational value by signing into an authentication system with a password.

However, on March 2 when students all around the Austin school district powered up their school computers, they found a newer, more rigorous web filter in effect. One of the biggest sites affected by this was YouTube. Student’s could no longer easily access many tutorials for educational purposes and teachers could not sign-in to allow access.

The only way teachers can allow access to restricted YouTube content now is to e-mail an information specialist in the central office to add the content to an approved list. Students must then login to an Austin ISD Google account that most students don’t even know they have.

Even after students login to this Google account, their access to YouTube is still extremely limited, blocking out even many educational videos.

We understand cyber safety is important and the school district wants to protect us from inappropriate content, but the filter that is now in place inhibits students with its flaws more than it protects us.

First, the sense of trust between the district, teachers, and students is completely eliminated with how strict they filter the internet.

Fortunately, the information technology department responds quickly, but this process is not widely known and many teachers don’t even know they can do this. It brings the educational process to a halt when a student announces to the class that a video is blocked by the filter.

Second, many technology based classes are struggling. Any class involving work on a computer suffers from the new filter including, animation, web tech, and film. In addition, some students on the Eagle’s Eye staff struggle to find information for their assigned stories.

It’s unfair to students with less financial means that only district computers have the filter affecting them. Students’ whose parents can pay for a big data plan can access all of the research tools available on the web, including YouTube.

Finally, while the restrictions are crippling a huge majority of the school, the newspaper is getting hit extremely hard. The newspaper staff practically lives on the computers. We use them to organize the stories for that publication, store information, research topics for our stories, as well as write and edit stories.

When websites are being too strictly blocked, we cannot attain the correct information for our stories. Without the correct information, we cannot accurately do our job of informing the student body.

Instead of restricting web access further, we as the Editorial Board we believe that teachers need to be empowered to help students make appropriate decisions regarding internet usage.

Every year the district’s teachers are supposed to sign an Acceptable Use Policy that requires them to live by the internet safety rules in the district. Teachers are also supposedly trained on appropriate cyber safety, but it’s become apparent it’s not as much a priority as claimed to be.

Granted there are a lot of things going on in the district to improve the education system, this is extremely important because of the modern world we live in being powered by the internet.

The school district has claimed that we as students will receive lessons about cyber safety, but this has not been put into place. We encourage these lessons on web safety to be incorporated into our regular classes to help students be more responsible with their internet usage.

Every first day of the school week, we are required to go to an Advisory period for 25 minutes, and the remainder of the week that time is for students to sign up for FIT sessions to work on homework and be tutored. We believe this time could be used to teach students about appropriate internet behavior.

The Editorial Board of the Eagle’s Eye newspaper agrees that cyber safety is of the utmost importance. We urge for the school district to educate teachers in order to teach cyber safety to students instead of tightening their grip and restricting students from using the internet.