Halton school board could spend $100k to censor online porn

Watch the video above: Halton school board could spend $100k to censor online porn. Mark Carcasole reports. 

TORONTO – Halton District School Board trustees will decide Wednesday whether to spend upwards of $100,000 to block their students from accessing porn on the school board’s WiFi.

The trustees are debating whether to install filters that would block adult content or anything else deemed objectionable by school officials.

Jeff Stauffer, an Oakville parent in favour of installing the filter, suggested the cost was “really minimal” when spread out across the board’s 60,000 students.

He wants the filter to keep kids in both elementary and high school from accessing pornography while at school.

“It’s happening at the elementary level. We became aware of a few situations within Halton board and in one situation children were unsupervised in a classroom during lunch hour and they were accessing the Internet and accessing pornography sites,” he said.

He cited another example, suggesting kids had pre-loaded the pornography onto their own mobile devices prior to a school trip.

The issue was parent-driven. It was brought to the board’s Chief Information Officer who will be presenting the report to board trustees Wednesday.

There is widespread use of mobile devices in the Halton board. The board recently introduced the “Bring I.T.” program that encourages kids to bring their own devices.

“We’ve had a lot more students bringing their own I.T., their phones and their iPads and iPods and all those things to be used,” Chair of the HDSB, Kelly Amos said. “On a peak day, we have over 28,000 things being accessed on the Internet and only about 17,000 of them are the boards.”

In September the school board is planning on having WiFi access points throughout all of their schools, meaning kids will be able to access the Internet whether or not they are in the classroom.

When Internet access was restricted to the classrooms, Amos said, kids were supervised and told what was and was not appropriate.

“If something does come up, the teacher is usually notified right away,” she said.

But Amos admitted when kids subvert the WiFi and use their phone’s data to access the Internet, there’s nothing the school board can do to stop them.

He admits that some kids are “curious” and will attempt to subvert a filter in order to find the material but says others might stumble across it inadvertently.

“Once that image pops up on the computer screen, the damage is done,” he said. “They’ve been exposed and they may re-enter those sites again and again and expose others around the computer.”

Filters are being used in other school boards. The Toronto District School Board has filters on all computers and WiFi access points.

“We want to make sure technology is used and incorporated into the classroom but we want to make sure that students are doing so in a responsible way,” TDSB spokesperson Ryan Bird said.

The Peel District School Board also uses a more complex filter, censoring some things for younger students that it allows older students to see. For example, the Peel school board denies children from Kindergarten to Grade six from viewing information about drugs online while permitting it for secondary students and faculty.

Stauffer thinks a similar matrix could be instituted in Halton, suggesting a balance “needs to be found.”

Amos however said the report, right now, deals only with filtering out pornography from being accessed within schools.

– With files from Mark Carcasole