"Boston schools deploy Net filters"
Two bills have been presented in the House and the Senate which state that if schools receive E-Rate federal Internet access subsidies they must use content filters. The mayor of Boston announced on Friday that the new Internet content filtering system will be installed on 65,000 public school computers. The voters in Boston are very pleased with this new system but elsewhere in the country people are outraged about this invasion of privacy. They believe that the Internet should not be filtered and that they should be able to view whatever they want. In a study conducted last year it was found that only 39% of U.S. public schools use a content filtering system.
The Senator who first introduced the bill argued that parents want their children to have access to the Internet at school but that they want there to be some form of control over its use. While parents can control what their kids use the Internet for at home they cannot control what their kids do at school. Therefore, he argues that most parents should be in favor of this new system.
An argument has been made that local communities, not the federal government, should be the ones making the choice as to whether or not they want to use a filtering system.
I think that these bills should be passed. There is no other way to protect children at school from abusing the use of the Internet. They should have no use for the items that will be filtered from the Internet while at school. It is not an invasion of privacy to keep pornography out of the public schools. If parents are against the filtering system they can allow children to use their computers at home to view the things that will be filtered.
Genie Dietz