Parents lobbying to limit elementary pupils’ online access

Some elementary school parents are lobbying the Boulder Valley School District to tighten controls on what their students can access online.

Anna Segur, who has a fourth-grade son at Boulder’s Crest View Elementary, said her son has shared that he and other students have found sites on school Chromebooks on how to make recreational drugs, sites with a chat feature and internet games that include sexual and violent content.

“I do not want my children exposed to profanity, violent or sexual content at schools,” she said. “This type of content is not available in print form in the library because there are standards about what is appropriate for elementary school students. Why should it be available online?”

Based on the complaints, Boulder Valley is working to block all gaming sites while “whitelisting” specific educational games used by teachers.

Andrew Moore, Boulder Valley’s chief information officer, said the goal is to have games blocked by the end of the school year, allowing time to identify teachers’ preferred educational games so lessons aren’t disrupted.

Social media sites are blocked at the elementary level, Youtube is available only in educational safe search mode and the district uses a $200,000-a-year website filter that blocks sites in 25 categories, from adult content to gambling.

He said what tends to get through the filters is inappropriate content masquerading as something more innocuous, such as a blog with a post of a nude picture.

The district so far also has blocked about 250 sites at the request of parents and teachers, Moore said. He’s also requesting $180,000 in the next school year’s budget to expand web filtering software districtwide.

Examples of what kids found while searching the web at school included lyrics with racial slurs, a “Perry the Perv” game, and firstperson shooter games.