When online learning leads to a terrible place

Look out, parents.

The learn-at-home environment can expose your children to more than literacy, math and social studies.

At least 170 students in Waterloo Region, most of them in elementary school, are also visiting high-risk websites that expose them to pornography, selfharm, bullying and child exploitation, in this time of online learning.

The Waterloo Catholic District School Board works with a service called Student Aware, which monitors online traffic through the student’s confidential login.

If the pattern of online search behaviour seems risky, the student is identified and the parents are contacted. Sometimes a social worker gets involved, Catholic school trustees were told this week.

The Catholic board heard that 169 students whose online behaviour was considered risky were identified between Sept. 10 and Feb. 8. Of these, threequarters were elementary students.

Of all the identified students, an appalling 62 per cent visited sites advocating self-harm and how to die by suicide. Another 22 per cent found pornography sites. The others found school violence, bullying and child exploitation.

The parents do not seem to be unhappy that their children were under surveillance. Instead, they expressed “gratitude for the oversight and support of the board,” said Erin Schreiter, social work lead for the Catholic board.

As for pornography, the board chose to monitor this because “it’s a biologically addictive medium,” Schreiter said. “It alters our brain reward and motivation systems.”

“Many of our parents are unaware of the degree of brutality and the dehumanizing nature of mainstream pornography,” she said.

The public school board, which is much bigger than its Catholic counterpart, doesn’t engage in a monitoring program like this, so there are no parallel statistics.

But here is the harrowing experience of one Waterloo Region family. I’m not identifying them, in order to protect the child, who is an elementary student at a public school.

The child has a laptop, and the parent made sure robust controls were in place on it, including the inability to use the device at night.

But it turned out that in January, when the laptop was being used for remote learning, the child was able to use the school login at night, and access pornography sites. It made the parent physically ill, when everything was found out, to see where the child had gone.

The parent thought the laptop was protected. But the child was apparently able to bypass the controls, the parent said, through the board’s login.

For its part, the school board says its own firewalls at its schools have very strong controls to prevent children from accessing inappropriate content online. But that protection doesn’t extend to the home environment. When learning at home on a privately owned device, the responsibility for internet safety falls to the parent.

“If you are working from your home, your home internet is the access point,” said Graham Shantz, board superintendent with responsibility for digital citizenship.

But it’s easy to see how parents, who trust what happens at school, might not be thinking about these controls when school comes home. Were they adequately warned?

Shantz said there is “an abundance of resources” on the school board’s website, approved by the board’s parent involvement committee.

The board’s website has a Digital Citizenship page. But, while it offers lots of good advice about preventing online bullying, avoiding plagiarism and respectful behaviour, I couldn’t find anything advising parents to take a close look at their home internet controls.

The public board says there are very few problems that have been reported to them. But the experience of the Catholic board suggests there must be hundreds of children accessing harmful sites. It is stomachturning.

Luisa D’Amato is a Waterloo Regionbased staff columnist for The Record. Reach her via email: ldamato@therecord.com