 "Photo: Keri Cllark")
 "Photo: Keri Cllark")
Students and administrators in a local school district are engaged in a game of digital WHAC-A-MOLE.
And, as with the popular arcade game of carnivals and pizza parlors, no matter how hard administrators hit the mole, new ones keep popping up.
That's the dilemma in the North East Independent School District, which has taken strict measures to ensure safety of its students by blocking social networking sites and Internet addresses categorized as harmful, distracting and inappropriate to the learning environment.
"I understand there are Web sites students shouldn't be on during school, but the way the district is coming down (on Internet usage) is crazy," said Jonathan Hermosillo, 17, a recent Roosevelt High School graduate.
In 2005, North East began blocking such sites when two former female students of Lee High School reported being raped by men they met on MySpace. Since then, however, students have turned to proxy sites to bypass the district server to get to appropriate and inappropriate sites.
A proxy is a Web site connected to an outside server that acts as a portal for anyone to get onto blocked sites. It effectively distracts the district's filtering system software by making the Internet address look like a legitimate, unblocked site.
"Everyone uses proxies," said Ximena Garcia, 17. "I even knew teachers asking for proxies from students."
Hermosillo and Garcia are graduates of DATA, the Design and Technology Academy, a Roosevelt magnet school that combines engineering, architecture, graphic arts and gaming design in a college-prep curriculum preparation. Nearly all aspects of the program depend on computer access.
"We are assigned projects and stuff where we need images, but we can't get them because Google images are blocked, so we use proxies to do our assignments," Garcia said.
"You could access Google images and search for things, but the pictures could not be seen or used, and if they were, they were very bad, pretty much impossible to use," Hermosillo said.
Hermosillo said that while his use of proxy sites was limited, he witnessed extensive use of the sites by many DATA students.
"I always saw kids using or asking for proxies to get on MySpace and Facebook," he said, "and most teachers just weren't aware of what was going on."
Stacia FitzSimon, director of DATA, said she was not aware of widespread use of the sites because students "don't really need the Internet."
"Everything (DATA) students produce is created by the students and for other students," she said. "We have been very fortunate not to have problems with proxies; students know they aren't supposed to use them."
Garcia and Hermosillo would disagree.
"Everyone used proxies; they were everywhere," Garcia said, noting that district servers usually catch up with proxy sites within a few days.
"The average longevity of a proxy site is only a few days; the really strong proxies can last about a week, maybe," she said. "They are here one day and gone the next, and there are millions of them out there."
Students say the blocks make completing assignments difficult, if not impossible. In an Urban Journalism Workshop survey of students on social networking sites, 52 percent said they had used proxies to bypass school servers and 8.3 percent reported using the sites more than 30 times during their school careers.
"We had to use proxies to access tutorials for guided research, senior portfolios, and because everything was blocked, proxies were the only way to do them," Garcia said.
She said one teacher asked her for a proxy site so students could watch videos of the inauguration of President Barack Obama.
"We couldn't even watch the inauguration on cnn.com because it was blocked," she said. "It was ridiculous we couldn't see history in the making."
Proxy sites are not illegal, but they do violate district policy, which is designed to confront the dangers posed by the increasing popularity of social networking sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook.
Tom Johnson, North East's director of educational technology, said educational sites were blocked because the district's server security software was configured to do so by the vendor who sold the system to the district.
"The way our system works is certain types of Web sites are blocked because that's what the company has listed on it's blocked list. If a site is blocked that actually is educational, we can unblock it," Johnson said, noting that the district had done so for Google and Wikipedia.
Some students are misusing proxies in school to access YouTube and other social networks, but, according to Garcia and Hermosillo, most students use proxies for educational purposes.
"If we were using proxies for educational purposes, like to finish our assignments, teachers usually just turned their head," Garcia said. "They knew we had to use them to do our work."
Garcia admitted to making her own proxy sites and says she knew of other students who were selling them to other students.
"I made proxies in class if I need something that bad. Mine (proxies) weren't very strong, but they got the job done," Garcia said, adding that some students turned to Google based in other countries.
"We started using Google.mx, Google.canada, even Ukrainian Google," Garcia said, "until those sites got blocked as well."
According to both Johnson and FitzSimon, it's easy to unblock educational sites; most sites are unblocked within a day or two of a request.
"It's just difficult to keep up with these issues because there are countless sites that should and shouldn't be blocked," Johnson said. "But I'm sure there are plenty of students still using proxies."
Garcia agrees, but is more philosophical about the student culture of proxy sites.
"There are so many proxies out there and getting them is so easy; it's like, if I have a proxy, I will give it to you; if you have a proxy, give it to me. Hey, sharing is caring right?" Garcia said.
The game goes on.
Be the first to comment on this article!