Had a hot parent complaint come in this weekend that their middle school student had accessed inapproriate content on their school-issued Chromebook over Thanksgiving break and are holding the school liable. We do filtering on-premise, but not off. Our stance has been that our oversight ends when school is not in session. Can we actually be held liable for this?
We filter on and off campus with iBoss. I believe the thought is its a district owned device so filters continue to run on and off campus.
There is a good chance that the student is in violation of your acceptable used policy and the parent just tipped you off. Refer the student for disciplinary actions for using the school issued device for something other than academic purposes.
If the parent wishes to attempt to hold the school legally responsible for anything, they will need to get a lawyer and file lawsuit to which your school’s lawyers will have to respond to and is not a technology issue. Most likely they are blowing steam, but they can file a lawsuit for whatever they want…whether it goes anywhere is up to the legal system.
You might want to consider looking into filter extensions such as GoGuardian, Securly, or the ilk and discuss implementation with your administration. I’m not sure if you can purchase one license, but maybe this student could make a good candidate to pilot the program.
Not all parents are well equipped to monitor and regulate their children’s activity on an internet capable device. This was the main reason we deployed on-device filtering when we started sending devices home at the onset of the pandemic. I think it’s important to remember that not every parent asked for an internet capable Chromebook to be in their added to their household.
To immediately address the parents concerns, you could always not allow the student to take the Chromebook home. In addition, you could put that device in an OU where it can only connect to the school’s filtered network. This could be done for a period of time as part of a disciplinary action determined by your school’s administration. Lean on your AUP!
We just changed to Linewize to filter all devices on and off campus. Before that I usually inserted a comment like “eyes on the student/device is the only 100% guarantee that they aren’t trying to access something sketchy but I will definitely look into it! And next time it happens, please try to get the exact URL then we can block it specifically…which is always best”. After their initial reaction, they calm down and agree.
If you are a school that participates in the Federal E-Rate program then you might be in violation because schools are required to filter computers. However devices aren’t category 2 eligible and they aren’t using school internet at home so its an interesting question best left to legal experts.
I think schools have a moral obligation to always look out for the safety, security, and wellbeing of all students and by allowing them unfiltered access to the internet at home doesn’t sit right with me or others at our school. If parents don’t like it then they can always provide an alternative device if they wish.
That’s why we really like Securly’s Parent app, we have it configured so after school parents can make devices more restrictive than the school policy but never more lenient. We also remind families that while we have robust filtering in place, they aren’t perfect and stuff slips through. I have yet to meet a parent who demands that we remove filtering from a device after hours and I’m not sure we would actually want to do it.
Not sure about liability. Our stance was that they couldn’t take devices off-site unless/until we could filter the device.
That said, we still get complaints from parents when their student accesses something they feel they shouldn’t be able to, like Facebook, which we do not block.
Either way, you can’t win. Parents that actually parent are becoming a rare thing.
I don’t know that I’ve heard of any actual legal issues related to this - but rather the possibility of issues is enough to get most into action.
Our thought is: If we provide a device (and even access sometimes via mobile hotspots) then it’s not unreasonable to also expect that our filtering/monitoring goes with that.
Giving a child access to unfettered internet - on a device and network we provided - seems like a pretty clear issue, even if it’s technically off-campus.
Of course, it all starts with a conversation to parents and clear expectations. We’ve certainly had parents flat-out say “I don’t want my kid bringing home a device” simply because they didn’t trust that they wouldn’t misuse it nor did they want the hassle/responsibility of their kid having the access. In other words, they wouldn’t other have internet access/device at home. And that’s fine, we can accommodate that.
Aside from legal concerns - don’t forget compliance concerns. If you’re taking e-Rate funds or have some other regulations you’re going to want to verify their requirements.
We use GoGuardian for our Chromebooks. It’s designed for this kind of thing. There are certainly other options (and possibly even a way to use your current on-campus solution, depending on its technology)
And who supplied the student with internet? /s
Blocksi. Extension on chrome profile. We only allowed the managed profile. As such we filtering on or off campus.
District google accounts can be filtered off campus with the right tools. Especially ones assigned to students.
If they are school devices and allowed home, then yes you need to filter them offsite. CIPA says you have to protect them from certain things. If they are you devices, and you accept federal funds, there is no choice.
I work in Wisconsin and this applies. I suspect most other states are similar.
CIPA Compliance | Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
https://dpi.wi.gov › erate › cipa
All school owned computers must be filtered, regardless of whether used on or off campus.
We currently use Linewize. We have used Aristotle and Lightspeed for filtering in the past too.
That said, I agree that nothing is 100% but CIPA just requires that you do your best but nothing is 100%. So if parents are worried about things, even with home filtering, keeping an eye on the kids is important so the alert to parents is still necessary.
No.
We’ve done the same thing for 8 years. No filtering at home and we make sure they know it. We provide links to services for parents to use, free and paid, for home filtering and monitoring because that is a parental issue. We have 2100 kids, and 2100 sets of parents who have different opinions on what should and shouldn’t be allowed. There is NO way we could make everyone happy.
Liability is a question for lawyers. Devices should be filtered off-prem to an extent. We use aristotlek12 which does a good job filtering off-prem. But with a lot of things, it is a management issue. No filtering is 100% absolute. Kids will be kids and will find a way around the filtering. They will find ways to disable the extension.
You should try and see what the student accessed first. Develop a plan, IE buy GoGuardian, AristotleK12, or another content filter. Let the parent know what you’re doing to address this problem. It should be enough to calm them.
We always used a direct access vpn and filtered that way through an appliance. Of course we did have agents to tag the device and user but it was just easier to auto connect on a vpn at start and the kids didn’t have to worry about it.
If you offer school owned hotspots to students, I would definitely look into off premise filtering options. We use Kajeet hotspots as they have their own cloud based filter. And…it’s alway a middle schooler cause they are at the bottom of the IQ bell curve until 10th grade.
We go the SASE route. Currently piloting Netskope, we were using zScaler for a few years though
Being held “liable” for this? I seriously doubt it, but people (especially crazy people) can sue for anything.
When we started 1:1 10 years ago, we did on prem filtering only. Partly because that’s just what was available at the time realistically. We were also on iPads and have moved to chrome books.
Still have on prem filtering, but with the move to chrome books we have moved to GoGuardian. This adds an additional layer of filtering that I genuinely appreciate. It catches some things our firewall doesn’t, allows us to thwart traffic we don’t want in sometimes unique ways… and allows for off site filtering/rules.
Example… we don’t allow Netflix during the school day, but allow it after hours and fully on breaks. Thought behind this is some of our kids don’t have anything else.
Highly highly recommend GoGuardian if you aren’t using it.
This is interesting. What about blocking everything and only whitelisting what they need to do school work? for example a few sites or so to do research and then Google classroom or whatever the school uses.
Check out Lightspeed Filters. They have a cloud solution for off-campus devices.
https://www.lightspeedsystems.com/solutions/lightspeed-mobile-device-management/
No necessarily a complete listing but you can reference this for many of the laws.