News

Rep pushes Internet safety policies for public schools

By Edward Mason and Ben Amirault
Staff writers
Published: February 14, 2008

BOSTON — You can lock the doors and windows, hold their hand at the mall, and buy training wheels for bicycles. But a major danger facing kids today is right above the keyboard.

Internet predators work over time to gain children's trust, asking where the child hangs out, whether their parents are at home, if they could send a picture, Essex County District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett said.

"They groom their victims," Blodgett said.

A North of Boston lawmaker wants to make sure the time kids spend on school computers is safer.

Rep. Bradley Jones Jr., R-North Reading, is pushing legislation to require every school district to have a policy for making the Internet safe for minors and make the policy known to parents and legal guardians.

"It's important that any parent be able to know what (the school system's) policy is, and even if there is no policy in particular," Jones said.

Jones, a parent of two young children, said he's "concerned about what's going on (on the Internet) and the access children have."

Blodgett, who supports the measure, said Jones' bill would complement a 2002 state anti-luring law, which made it a crime to use the Internet to entice a child younger than 16 for sexual purposes. In 2007, 10 people were arrested in Essex County on charges of luring minors over the Internet.

Still, the Internet is a dangerous place.

"Many times in this day and age, we deal with crimes relating to juveniles and youths, and, most of the times, computer and technology are involved in the crime," Danvers police Chief Neil Ouellette said. "I think it's a great idea to have a layer of protection, especially in this regard to the Internet."

Jones filed the measure late last year, before 49 state attorneys general and the operators of the MySpace.com Web site reached a pact on Jan. 14 to protect children from child predators and inappropriate material. MySpace came to law enforcement officials' attention after minors were lured by child predators who posed as teenagers on the site.

The company pledged to take steps to prevent known child predators from creating MySpace profiles and to create an e-mail registry parents could use to keep their children off the site, among other steps.

Schools already protecting kids

Mark Ekster, technology integration specialist in Danvers schools, said local districts already have policies to protect students from online predators.

"I don't know of one (school district) that doesn't have one," Ekster said.

The Children's Internet Protection Act, passed in 2000, states that all districts that want federal funding for Internet programs need a policy to protect minors and filters that block content.

Ekster said the policy he crafted for Danvers does not lay out all of the sites that are blocked because the list would be "thousands of pages long," but among them are pornographic sites, those that promote illegal activity or contain hate speech, as well as social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook that contain no "educational value."

Even with all the precautions, Ekster admits no technology is perfect. He said it's possible for tech-savvy students to bypass firewalls and access blocked material through proxy sites, but Ekster said he and his colleagues are "vigilant" about preventing access to those sites.

Many North Shore schools require that both students and legal guardians sign these protection policies before students log on.

Hamilton-Wenham's policy prohibits mp3, video and software downloads and bars use of instant messenger programs.

Swampscott reminds the user that his or her right to free speech is suspended when using the school's network.

Beverly explicitly says that students should never agree to meet with someone found online.

Many schools plainly say no student should give out any personal information such as addresses, phone numbers and credit card numbers without permission from a teacher.

C. Milton Burnett, superintendent of Peabody schools, said his schools' rules have been in the student handbook since the mid-1990s, and content filters have been in the network from day one of Internet service.

Staff writer Bruno Matarazzo Jr. contributed to this report.