Looks like this site is not allowed.
That’s the message that appears on the top of a computer screen above the naughty cord-gnawing gnomes when a student tries to access a site that’s blocked by the ICCSD administration. Often, this makes a lot of sense. Adult content like pornography has no place in schools. But sometimes, there are blocked sites that are just inane. There are lots of holes in the way that the district blocks sites.
“A West High student [recently] submitted a request to unblock a website,” Joshua Reynolds, the Iowa City Community School District Director of Technology, said, “We looked into it, [and] it turned out that Securly was categorizing it incorrectly.”
When ICCSD blocks a site, they’re following two policies: one, the national law and two, the guidelines that Securly, the company that monitors student activity, has put in place.
The Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) states that if schools don’t block sites with inappropriate images (eg., pornography) or sites that are harmful to minors, public schools will lose their funding. However, the rules explicitly outlined (harmful to minors) are pretty vague (what is harmful to minors?). Securly has way more regulations, splitting sites into categories and efficiently blocking and permitting sites. But Securly isn’t always right. Sometimes it categorizes stuff wrong. That’s why there’s a policy in place to fix these problems: A student, parent, or teacher can request a site to be blocked or un-blocked.
“We work with our teaching and learning staff to kind of determine whether that site provides educational value or not,” Reynolds said. “And then we make a ruling on it.”
It’s not a bad system. But still, it has many flaws. Blocking by category can mean that some useful sites, like GroupMe, are blocked. GroupMe was used by many clubs for communication, which is (slightly) harder now that the site has been blocked. And GroupMe is only one of a number of sites that are questionable. Some websites, like Gentleman’s Quarterly and Sports Illustrated, are blocked because their Terms of Service say that a user must be older than 18 to access the site. And this makes complete sense. Now in the cases of Gentleman’s Quarterly and Sports Illustrated, this is no great loss, but you get to an interesting problem once you reach another site that is blocked because of age: Google News.
Google News changed its terms of service a few years ago by making the age restriction 13+ , rather than 18, but the ICCSD doesn’t regularly check if a site has changed its terms of service (because that’s extremely tedious). However annoying the task may be, it’s essential to periodically review blocked sites like Google News, because blocking a news site is blocking factual information, which borders on censorship. Currently, and likely in the future, ICCSD requires a request to fix problems like this.
Additionally, as of 2025, Securly has added a new feature that allows teachers to see every student’s Chromebook screen from their computer. While this is a blatant disrespect for privacy, it is still a very effective way to keep students on task. However, it also makes blocking some of these websites in the gray area unnecessary. If there’s a site that the school sees useful in some situations, they can leave it open and let teachers block it using Securly Classroom rather than block it completely.
As always when a type of media is blocked or banned, there are moral discrepancies. Currently, the administration and teachers have a sort of godly control over what we can access on the internet. Securly classroom literally has a feature that allows a teacher to kick a student off their chromebook. This power can easily be abused. It’s not that hard to imagine a teacher or administrator using this power to block whatever site they want. Even if the possibility is unlikely, it’s still worth pointing out, and this sort of totalitarian power should have some kind of regulation.
There are a lot of problems with this system that need to be addressed. In the long term, less ambiguity is needed on what ‘harmful to minors’ means rather than listening to arbitrary rules decided by the Securly team in California. Clear definitions allow less room for bending the rules. This keeps the administration in check from any possible power-abuse and allows us students to better understand the reasoning behind blocking a site. In the short term, we as students have to take action. If students notice a site that shouldn’t or should be banned, then they have to report it. Only through action can we improve the system and make sure that our freedom doesn’t remain blocked.
