Oregon 3rd graders see lewd video on school computer
PORTLAND, Ore. -- The tech department for the David Douglas School District is strengthening its internet filters after a third grader at Menlo Park Elementary accessed a lewd video on a school computer.
A family member connected to one of the students who was exposed to the video contacted the On Your Side Investigators for help after the incident, which she said happened last Friday in the elementary school's library.
According to the woman, several third graders were at a table using a school-issued laptop. One of the students, she said, accessed a website that showed "music and nude girls dancing followed by sexual act involving two woman", which the student then showed to a small group of other 8-year-olds.
"I'm sad for the children that were exposed to something that they had no knowledge about. Their innocence was lost," she said. "I was concerned about my family member and how it was going to affect them and how they view women, sex, relationships, from here on out"
When the teacher would walk past the table, the woman said, the student accessing the video would try to hide the screen. At some point, a teacher apparently got suspicious and checked the browser history, according to the woman.
"Imagine the horror when your child comes home and tells you something like that," the woman said.
KATU dug into the district's internet filtering policies. David Douglas does have technology that blocks internet access to sites are obscene, pornographic and harmful to kids.
The On Your Side Investigators contacted the district for answers. Spokesman Dan McCue declined to speak on camera but provided several email statements:
"We can confirm that a student had accessed YouTube and while at that site looked what may have been age-inappropriate videos. No pornography sites were accessed. As I've described to you, we have policies and practices around acceptable use that includes disciplinary measures and notifications of the parents/guardians of any impacted students. Those all happened in this case appropriately.YouTube itself is not a prohibited site. Our understanding is that following this incident, Multnomah County Education Service District (MESD) or Cascade Tech, were able to refine its filtering of YouTube, so that certain YouTube searches can be blocked. However, any questions about filters on the internet really should be directed to (MESD), as they are the provider for all East Portland and East Multnomah school districts.Direct communication with our families is critical to the David Douglas School District. When we have an issue arise between a concerned family and the District, it is our practice to resolve that issue directly with the family, not through the media. Therefore there will not be anyone available to talk on camera."McCue didn't know the student's intent and said he had not personally accessed the sites.
"Are they checking to make sure their filters are working?"
If the district has internet filters in place, then the woman wanted to know how students accessed the sexually-explicit material in the first place.
When KATU inquired for specifics on the district's filters, McCue responded:
"Like most school districts in Multnomah County, David Douglas School District purchases its internet service, as well as filtering technologies, from the Multnomah Education Service District via a larger consortium known as Cascade Technology Alliance. They, along with the districts in the consortium, operate in full compliance with the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA).In response to KATU's inquiry, the David Douglas School District asked Cascade Tech to describe the filtering technologies in more specificity. Here is the response the district received:
"Several different filtering technologies are in use.The first technology is DNS-based that blocks access based on host name lookups (i.e. mapping "www.google.com" to an IP address). In addition to filtering general web traffic, this technique can also block access to IPv6, non-HTTP, and encrypted HTTPS sites that traditional web filters will not block. Soon a majority of web sites will encrypt by default, last week 45% of all of our web traffic was encrypted. There is a big push by technology vendors to encrypt all traffic.For the second technology measure, we manipulate search engine requests to try to enforce "safe search" functions. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc all filter adult material by default. We use technologies that try to prevent students from over-ridding these settings in order to access cached copies of inappropriate material. The effectiveness of this technique is largely based on how well the search engines categorize their own search results.Third, we have a traditional web filter. Traditional web filters now cover about 20% of our total web traffic.In regards to CIPA, the two requirements are in place. David Douglas has a policy and technological measures. CIPA required the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to conduct a study that included the effectiveness of filtering technology.This study includes a discussion of trade-offs and limitations with web filtering, starting on page 12.As you may infer from this study, web filtering technology does not provide a guarantee of 100% effectiveness. A combination of technological measures, human monitoring, and training is recommended to achieve a reasonably effective level of protection."
"I think the school handled the situation horrifically."
The woman and her family insist they did not find about about the incident until their third grader came home last Friday. However, the 8-year-old told his parents that the Principal was aware of the situation because she apparently spoke to the small group of kids -- those who saw the video -- about the incident.
"The principal should have called the mom before the children were interviewed," the woman said. "The parents should have been present. this was a very sensitive subject and the parents should have been involved at that point, before they were interviewed."
Considering the family's concerns, McCue provided the following response:
"As you know, we do not publicly discuss specific student discipline incidents. In general, we do have an acceptable use policy in place for students, and they are aware of our policies regarding internet access and what is and is not appropriate. In our digital age, of course, students do have opportunities to access the internet. We depend on a combination of appropriate supervision, filtering technologies and our students' knowledge of our policies to prevent access to inappropriate sites.However, we also realize that these are not always 100 percent effective and, like all school districts, we will have breaches. In those instances, appropriate disciplinary action is taken and the parents of any impacted students are contacted.Without going into details about this particular incident, I can tell you that all appropriate actions and responses were taken immediately following the incident."Moving forward, the woman said she doesn't think an apology will suffice as the "damage has already been done." However, she said she wants to see a commitment to making sure this doesn't happen again.
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