The Net's Not an Option
Is it time to get rid of 1996-style appropriate use policies?
Walter Minkel -- School Library Journal, 3/1/2000
In his 2000 State of the Union address, President Clinton said, as he's said before, "We know we must connect all our classrooms to the Internet." Clinton, and many Americans, expect that soon all students will be accessing the Net daily, and using it without giving it a second thought. The explosion of the Web industry, and the fact that we can scarcely listen to the radio or watch TV without encountering a .com-mercial, tell us that the Internet is now reaching critical mass in our culture. Soon, the ads all suggest, we'll be living more and more of our lives online. In 1996 and 1997, when the Net began appearing bigtime in school labs and libraries, requiring students to use it seemed optional. It no longer does.Should it still be optional for students? In many schools it definitely is. Before children go online--in schools that use filtering software and those that don't--parents and students must sign "appropriate use policies" or AUPs. If you type "AUP" and "school" into AltaVista, hundreds of these from various schools will appear. While we should demand that students understand and practice proper behavior at a Net terminal, big problems surface in 2000 when students can't go online at school without a parent's signature. Recently, Cathy Pfahl, a librarian at Mt. Vernon (WA) High School, began to wonder whether her school's AUP was appropriate anymore. Her library's old Reader's Guide is gone, and students are doing research online that once was done in print periodicals. But only about three-quarters of her students have returned the signed forms from home and had the "Net" sticker that gives them access at school applied to their student ID cards. "We subscribe to ProQuest Direct," Pfahl says, "with plans to add other online subscriptions to important research databases. Requiring a separately signed AUP puts a barrier between the library's resources and the students. We do not have or allow that barrier to any type of library resource but our electronic ones." It's obvious why the barrier's there: legal anxieties on the part of governments and school districts. We need look no farther than Hudsonville, MI, where the public library board turned off Net access, fearing an expensive court challenge when a local chapter of a national Christian conservative group wanted to make certain young people had no access to an unfiltered Internet. Reading most policies, you'll see language such as what's in the Drew Central School District (AR) AUP (www.drewcentral.org/aup.htm), over a "Parent's Signature" line: "I...recognize it is impossible for the district to restrict access to all controversial materials and I will not hold the district responsible for material acquired on the network." Pfahl feels that it's time to stop requiring a parent's signature before students can go on the Net. "I think that a parent asking a librarian to bar his/her student from using the Internet is comparable to a librarian being asked to deny use to the student of an entire section of the school library, such as the reference section or the periodical section." I agree with her. The library's reference section in par
School tech guru Doug Johnson of the Mankato (MN) Schools agrees as well. "Parents have always had the right--at least in Minnesota--to choose not to have their children read a particular book title, not to participate in a particular unit of study, or not to use the Internet," Johnson says. "Unlike reading a single book or participating in a particular activity, prohibiting the use of the Internet is banning an entire medium of information. It is more akin to saying I don't want my child reading--period."
The Net is no longer optional in schools. While behavioral expectations on Net use--just like other school expectations--will always need to be stated clearly and agreed upon by student and teacher alike, the day of the 1996-style parents-sign-before-kid-goes-online AUP is over.
