Nation's Schools Eye New Internet Filter Law

The new federal filtering mandate hasn't had much effect on the Broward County (FL) public schools. That's because the district has already been using an Internet filter for two years. "It was something that the director of the technology department put in place," says Barbara J. Correll, library director of the South Florida district.

Correll was not thrilled with the decision, nor with her lack of input on it. But "I think many districts [in the state] have been forced to put in filters," says Correll, vice president of the Florida Association for Media in Education.

For many school districts, like Broward, the filtering mandate called CIPA (the Children's Internet Protection Act) is not even an issue. That's because 75 percent of the nation's schools already filter their Internet terminals, according to the latest numbers from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Still, a small but significant minority of districts do have to reckon with the law. Congress has said that schools will lose their e-rate discounts if they do not use technology to block objectionable material on the Web.

For Bob Stocking, director of instructional media and technology for North Carolina's Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, that is not a threat to be taken lightly. The district couldn't function, he says, without e-rate money. So Stocking is helping form a committee that will examine the issue and make recommendations to the school board. Though CIPA doesn't require e-rate recipients to actually filter until next July (see News, June 2001, p. 19), Stocking says there's now "a lot more political pressure" in his district do so.

Stocking is lucky in one sense: at least he has a say in the district's decision. Like Correll, media specialists in some other districts either weren't or aren't being consulted about the issue. "They're getting pressure from the IT department, saying, 'Oh, we have to do it now,'" says Julie Walker, executive director of the American Association of School Librarians, a division of the American Library Association (ALA).

In Bettendorf, IA, for instance, media specialist Kathy Geronzin says each of that state's area education agencies has a technology advisory council that makes decisions about things like filtering. Geronzin, a strong filtering opponent, says these councils "have a bad rep with First Amendment rights." So far Geronzin's school is unfiltered, but, she says, if that changes, "I will sue through the Iowa Civil Liberties Union."

For a lengthy discussion of the CIPA law as it applies to schools, visit the Consortium for School Networking at www.cosn.org. ALA's CIPA Web site is at www.ala.org/cipa.