By Michael Davies
davies@newsroom.byu.edu
With the advent of the Internet, educators all over the U.S. are juggling the values they prize most.
Freedom to speak, freedom of privacy and the responsibility to produce quality young people, are each weighed in the debate over Internet freedom.
Educators and lawyers met at the 2000 Utah Education Law Institute Program, on Monday, Oct. 16, to discuss education.
The Internet was one of the key issues addressed.
'About 70 percent of the sites now available on the Internet are pornographic sites,' said Blake Ostler, a lawyer with Burbidge, Ostler, Carnahan & White.
Ostler works closely with school districts and deals with the misuse of the Internet by faculty and students.
In 2000 alone, Ostler said, he has been involved in the termination of 29 school district employees for Internet abuse.
Twenty-eight of those terminations were for access to pornography. The other termination was for verbally abusing a student on-line, he said.
Ostler said Internet access by teachers can create problems and waste time.
He said school districts have no obligation to supply access to all of their teachers.
He said problems are also arising with students.
Lawsuits all over the nation have popped up as school districts wrestle with student Internet use, he said.
Youth can have access to almost any information they want. Some students are even producing questionable Web sites themselves, Ostler said.
He said school districts have even been sued and lost lawsuits for expelling students for producing explicit material on their Web sites.
A school district must prove that a student publication interrupts the educational well being of the school, Ostler said.
Many schools have tried to place a filtering system in their computers. Filters keep Web sites with explicit words off of the computer, he said.
Many school districts and libraries have been sued over their use of filters. The Supreme Court ruled that any library that offers itself to the public is considered a public forum, Ostler said.
Filters are related to banning books, Ostler said. Therefore, public libraries are not allowed to filter their computers.
If a school library wants to limit material accessible to students, it must make sure to only offer access to students and faculty; not to the public at large, he said.
But access to Web sites is not that easy to ban.
'Filters are useless. Any self-respecting senior in high school who knows anything about computers can get around a filter,' Ostler said.
He said one alternative to Internet abuse is to have a localized place where students and faculty can use the Internet.
'The only thing that will protect school kids from predators is adequate oversight and supervision,' Ostler said.