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Parent urges stricter blocks after learning students can access social media on school Chromebooks
Summary
A North Kingstown parent told the Policy Advisory Committee that students can access Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram on school-issued Chromebooks; IT staff described how the district balances instructional uses of platforms, teacher-level blocking via GoGuardian and federal CIPA requirements.
A North Kingstown parent told the Policy Advisory Committee on Nov. 24 that her 13-year-old can access social media on a district-issued Chromebook during school hours, and urged the district to add stricter blocks.
“My daughter can get on pretty much any site she want[s] to, including Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram,” said Stacy Monstein, a parent whose child attends Davisville Middle School, during the public-comment portion of the meeting. Monstein said she tried to block sites using GoGuardian but that ‘‘the blocks that I put on are disregarded during school hours.’’
The concern prompted a broader discussion of district filtering tools and instructional uses of platforms. Chester Paco, the district IT supervisor, told the committee that some platforms are left accessible because teachers and career-technical programs use them for instruction. “There is educational value to social media,” he said, and noted that YouTube, for example, can contain lesson materials that are important for classes such as music and digital arts.
Paco explained the district uses category-based filters to meet Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA) requirements and that overbroad, district-wide blocking can have unintended consequences for instruction. To balance classroom needs and safety, teachers can apply time-limited, classroom-level blocks through tools such as GoGuardian; those blocks typically apply only while a teacher is supervising a class and may be overridden by other instructional staff when appropriate.
Committee members and teachers described using GoGuardian primarily to block games and distracting sites and said teachers sometimes learn classroom-level controls over the course of the year. Several committee members proposed clearer parent-facing communications about what categories are filtered and instructional use-cases so families are not surprised when students access certain sites through school devices.
The meeting did not produce a policy change at that session; committee members approved a motion to advance consolidated technology policy drafts to the school committee for a first read, where the filtering details and parent communications can be refined.
The Policy Advisory Committee is expected to continue work on how the district defines the term “user,” how it references guest access, and how it documents filtered categories for parents.
