Students could be sitting in one of their classes and the teacher assigns an online website, the students go to look up the website and the website is blocked with the following words “Your connection is private,” recurring words that pop up way too often. The school has taken a step a bit too far by doing more harm than good, by making too many things private.

Teachers sometimes need another helping hand by giving students Youtube videos to watch as a second source to what they are learning; unfortunately, for the teachers and students, the same mishap keeps occurring where the video is blocked by the schools web censoring system. This sets back a lot of teachers’ lesson plans, especially if the video is crucial to the lesson.

Although some people might argue that blocking certain Youtube videos is an important practice considering all the inappropriate content that could be floating around, research shows that 65 percent of people are visual learners, meaning it would be better to find a way to strengthen the blocking system to separate the inappropriate content on Youtube from the informational text.

Being able to express yourself at a young age is very important to feel more like yourself. Even the little things in life can go a long way, like personalizing your computer, which involves changing the background of lock screens, changing home screen backgrounds, etc. Unfortunately, the school’s privacy system limits students from full access to these options. 

On the contrary, some features can change on the computers, like the color of tabs or the font lettering, but students should be allowed full access to these features because according to sunshinehouse.com, personal expression can strength students creativity, independence and confidence, some students could also have the same computers for years, and they deserve a chance to change up their style a little bit.

The school also blocked social media on student’s computers, this can cause a bit of an annoyance to students as students use social media a lot as a way to connect to other students. Although it can be distracting for students to have certain features like Instagram, Twitter, and Spotify, some of these apps could be very useful for students.  Eisenhower Highschool has an instagram page to run on the computer and can’t always run it if that app is blocked on their computer. Listening to Spotify is a good social media outlet as well, so students can listen to music while working on their computers.

The schools blocking system is much too controlling on their students’ computers. Superintendents should rework their privacy settings and continue to block out inappropriate content, but allow students to have useful tools.