School defends internet policy after second grader’s explicit search
By Ashley Paul
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Maryland (WJZ) — Parents in Harford County are outraged after a second-grade student was able to search a sexually explicit term on his Harford County Public School-issued laptop.
The incident happened at Roye Williams Elementary School in Havre De Grace.
“Unfortunately, when I pulled up his laptop and his search history, it was typed in, and the first page that came up was Wikipedia. And unfortunately, it showed him images of what that was,” Sadie Gaupp told WJZ’s Ashley Paul.
Gaupp cried as she talked about the moment the web page loaded, and she saw the words and images her son had searched on his laptop earlier that day.
“That’s just a conversation that I didn’t even want to have with my eight-year-old, let alone having to say what that is and have it not be a huge deal because it’s a child. So you don’t know how they’re going to react to something,” Gaupp said.
She said that another student dared him to look up the sexually explicit term, and he admitted to what he saw later that night.
“I’m really frustrated he was able to access this at school. It wasn’t like the laptop, because they do come home. It wasn’t like he did that at home in our home; he did that at school, on the school’s internet, on their devices. And where’s the protection there?” Gaupp asked.
“Do eight-year-olds really even need laptops to learn…?” A letter sent to parents by the school’s principal explains they are committed to appropriate digital learning, and there are multiple firewalls and filters in place to restrict access to inappropriate websites.
It goes on to say, “Educational resources such as Wikipedia remain accessible because they are widely used for research and learning. Unfortunately, in this instance, a student intentionally encouraged others to search for a term that produced inappropriate results on that platform.”
The webpage in question, they tell us, has since been blocked by the district’s technology department.
“I don’t care if it’s well for their learning. Do eight-year-olds really even need laptops to learn in the first place?” Gaupp questioned. “Because we were learning way before that without laptops. But it’s easy to have app monitoring, it’s not hard.”
Gaupp says she plans to homeschool her children from now on because of this incident.
HCPS tells us they monitor and filter online content to the federal standards outlined by the Children’s Internet Protection Act, and any student sharing or encouraging access to inappropriate content will face disciplinary action.
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