Things teenagers love: Netflix, Crash Course videos, Vine compilations, ESPN top 10 plays, Khan Academy
and Spotify.

Things no longer accessible through St. George’s wifi: see the list above.

This year has seen a number of changes in web usage policies at St. George’s. In December, students lost the ability to access popular websites like Netflix, ESPN and YouTube and to read articles with certain keywords on the St. George’s wifi network, leaving many students to question why such a change occurred.

According to Mr. Scott Garmon, director of technology and network systems, limited amounts of bandwidth and the Child Internet Protection Act guidelines are the two main reasons why students may encounter blocked access.

In order to understand bandwidth, Mr. Garmon says it is easiest to think of it as a water-pipe.

“It [bandwidth] is the amount of data that we can push through a water-pipe,” Mr. Garmon said. “The bigger your pipe, the more data you can get through it.”

According to the Southern Regional Education Board, the FCC minimum internet access goal for 2018 was one megabit per second per student. Currently, St. George’s has 300 megabits per second of bandwidth shared across all three campuses, though Mr. Garmon says there are plans to. increase that amount to one gigabyte. Given the limitations of the current amount of bandwidth, the school must use what it has wisely.

“Different things on the internet use different amounts of bandwidth,” Mr. Garmon said. “Sending an email uses a very small amount, but when you start streaming something like a video, that uses a lot of bandwidth.”

The school’s finite amount of available bandwidth is partly why websites such as YouTube and ESPN, where students would tend to stream videos, have been blocked.

“It was causing our network to slow down and we were having connectivity problems, so there were a number of those things that we blocked off the network,” Associate Head of School, Mr. William Bladt, said. “The fact that even a small number of people [are] getting on there and streaming [uses] such a massive amount of memory that it causes system issues.”

Another issue that contributes to these restrictions is the fact that all three St. George’s campuses share the school’s finite amount of bandwidth, limiting the amount that each campus can use without experiencing negative side effects on the other campuses.

“We are tethered together, Collierville, Germantown and Memphis campuses,” Mr. Bladt said. “We have to be considerate of how we are affecting the other two campuses too. We can see things go to a standstill at Memphis if we are pulling too much at this campus.”

However, the limited amount of bandwidth is only one reason for internet blockage and web filtering on the network. Mr. Bladt pointed to what he sees as the school’s duty to protect students from inappropriate content as the other.

“There is a responsibility that we have to keep people from accessing specific sites with information or imagery or messages that we would deem to be harmful for teenagers,” Mr. Bladt said.

For Mr. Bladt, this responsibility is a result of the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which was enacted in 2000 by Congress to “address concerns about children’s access to obscene or harmful content over the Internet,” according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

According to the FCC, “CIPA imposes certain requirements on schools or libraries that receive discounts for Internet access or internal connections through the E-rate program – a program that makes certain communications services and products more affordable for eligible schools and libraries.”

Schools and libraries that follow CIPA “must block or filter Internet access to pictures that are: (a) obscene; (b) child pornography; or (c) harmful to minors (for computers that are accessed by minors).”

If a school does not receive such discounts, they are not legally required to follow the guidelines imposed by CIPA.

St. George’s does not accept E-rate funds, and as a result, is not required to follow CIPA guidelines. However, according to Mr. Garmon, the school continues to follow CIPA guidelines to protect students of all ages.

To do so, St. George’s uses content filters to either block entire websites that are deemed non-educational or specific keywords, such as “sex” and “guns.”

“If you do a Google search on, say, guns,” Mr. Garmon said, “the content filter applies these different algorithms, and either it is passed or it is not passed [through the filter].”

These filters can cause some challenges. Because the school’s entire wifi system is connected, from the Memphis Campus to the Collierville Campus, individual campuses cannot establish their own Internet filters so they can prevent seniors from accessing certain material because it could be inappropriate for a kindergartener.

“Our whole school is connected, from our pre-K to our seniors, to the same filter,” Mr. Garmon said. “One of the problems that you run into is trying to maintain a balance between upperclassmen that need access to more adult-content related material and a third or fourth grader.”

Senior media literacy student Maggie Vento has run into this keyword filtering algorithm firsthand.

“We had a project where we had to do research on a controversial topic or on a big news story and my topic was “marijuana [legalization],” Vento said. “I couldn’t Google anything because marijuana was one of the words that was blocked.”

There are ways to bypass these keyword filters, either by whitelisting individual websites, giving select students bypass codes or teaching the filter to recognize trusted sources.

“What our web filter has the ability to do is to actually place source above keyword,” Mr. Bladt said. “For example, we can make anything published by the New York Times visible, even if it had the word marijuana, but a website that’s like ‘how to grow marijuana in your house’ is blocked.”

“Whitelisting” has become especially relevant for classes like yearbook that need to access to certain online products.

“Yearbook is removed from it,” Mrs. Emmy McClain, Associate Director of Student Life, said, “because in yearbook, we are using an online platform, Studioworks, and so that has been bypassed.”

However, most classes have to manage with the content filtering and find other ways to get their information. This can pose problems for classes such as Marketing and Design, which uses websites that are frequetly blocked.

“If a child wants to dive deep into something, I usually say, ‘Hey if you Youtube ‘how to change eye color in Photoshop,’ you’ll see a step-by-step video’ and that has been something that has just stopped,” Mrs. McClain said. “That’s hard for us because I don’t really have a quick and easy solution for them to figure it out.”

Some AP Psychology seniors also ran into issues with streaming videos while completing a project for class. Senior Julia Fogel struggled to access websites such as YouTube that contained videos that were needed for a presentation on psychological disorders.

“It was kind of annoying be cause we had all of our notes on my computer and then having to use Mrs. Philpott’s computer made it really not practical,” Fogel said, “because we had to have two computers up there while we were presenting.”

Despite these web filters serving as roadblocks in some classes, some teachers see an upside.

“I work in classes that are supposed to build creativity, so I always tell my students, ‘Don’t go straight to Pinterest’ because I think some kids are reliant on other people’s ideas to spark ideas of their own,” Mrs. McClain said. “I try and help them realize that you have a lot of things in your mind already, and you don’t have to go see what somebody else did.”

Not having access to some of these websites also pushes students to use the resources at school that are not blocked, such as databases and periodicals that are available on the school’s library website.

“It’s an extra step to go to the library’s database to start searching, but there’s a ton of junk you find on the first page of a Google search,” Mr. Bladt said. “When you are looking at a set of periodicals, you are not being bombarded with that stuff. It’s an extra step, but it’s a smart extra step for students who are doing research.”

The school is continuing to make changes to the web filtering systems in order to follow with CIPA guidelines and cater to the needs of its students.

“What needs to happen in the future is to segment our content filtering between lower school, middle school and upper school, and that takes time, money and resources that the school is well aware of,” Mr. Garmon said. “It’s a constant process to tweak our filter, as thousands of websites appear everyday.”

As a part of this process to improve the school’s filters, Mr. Bladt said he welcomes students’ opinions on how to increase the quality of the academic experience at St. George’s.

“If there is anybody who is interested in the process of looking at this stuff with us, we’d love to engage with those students,” Mr. Bladt said.