Here at Penns Valley Junior and Senior High School, like almost all schools in the nation, censorship has a hold at the foot of all media produced by the school, but the laundering goes even one step further.

A partially controlled media blocker is placed on every student’s device, scrubbing their computers of access to games and sites that are inappropriate for school. Censorship like this is understandable to make sure students are spending class time wisely; however, the blocker has a very broad spectrum of things it chooses to censor and it gets a little ridiculous.

I asked our school’s media teacher, Mr. Farley, whether he believes the censorship he observed from the program is reasonable and he stated, “While I think the intent is good and necessary, the execution could be better. It is too far-reaching. For example, pictures in a Gimkit that I made were blocked when the students were playing, which made the questions unable to be answered.”

Mr. Farley’s experience is not a single isolated event, the broad censorship takes place across the school. I also interviewed a senior student Wesley Morrison and he gave me a particularly absurd answer. He claimed, “I looked up just the word beaver for a school project, and as a result my whole screen was blocked and the search was flagged by the program.” While the broad and unreasonable net cast by the system leads to overzealous censorship that can inhibit the learning process, the intentions of the extension are pure. As time progresses the tech team is learning how to protect the students while keeping education at the forefront.