Filters in Schools Filtering software puts the choice of how and when children should use the Web where it should be in the hands of parents and educators. Filtering software is the most effective way to safeguard kids from inappropriate Web content while safeguarding our First Amendment rights of free speech. Almost all of America s K-12 schools have Internet access, many directly in the classroom and of these, about 60 percent of schools already use some sort of filtering device.
Schools implement filtering software for many reasons.
Clearly, the most compelling reason is the desire to protect children at school from everything from sexually explicit content to how to build a bomb and how to buy a gun. Increasingly, we are finding that schools are also driven by the issues of legal liability and network bandwidth. The most commonly used filters in schools, like SurfControl s Cyber Patrol and N2H2 s Bess, are category list-based products that filter by IP address or domain name. In the case of Cyber Patrol, human reviewers, who are parents, teachers and trained professionals, build the lists based on published criteria. We use artificial intelligence in the research process, but ALL sites added to our CyberNOT list of inappropriate content have been reviewed by a person.