Montgomery County students exposed to porn on school-issued laptops
MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Md. (FOX 5 DC) - Two Montgomery County families say their kids were supposed to be using district-issued computers for schoolwork, but instead, they were looking at pornography.
Now the parents are demanding the county do more to block inappropriate websites, or otherwise, they may take legal action.
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“These are very dangerous Chromebooks with great vulnerabilities,” said attorney Tim Maloney, who is representing the two families and sent a letter to the Montgomery County Board of Education on their behalf this week.
In one case, the parents of an 11-year-old sixth-grader said they checked their son’s browser history and were stunned to find out he’d been searching for explicit images.
“We feel almost robbed of our son’s innocence,” said the boy’s mom, who asked to remain anonymous. “It’s been really hard, I’ll be honest, on me for the past week.”
Another parent, who also asked to remain anonymous to protect his family’s privacy, said his 9-year-old third-grader had also accessed extremely graphic content, mostly through Twitter.
“It’s extremely extremely upsetting and it’s frankly hard for me to talk about,” the dad told FOX 5 Tuesday.
But Montgomery County Public Schools has a different take. In a statement, a spokesperson said in part, “the systems and filters we put in place block pornographic and other inappropriate sites.” They added, “additionally, Twitter has been, and continues to be, blocked,” so students wouldn’t be able to access the site, the spokesperson said, “unless they actively and intentionally bypassed our filters.”
The statement went on to say, “we also want to stress the importance of parental supervision because no system can completely safeguard against all Internet content.”
“They are in denial and they need to own up to the fact that these are known vulnerabilities of the system that need fixing now,” Maloney responded. He also provided FOX 5 with an image that he said is the browser history of the 9-year-old student. It appeared to contain links to pornographic content.
“And the idea that this is the parent’s responsibility is absurd in the sense because the parents ability to block has been disabled on the Chromebook, and they really want the parent to be standing over the computer 24 hours a day, when many of these parents are working,” Maloney continued.
The parents of both children said they would rather not take this matter to court. Instead, they said they’re looking to get the issue fixed and to make sure other parents know about the problem.